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The play Jealousy is a sort of public trial of woman, and when at the end the crazy husband of the woman who flirted but loved him best strangles her, it is a sort of verdict, sentence, and execution in one.
How serious the trial is may be judged from the fact that each of the audience is given a pencil and a piece of paper and asked to record his opinion as to whether the man was justified in committing the murder.
How repulsive the whole thing! A play that should put “Woman” adequately on the stage needs many women and the various kinds of men who need from women the things that women can give—faith, love, children. For setting or for evidence it needs the world. The powers of life and death must stalk across the stage. The stakes for which men bid must be there, and also the
Stars silent over us,
Graves under us silent.
Jealousy is the reflection of a shameful way of life. It is trivial, mean, parochial, the rage of talk for a day among the bourgeois of Russia, interesting now, as opposed to the story of Antony and Cleopatra, interesting for ever.