Barrie’s works for the stage were popular in their day, and some were later filmed (with varying degrees of success), but by the 1930s his plays had begun to seem less like the charming pastiches they were and more as quaint relics of middle-class Victorian and Edwardian sentimental sensibilities, lacking the intellectual and sociological heft of works by such contemporaries as George Bernard Shaw. Barrie wrote several plays for adults, the best known of which are The Admirable Crichton (1902), Quality Street (1902), What Every Woman Knows (1908), and Dear Brutus (1917), as well as the theatrical version of his most celebrated novel, The Little Minister (1897). Roger Lancelyn Green, Fifty Years of Peter Pan Like the other great stories of its kind, it was told first to a particular child or a group of children-but like them also it was invented to please the author and drew from the unsuspected depths of his memory and of his own deepest personality. And so it seems worth studying, not only for its remarkable stage history, but also as a piece of great literature: its background as a story as well as its foreground as a play. The secret of Peter Pan seems to be that it is not merely a children’s entertainment but a great play in its own right, a memorable theatrical experience, differing only in the nature of its appeal to the adult playgoer or to the child.
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