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John Drinkwater |
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Hoping to revitalize poetic drama on the English stage, John Drinkwater began his playwriting career in 1911 by writing verse plays for Barry Jackson's amateur theater group, the Pilgrim Players, in Birmingham. These works were favorably received by the cognoscenti, but Drinkwater desired a larger audience; therefore, he abandoned poetic drama and in 1918 wrote the first of his historical plays in prose, Abraham Lincoln, a popular hit when it appeared and the most successful play he ever wrote. It and the chronicles that followed sustained public and critical interest in Drinkwater that continued through the 1920s and into the early 1930s; but by his death in 1937 critical attention faded. Though Drinkwater cannot be credited with having had any lasting influence on twentieth-century drama, the verse drama X=o and Abraham Lincoln were plays to which Drinkwater's contemporaries enthusiastically responded as noteworthy expressions of antiwar sentiment. Drinkwater is also well known for his atypical Bird in Hand, a great popular success that is in the tradition of She Stoops to Conquer .
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