"Avowedly I will never write for the stage; if I do, 'call me horse.'" he said in a letter to Terry.[125] Again in a letter to Southey: "I do not think the character of the audience in London is such that one could have the least pleasure in pleasing them....

On the whole, I would far rather write verses for mine honest friend Punch and his audience";[126] and to a would-be tragedian he said: "In the present day there is only one reason which seems to me adequate for the encountering the plague of trying to please a set of conceited performers and a very motley audience,--I mean the want of money."[127] This degraded condition of the London stage Scott thought to be a consequence of limiting the number of theaters.

We can hardly suppose, however, that he was pessimistic in regard to the written drama of his day, when he could say of Byron, "There is one who, to judge from the dramatic sketch he has given us in Manfred, must be considered as a match for Aeschylus, even in his sublimest moods of horror";[128] or when he could place Joanna Baillie in the same class with Shakspere[129].
Scott probably did much reading in the drama in his early life.

We know that by 1804 he had "long since" annotated his copy of Beaumont and Fletcher sufficiently so that he wished to offer it to Gifford, who, Scott erroneously understood, was about to edit their dramas.[130] The edition of Dryden, published in 1808, shows familiarity with Elizabethan as well as Restoration dramatists.

He seems to have had first-hand knowledge of such men as Ford, Webster, Marston, Brome, Shirley, Chapman, and Dekker, whom he mentions as being "little known to the general readers of the present day, even by name."[131] But 1808 was the very year in which appeared Lamb's _Specimens of English Dramatic Poets_ and Coleridge's first course of lectures on Shakspere.