ABSTRACT
William Archer (1856-1924), drama critic, playwright, and translator of Ibsen, was a central force in promoting the new drama of Ibsen and Shaw. For Archer, a vitriolic attack on earlier drama was one method of making way for public acceptance of the new. Totally grounded in the 'well-made play' of rational construction and realistic effect, Archer, though misguided and incorrigibly uninformed about Elizabethan dramatic conventions, cannot be wholly patronized: as Robert Ornstein has noted, 'his attacks on the formlessness of Webster's plays contained an irreducible kernel of aesthetic truth' ('The Moral Vision of Jacobean Tragedy' (1960), p. 128).
