In his prefatory note to A Study of the Drama, from 1910, Brander Matthews lists philosophy as one of four primary categories to be used in assessing the merits of any playscript (v). His use of the term is essentially vernacular: philosophy, in his explanation, encompasses “a message of high importance” and a “vision of human life” (217). Yet the usage is significant. At the time Matthews was writing, drama had not yet secured wide acceptance as an art form with a capacity for speculative investigation and was just as likely to be seen as an intellectually bankrupt mode of entertainment. Matthews’s suggestion that philosophy might have anything at all to do with the drama was largely a rebuke to these aspersions. “To many of us the drama gives merely unthinking amusement in the playhouse,” he concedes, in The Development of the Drama (3). But, almost tentatively, he adds, “To some its chief quality is that it enables them to disentangle the philosophy of the dramatist himself” (3). If Matthews’s writings are largely archived and forgotten today, his place in the history of drama scholarship is surely still pertinent. He held the first collegiate appointment in dramatic literature in the United States, and he took it as part of the purpose of his position to justify the standing of the material he was tasked to study. That the drama might have some capacity for and inclination toward philosophy was an essential part of that validation. The subject of the present issue of Modern Drama is one that would have been familiar to Matthews and tomany of the earliest professional scholars of modern drama: a consideration of the relationship between drama and philosophy. It is a subfield that, in recent years, has experienced something of a renaissance. There have been dedicated sessions on theatre and philosophy at several of the most recent conferences of the American Society for Theatre Research, the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, and other scholarly organizations, in many cases supported by standing interest groups. A new professional organization with the name of Performance Philosophy was started in the United Kingdom in 2012 and held its inaugural conference in