AustLit

Editor's note (2006): '... this "work", to use the most generic term available for some dozen or more contemporaneous play-texts by different playwrights and different companies, was the product of a succession of hands. The version published here is almost certainly that attributed to Arnold Denham, who as far as is known wrote no other plays and had little theatrical experience, but whose willingness to litigate in defence of his alleged intellectual property ensured that "his" script was the best known of those staged in the period 1899-1909 in New South Wales, Queensland and possibly elsewhere. But Denham was a gross plagiarist; further, his play has at least one unidentified co-author, responsible for the three scenes of Act IV.'