Two friends living on opposite sides of the street must rely on passersby to help them cross the street to play with each other.

Volume 1 of this two-volume set contains 26 plays including Aeschylus "Prometheus Bound"; Sophocles "Antigone"; Seneca "Medea"; Marlowe, "Dr. Faustus"; Heywood, "A Woman Killed with Kindness"; Johnson, "Every Man in His Humour"; Beaumont and Fletcher "The Maid's Tragedy"; Sheridan "The School for Scandal"; plus plays from the Orient, medieval plays and more.

In the words of the November 1913 reviewer in Theater Magazine, ÒThis play is a novelty in many ways.Ó And Channing Pollock comments in The Green Book in December 1913, ÒIt is a play within a play within a play, with the characters in each separate play laughing at those in all the other plays. É The amazingly ingenious scheme of the piece suggests those wooden eggs, contained by one inside another, that used to be imported from China. Seven Keys to Baldpate is a play and a burlesque of that play synchronized. Its authors deride the trashy melodrama, in melodrama, and then justify melodrama by showing real life to be full of melodrama. Finally, they justify themselves and defy criticism in a brilliant bit of effrontery.Ó Based on the novel of Earl Derr Biggers by the same title, Seven Keys to Baldpate opened on September 22, 1913 at The Astor Theater, in NYC, and has been revived and filmed many times ever since.

Glorious discovery! Hah! the spiritual vampire might feed on his strength-might grow strong on this cannibalism of the soul! and what of him if she dragged him down into idiocy? Served him right! Did Etherial care that his spiritual death must be her life? She laughed and screamed with the joy of unutterable ferocity! Eureka! Eureka! They shall all be my slaves! They taunt me with being born without a soul, with being underwitted! I shall devour souls hereafter by the hundreds! I shall grow fat upon them! We shall see who has the wit! Their thoughts shall be my thoughts, their brains shall work for me, their spirits shall inform my frame! Ah, glorious! glorious! I shall live on souls hereafter! I shall go up and down in the land, seeking whom I may devour! Delicious! Delectable Etherial!

Lucius Pontius Pilate was a Roman on the rise, an ambitious nobleman serving with ruthless efficiency as a confidential agent of the Emperor Tiberius Caesar. A respected member of the Roman Senate, Pilate harbored a cruel streak that Tiberius used to strike fear into the Empire's enemies. Pilate was on his way to the peak of Roman society when a disastrous encounter with the loathsome Gaius Caligula, Tiberius' heir, ended with him being disgraced and sent into exile as Prefect to the armpit of the Roman Empire: the province of Judea. In this desert land, where political rebellion and religious fanaticism bloomed like flowers in the spring, Pilate's life became entwined with that of Jesus of Nazareth, the enigmatic leader of a new religious sect. Bullied into sending Jesus to the cross by the local religious leaders, Pilate is tormented with guilt and nightmares, unable to wash away the blood on his hands. But when the death of Tiberius elevates Caligula to the Imperial throne, Pilate may have no choice but to flee for refuge to the disciples of the Man he crucified. But will they accept him?