Sydney Grundy

[2] Early comedies included The Glass of Fashion (1882), The Silver Shield (1885),[4] and the blank verse Clito for Wilson Barrett (1886).

[5] Grundy became well known as an adapter of French and German plays, cleaning them up for British audiences and revisiting the source material to craft his final product.

Among his earlier successes at adapting European works were The Snowball at the Strand Theatre (1879), based on Oscar, ou le mari qui trompe sa femme by Eugène Scribe and Duvergne; In Honour Bound (1880), based on Scribe's Une Chaine; Dust at the Royalty Theatre (1881); The Glass of Fashion (1883); and A Wife's Sacrifice (1886).

[4] Grundy's original libretti included the one-act "musical absurdity" Popsy Wopsy (1880), the full-length operas The Vicar of Bray (1882) and Pocahontas (1884); all three with composer Edward Solomon.

These were followed by The Degenerates (1899, at the Haymarket, starring Langtry); A Debt of Honour at the St James's Theatre (1900); Frocks and Frills at the Haymarket (1902) from Doigts de fees of Scribe and Ernest Legouvé; The Garden of Lies at St James's (1904) from Justus Miles Forman's novel; Business is Business at His Majesty's (1905), a rather free adaptation from Octave Mirbeau's Les affaires sont les affaires; and The Diplomatists at the Royalty Theatre (1905) from La Poudre aux yeux, by Labiche.

[6] About a dozen of Grundy's works played on Broadway, including A Pair of Spectacles in 1890 and 1905; The New Woman in 1894; A Bunch of Violets in 1895; The Late Mr. Castello in 1896; A Marriage of Convenience in 1897 and 1918; The Musketeers in 1899; The Degenerates in 1900; The Love Match in 1901; Frocks and Frills in 1902; Gypsy in 1903 and The Awakening in 1908.