Don Juan de Marana. A Play in Four Acts.

Limited first edition. Tall 8vo. Pp. xix, 178. Photogravure portrait frontispiece. Quarter-bound Japanese vellum over blue-grey cloth with printed title label to spine, and spare label tipped in at rear; rough-cut fore- and bottom edges. In a matching pale teal dustwrapper. Privately Printed for Subscribers only and part of a uniform series by T. Werner Laurie Ltd. A limited edition of 1,000 copies, this being No. 536, and signed to the colophon by the author. Top edge dusty, deckle edges somewhat darkened, toning to edge-worn dustwrapper spine, else Very Good.

A somewhat laborious re-working of Alexandre Dumas', père, Don Juan de Maraña, ou la chute d'un Ange (1836), completed on 31st January 1914, which despite overtures and payments from various theatre managements, was never performed. The dearth of staged productions of his plays continues to this day, as Bennett didn't help his cause with critics when he declared that he only wrote plays to make money, since they were far easier to dash off than novels. For good measure, he described theatregoers as "untrained, child-like intelligences, just arousing themselves to the significance of things".