Prompted by the appearance of Deacon Brodie in a novel I have just finished, I read this script of an 1880s play on the infamous Edinburgh criminal scripted by one of Scotland's most famous authors. The play was apparently a flop, and it is not hard to see why. The action is confusing, and to the non-Scottish reader, much of the dialect is hard to follow due to the Scots dialect. When it was easier to follow, it wasn't really worth the effort. ( )