EDWA RD SZ IGLIGETI, EDWARD TÓT H 263 sented, accompanied with national music and dancing j it made an ag reeable change from the raving villains of the romantic dramas. I ts c reator was EDWARD SZIGLIGETI (1814-1878) who was for some time an actor and was consequently weil aequainted with stage technique. His first prodoction was The Deserler, in which a large part was still played by the upper classes, but later on the humbler classes played a more and more important and exclusive part in his dramas such as The Pistols, The Horse-herd and The Gypsy. In the Hungarian peasant world there were many poetica! figures of which Szigligeti made use. There were, for example, the proud, hot-headed and somewhat pert peasant lad, who was yet full of deep feeling, and was equally sensitíve to the sorrow of disappointed love and to the joys of life, with its song and dance j the highwayman (betyár), that Iong-since vanished king of the puszta, violent but generous j and that well-known figure of Hungarian village life, the cowardly, sly, and always comical gypsy. Szigligeti was the ch,ief provider of the H ungarian actor's repertory. During the first thirty years of the existence of the National Theatre, one third of the plays it produced were by Szigligeti. It was he who wrote the hest H ungarian farce, Liliomfi. Amon g his serious dramas the best was The Pretender, in wh ich he gave the story of Borics, the Hungarian D emetri us, who though t bimself the lawfut son of King Kálmán an d claimed the throne until he learned the terrihle secret of his illegiti mate birth. The chief follower of Súgligeti as a writer of "popular plays " was EDWARD TÓTH (1844-76), wh o was a poor actor when he wrote The Black Sheep of the Village,
