There is, of course, no essential reason why our playwrights should also be our novelists, or vice versa. Certainly many of our fi nest writers – from Henry Fielding and Aphra Behn to Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens, from Oscar Wilde and Anton Chekhov to Samuel Beckett and Max Frisch – have made fine use of the double traffic, stepping from page to stage as the occasion demanded, the artistic stimulation prompted, the theatrical opportunity came. Some of our best novelists have been among our very best playwrights; some of our fi nest dramatists have excellently exploited the loose baggy monsterdom of the novel. Equally there have been a good number of major writers who failed with the alliance. A notable example was Henry James, whose unfortunate adventures in theatre at the start of the 1890s, when disillusionment with the novel led him to write various plays, including the costume-drama Guy Domville (promptly booed off the stage), cost us several important late fictional works from the Master – or so we like to believe.