author

Arnold Wynne

b. 1880

A literary scholar remembered for mapping the rise of English drama from medieval religious plays to the Elizabethan stage, he wrote with a clear eye for how theatre grew through character, verse, and performance. His best-known work, The Growth of English Drama, has stayed in circulation through later reprints and digital editions.

1 Audiobook

The Growth of English Drama

The Growth of English Drama

by Arnold Wynne

About the author

Born in 1880, Arnold Wynne is known chiefly as the author of The Growth of English Drama, first published by Clarendon Press in 1914. The book traces English theatre from early church drama and miracle plays through moralities, interludes, and the emergence of comedy and tragedy, making a broad literary history approachable for students and general readers.

Library and public-domain records confirm that his work continued to circulate in later editions, including a 1920 Clarendon printing and later reprints. Another book attributed to him, A Critical Handbook of English Drama, is listed in modern catalog and bookseller records, though readily available biographical details about Wynne himself are quite limited.

That scarcity gives his surviving work an old-library kind of appeal: the author remains somewhat shadowy, but the writing still offers a compact guide to how English drama developed across centuries. For listeners curious about the roots of the stage, Wynne’s books open a door into an earlier style of literary scholarship that aimed to be useful as well as informed.