Much has been made of the gains of the multicultural reconstruction of the canon of world drama, but what about the works that have been abandoned to make room for the new ones? Eight Modern Plays: An Archaeology of Western Drama brings together eight plays that have been dropped from (or never included in) the major anthologies of world drama over the past ten to twenty years, in order to examine the consequences of the new canonization for our understanding of the development of dramatic form. Those plays are The Thunderstorm (1859), by Alexander Ostrovsky; Engaged (1877), by W. S. Gilbert; The Intruder (1890), by Maurice Maeterlinck; The Weavers (1892), by Gerhart Hauptmann; From Morn to Midnight (1912), by Georg Kaiser; The Magnanimous Cuckold (1921), by Fernand Crommelynck; Awake and Sing! (1935), by Clifford Odets; and The Trial of the Innocents (1950), by Carlo Terron.