This essayal met with success. It also opened the way for
collaboration with Tom Taylor in the writing of "Arkwright's Wife" and
"Clancarty," and with Charles Reade of "Jealousy." At this time also
he commenced a dramatization of George Eliot's "Silas Marner."
There were no half-way measures about Mackaye; things of the theatre
and principles of the theatre caught and held his interest. At the
very last of his life, while he was at work on his "Spectatorus,"
which foreran the American idea of a Hippodrome, and which might have,
in years to come, happily housed his son Percy's "Caliban," he was
at the same time attempting to combine with it an educational aspect
which would lift it above the mere spectacular. The symbolical notes
which he handed his son--who was then a mere boy--for the writing of
a Chorus, show the profound approach he took to all his work. Such
seriousness is one of the consuming traits of Percy, whose sense of
humour is probably better developed than that of his father, and whose
sway of literary expression is fuller.
For none of Steele Mackaye's dramas were written with any idea of
being read. They were all constructed by one fully alive to the
theatre and its demands.
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