The Silver Box: A Comedy in Three Acts

About

Galsworthy's 1906 debut play — his first great success — dramatizes the same crime committed by two men of different classes and the radically different consequences each faces. A rich young man steals a silver box while drunk; a poor man steals a purse. The law's treatment of each is a precise index of the class system's operation under supposedly equal justice. The play established Galsworthy's method: systematic parallel construction that forces the audience to see the disparity without editorializing it. It was a landmark of Edwardian social drama and launched one of the period's most politically engaged theatrical careers.