A Man of Honour: A Tragedy in Four Acts.

A Man of Honour was the first of W. Somerset Maugham's plays to be produced, staged by the Stage Society in London in 1903 while the young author was still supporting himself on the meager returns of his early novels. A grim tragedy in four acts about a well-born man who marries a barmaid he has wronged, and the misery that follows, it owed something to the naturalism of Ibsen and was respected by critics as a serious work while failing to find a popular audience. Maugham would wait until the triumph of Lady Frederick in 1907 for the success that made him the most sought-after playwright in London. Heinemann later gathered his plays into a uniform series of acting texts, for which Maugham supplied the preface printed in this edition. William Somerset Maugham (1874 to 1965) trained as a physician before turning to writing and became one of the most popular and highest paid authors of his age, the creator of Of Human Bondage, The Moon and Sixpence, Cakes and Ale, and The Razor's Edge, as well as the Ashenden stories drawn from his own service as a British intelligence agent during the First World War.