EURIPIDES

lish, but always with stilted inversions and scholarly heaviness, and
the sense subjected to the sound/'

She made me try it, the choruses first. Scenes of the play were to
follow and be combined into growing length for performance, as fast
as I could write them. We had put on the stage all of the choruses,
for Margherita Duncan and Helen Freeman, besides the six girls and
herself, before someone discovered and reported that by living in the
theater's large, luxurious dressing-rooms Isadora and her group were
breaking New York's fire regulations. So the whole experiment ended.
But I finished the play, which was published as a single volume in
1915 and again, as part of my Book of Plays, in 1922. Both times,
forgetting that we had omitted certain sections of the choruses which
Isadora had thought too remotely allusive to be understood or effec-
tive, I neglected to restore them for print. They are included, how-
ever, in the present volume. I must add that in making the text for
Isadora I relied only on close study of all English versions available,
In revising it through the past two years, I have kept the choruses
more or less as they were, a sort of musical accompaniment to the
drama, but have otherwise written and discarded some seven manu-
scripts, with the devoted intent that what I could do for it might be-
come ever simpler, clearer, and worthier of the humanist who
wrote it.

For general accuracy, this new version has had the supervision of
Richmond Lattimore, who instigated my endeavor to make it a still
more human play in 1955 than the earlier version seemed to be in
1915.1 repeat at this time the original dedication to my friend Barry
Faulkner, the then young painter who helpfully watched the growth
of the first version forty years ago.

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