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PAGE I THE STAGE OF SHAKESPEARE

The Elizabethan Playhouse--The Plays and the Players 3

II THE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE

Some Mistakes of the Editors--Some Mistakes of the Actors--The Character of Lady Macbeth--Shakespeare's Jew and Marlowe's Christians--The Authors of "King Henry the Eighth"--"Troilus and Cressida" 27

"The Merchant of Venice"--"Romeo and Juliet"--"Hamlet"--"King Lear" 119

The Repertory Theatre--The Elizabethan Stage Society--Shakespeare at Earl's Court--The Students' Theatre--The Memorial Scheme 193

INDEX 241

THE STAGE OF SHAKESPEARE

THE ELIZABETHAN PLAYHOUSE THE PLAYS AND THE PLAYERS

SHAKESPEARE IN THE THEATRE

THE STAGE OF SHAKESPEARE

THE ELIZABETHAN PLAYHOUSE.

The interdependence of Shakespeare's dramatic art with the form of theatre for which Shakespeare wrote his plays is seldom emphasized. The ordinary reader and the everyday critic have no historic knowledge of the Elizabethan playhouse; and however full the Elizabethan dramas may be of allusions to the contemporary stage, the bias of modern dramatic students is so opposed to any belief in the superiority of past methods of acting Shakespeare over modern ones, as to effectually bar any serious inquiry. A few sceptics have recognized dimly that a conjoint study of Shakespeare and the stage for which he wrote is possible; but they have not conducted their researches either seriously or impartially, and their conclusions have proved disputable and disappointing. With a very hazy perception of the connection between Elizabethan histrionic art and its literature, they have approached a comparison of the Elizabethan drama with the Elizabethan stage as they would a Chinese puzzle. They have read the plays in modern printed editions, they have seen them acted on the picture-stage, they have heard allusions made to old tapestry, rushes, and boards, and at once they have concluded that the dramatist found his theatre inadequate to his needs.

Now the first, and perhaps the strongest, evidence which can be adduced to disfavour this theory is the extreme difficulty--it might almost be said the impossibility--of discovering a single point of likeness between the modern idea of an Elizabethan representation of one of Shakespeare's plays, and the actual light in which it presented itself before the eyes of Elizabethan spectators. It is wasted labour to try to account for the perversities of the human intellect; but displays of unblushing ignorance have undoubtedly discouraged sober persons from pursuing an independent line of investigation, and have led many to deny the possibility of satisfactorily showing any intelligible connection between the Elizabethan drama and its contemporary exponents. Nowhere has a little knowledge proved more dangerous or more liable to misapplication, and nowhere has sure knowledge seemed more difficult of acquisition; yet it is obvious that investigators of the relations between the two subjects cannot command success unless they allow their theories to be formed by facts.

To those dilettante writers who believe that a poet's greatness consists in his power of emancipating himself from the limitations of time and space, it must sound something like impiety to describe Shakespeare's plays as in most cases compositions hastily written to fulfil the requirements of the moment and adapted to the wants of his theatre and the capabilities of his actors. But to persons of Mr. Ruskin's opinion this modified aspect should seem neither astonishing nor distressing; for they know that "it is a constant law that the greatest poets and historians live entirely in their own age, and the greatest fruits of their work are gathered out of their own age." Shakespeare and his companions were inspired by the prolific energies of their day. Their material was their own and their neighbours' experiences, and their plays were shaped to suit the theatre of the day and no other. It is therefore reasonable for the serious critic and historian to anticipate some increase of knowledge from a thorough examination of the Elizabethan theatre in close conjunction with the Elizabethan drama. Students who reject this method will always fail to realize the essential characteristic of one of the greatest ages of English dramatic poetry, while he who adopts it may confidently expect revelations of interest, not only to the playgoer, but to all who devote attention to dramatic literature. Above all things should it be borne in mind that the more the conditions of the Elizabethan theatre are studied, the better will it be perceived how workmanlike London's theatrical representations then were, and that they had nothing amateurish about them.

As the absence of theatrical machinery helped playwrights to be poets, so the capacity of actors stimulated literary genius to the creation of characters which the authors knew beforehand would be finely and intelligently rendered. Nor were the audiences in Shakespeare's time uncritical of the actor's art, and frequent allusions in the old plays show that they understood what "a clean action and good delivery" meant. To quote again from Mr. Addington Symonds, "attention was concentrated on the actors, with whose movements, boldly defined against a simple background, nothing interfered. The stage on which they played was narrow, projecting into the yard, surrounded on all sides by spectators. Their action was thus brought into prominent relief, placed close before the eye, deprived of all perspective. It acquired a special kind of realism which the vast distances and manifold artifices of our modern theatres have rendered unattainable. This was the realism of an actual event, at which the audience assisted; not the realism of a scene in which the actor plays a somewhat subordinate part."

Noblemen used to maintain a musical establishment for the service of their chapels, and to this department of their household the actors belonged. When not required by their masters, these players strolled the country, calling themselves servants of the magnate whose pay they took and whose badge they wore. Thus Shakespeare's company first became known as "Lord Leicester's Servants," then as the Lord Chamberlain's, afterwards, in the reign of King James, as "The King's Company." And we can imagine the influence of the chapel upon the art of the theatre when we consider that choristers, who were taught to sing anthems and madrigals, would receive an excellent training for that rhythmical and musical modulation so indispensable to the delivery of blank verse. With regard to the boys who performed the female characters, it is specially to be noted that they were paid more than the ordinary actors, in consequence of the superior physical and vocal qualifications which were needed. That the boys were thoroughly successful in the delineation of women's parts we learn from the Puritans, and from the insistence that those boys impressed for Queen Elizabeth's chapel should not only be skilled in the art of minstrelsy, but also be handsome and shapely, which seems to point to the theatrical use that would be made of them. To this end, power was given to the Queen's choirmaster to impress boys from any chapel in the United Kingdom, St. Paul's only excepted. A contemporary play has the following allusion to a boy actor: "Afore Heaven it is a sweet-faced child. Methinks he would show well in woman's attire. I'll help thee to three crowns a week for him, an she can act well."

Referring once more to the construction of the theatres, it is important to note that they differed most from modern playhouses in their size; not so much, perhaps, in the size of the stage as in the dimensions of the auditorium. The building was so made that the remotest spectator could hardly have been distant more than a dozen yards, or thereabouts, from the front of the stage. The whole auditory were thus within a hearing distance that conveyed the faintest modulation of the performer's voice, and at the same time demanded no exaggerated effort in the more sonorous utterances. Especially would such a building be well adapted for the skilled and rapid delivery for which Elizabethan players were famous. Added to this, every lineament of the actor's countenance would have been visible without telescopic aid. It was for such a theatre that Shakespeare wrote, says Mr. Halliwell Phillips, "one wherein an actor of genius could satisfactorily develop to every one of the audience not merely the written, but the unwritten words of the drama, those latter which are expressed by gesture or by the subtle language of the face and eye. There is much of the unrecorded belonging to the pages of Shakespeare that requires to be elicited in action, and no little of that much which can only be effectively rendered under conditions similar to those which prevailed at the opening of the Globe."

Suitable to the construction of the Elizabethan theatre was the construction of the Elizabethan play, the most noticeable feature of which was the absence of division into scenes and acts. For even when a new act and scene are marked in the old quartos and folios, they are probably only printer's divisions, and we find the text often continuing the story as though the characters had not left the stage. Not that it is to be inferred that no pauses were made during the representation of the play, especially at the cheaper and more popular houses, where jigs and musical interludes were among the staple attractions. But judging from the following words put into Burbage's mouth by Webster in his induction to "The Malcontent" , we may gather that at the Globe it was not usual to have musical intervals.

Nor is it likely Shakespeare would have approved of any interruptions to the dramatic movement of his plays when once it had begun. He made very sparing use of the chorus, and avoided both prologue and epilogue when possible.

There is, in this same induction by Webster, some dialogue that throws light also upon the estimation in which Shakespeare and his fellow actors regarded their calling and its duties and responsibilities, and is worth quoting:

Above all things, may it be acknowledged that if the Fortune theatre, the great rival playhouse to the Globe, was the most successful and prosperous financially, the Lord Chamberlain's troupe appealed, through Shakespeare, to the highest faculties of the audience, and showed in their performances a certain unity of moral and artistic tone.

THE PLAYS AND THE PLAYERS.

An Englishman visiting Venice about 1605 wrote in a letter from that city: "I was at one of their playhouses where I saw a comedy acted. The house is very beggarly and base in comparison with our stately playhouses in England, neither can the actors compare with us for apparel, shows, and music." This opinion is confirmed by Busino, who has left an account of his visit to the Fortune playhouse in 1617, where he observed a crowd of nobility "listening as silently and soberly as possible." And Thomas Heywood the dramatist, not later than 1612, affirms that the English stage is "an ornament to the city which strangers of all nations repairing hither report of in their countries, beholding them here with some admiration, for what variety of entertainment can there be in any city of Christendom more than in London?" In fact, the English people at this time, like the Greeks and Romans before them, were lovers of the theatre and of tragic spectacles. Leonard Digges, who was an eye-witness, has left on record the impression made upon the spectators by a representation of one of Shakespeare's tragedies:

"So have I seen when Caesar would appear, And on the stage at half-sword parley were Brutus and Cassius. Oh! how the audience Were ravished, with what wonder they went thence!"

But plays as perfect in design as "Julius Caesar," "Othello," and "Macbeth" were the exception, not the rule, upon the Elizabethan stage. They were the outcome of nearly twenty years' experiment in play-writing, a period during which Shakespeare mastered his art and schooled his audience to appreciate the serious unmixed with the ludicrous. When he first wrote for the stage, plays needed to have in them all that the taste of the day demanded in the way of comic interlude and music. A dramatic representation was a continuous performance given without pause from beginning to end, and the dramatists, in compliance with the custom, used the double story, so often to be found in the plays of the time, in order that the movement should be continued uninterruptedly. The characters in each story appeared on the stage in alternate scenes, with every now and then a full scene in which all the characters appeared together. Ben Jonson condemned this form of play. He ridiculed the use of short scenes, and the bringing on to the stage of the characters in pairs. Yet he himself found it necessary to conform to the requirements of the day, as is shown in his first two comedies, written to be acted without pause from beginning to end. Later on he adopted the Terentian method of construction, that of dividing the plays into acts and making each act a complete episode in itself; and in his dedication prefixed to the play of "The Fox," he claims to have laboured "to reduce not only the ancient forms, but manners of the scene." There can be no doubt, therefore, that Ben Jonson disliked Shakespeare's tolerance of the hybrid class of play then in vogue. Yet Shakespeare, if he thought it was not possible to work to the satisfaction of his audience according to the rules and examples of the ancients, none the less strove to put limits to the irregularities of his contemporaries. At the Universities scholars regarded his plays as compositions that were written for the public stage and therefore of no intrinsic value; while Londoners must have looked upon them as representations of actual life when compared with the formless dramas they were accustomed to see. He desired unity of fable with variety of movement, and endeavoured to abolish the use of impromptu dialogue by writing his own interludes and making them part of the play. Shakespeare wished to satisfy his audience and himself at the same time; and by the force of his dramatic genius he succeeded where others failed, and wrote plays which, if unsuitable for the modern stage, are still being acted.

About two-thirds of the plays which were acted at the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatres are now lost to us; and this dramatic literature must have been of unusual excellence, unless we are to suppose that the law of the survival of the fittest may be applied to the lives of plays. From the names of extinct dramas, accessible to us in such places as Henslowe's "Diary" or the Stationers' Registers, it may be inferred that the groundwork of many of them consisted either of political or purely social and domestic topics. Domestic tragedy was one of the most popular forms of the drama. In fact the dramatists, in most instances, took the material for their plays from their own and their neighbours' experiences, and all that was uppermost in men's minds was laid hold of by them, and brought upon the stage with only a little transparent concealment. The topical Elizabethan drama, in the plays which have come down to us, viewed from a purely historical standpoint, is a very accurate though not very flattering embodiment of middle-class society in London in the sixteenth century. From it we learn the dangers incurred by the presence of a large class of riotous idlers, discharged soldiers and sailors, over whom the authorities exercised little control; we are given striking descriptions of the London "roughs"; of these "swagging, swearing, drunken, desperate Dicks, that have the stab readier in their hands than a penny in their purses." We read, too, of the games that children played in the streets; of the assembling of the men of fashion and business in St. Paul's; and of the dense crowding of the neighbouring streets at the dinner-hour, when the throng left the cathedral. The conversation that the characters indulge in, apart from the immediate plot, invariably relates to current events. In a play written about the time of the Irish rebellion, one of the characters talks about Ireland in a way that might apply to recent days:

"The land gives good increase Of every blessing for the use of man, And 'tis great pity the inhabitants Will not be civil and live under law."

Uninteresting and unsavoury as some of the details of the Elizabethan domestic tragedies are, they were often used with an avowedly moral aim, and they had, according to many contemporary accounts, the most salutary effect on evil-doers. It was not more than forty years after Shakespeare's death that Richard Flecknoe, in his "Discourse of the English Stage," comments upon the altered character of the drama:

"Now for the difference betwixt our Theatres and those of former times; they were but plain and simple, with no other scenes nor decorations of the stage, but only old Tapestry, and the Stage strewed with Rushes, whereas ours for cost and ornament are arrived at the height of Magnificence, but that which makes our Stage the better, makes our Playes the worse, perhaps through striving now to make them more for sight than hearing, whence that solid joy of the interior is lost, and that benefit which men formerly received from Playes, from which they seldom or never went away but far better and wiser than when they came."

The short space of time--two hours and a half--in which an Elizabethan play was acted in Shakespeare's time, has excited much discussion among commentators. It can hardly be doubted that the dialogue, which often exceeds two thousand lines, was all spoken on the stage, for none of the dramatists wrote with a view to publication, and few of the plays were printed from the author's manuscript. This fact points to the employment of a skilled and rapid delivery on the part of the actor. Artists of the French school, whose voices are highly trained and capable of a varied and subtle modulation, will run through a speech of fifty lines with the utmost ease and rapidity; and there is good reason to suppose that the blank verse of the Elizabethan dramatists was spoken "trippingly on the tongue." And then only a few of the plays which were written for the public stage were divided into acts; and even in the case of a five act drama it was not thought necessary to mark each division with an interval, since the jigs and interludes were reserved for the end of the play. So with an efficient elocution and no "waits," the Elizabethan actors would have got through one-half of a play before our modern actors could cover a third. Even Ben Jonson, while disliking the form of the Elizabethan drama, recognized the advantage to the dramatist of simplicity in the method of representation. He alludes, with not a little contempt, to Inigo Jones's costly settings of the masque at the court of King James.

"A wooden dagger is a dagger of wood, Nor gold nor ivory haft can make it good ... Or to make boards to speak! There is a task! Painting and carpentry are the soul of masque. Pack with your pedling poetry to the Stage. This is the money-got mechanic age!"

If a theatre were established in this country for the performance of Shakespeare's plays with the simplicity and rapidity with which they were acted in his time, it might limit the endless experiments, mutilations, and profitless discussions that every revival occasions. "To read a play," said Robert Louis Stevenson, "is a knack, the fruit of much knowledge and some imagination, comparable to that of reading score"; the reader is apt to miss the proper point of view. In omitting one-third of the play every time Shakespeare is acted, the most appropriate scenes for representation may not always be chosen. But were the entire play acted occasionally, the author's point of view could not fail to declare itself. It is interesting to note that Germany, always to the fore in Shakespearian matters, has obtained in Baron Perfall, the director of the Royal Court Theatre in Munich, an advocate for the performance of Shakespeare's plays as they were originally acted.

The Elizabethan dramatists, as a rule, deprecated the printing of their plays. They regretted that "scenes invented merely to be spoken should be inforcively published to be read." Elocution was to the playwrights an all-important consideration. They acknowledge that the success of their labours "lay much in the actor's voice"; that he must speak well, "though he understand not what," for if the actor had not "a facility and natural dexterity in his delivery, it must needs sound harsh to the auditor, and procure his distaste and displeasure." A good tragedy, in Ben Jonson's opinion, "must have truth of argument, dignity of persons, gravity and height of elocution"; "words," he says, "should be chosen that have their sound ample, the composition full, the absolution plenteous, and poured out all grave, sinewy, and strong." And Thomas Heywood, in 1612, thus writes in defence of the actor's art: "Tully, in his booke, 'Ad Caium Herennium,' requires five things in an orator--invention, disposition, eloqution, memory, and pronuntiation; yet all are imperfect without the sixt, which is action: for be his invention never so fluent and exquisite, his disposition and order never so composed and formall, his eloquence and elaborate phrases never so materiall and pithy, his memory never so ferme and retentive, his pronuntiation never so musical and plausive; yet without a comely and elegant gesture, a gratious and a bewitching kinde of action, a natural and familiar motion of the head, the hand, the body, and a moderate and fit countenance suitable to all the rest, I hold all the rest as nothing. A delivery and sweet action is the glosse and beauty of any discourse that belongs to a scholler; and this is the action behoovefull in any that professe this quality, not to use any impudent or forced motion in any part of the body, nor rough or other violent gesture, nor, on the contrary, to stand like a stiffe starcht man, but to qualifie everything according to the nature of the person personated: for in overacting trickes, and toyling too much in the anticke habit of humors, men of the ripest desert, greatest opinions, and best reputations may breake into the most violent absurdities. I take not upon me to teach, but to advise; for it becomes my juniority rather to be pupil'd my selfe than to instruct others."

Shakespeare, also, though not so great an actor as he was a dramatist, knew as well what was needed for the art of the one as of the other, and perhaps thought even more about the acting because he had the less genius for it. There are some descriptive passages in his plays which show that he visualized the characters he created and gave them gestures which were appropriate to their personalities.

If the actors were fortunate in having poets such as Shakespeare, Jonson, and Heywood, not only to write for them, but also to instruct them, the poets were no less fortunate in their actors. Of Burbage, we are told that he had all the parts of an excellent orator, animating his words with his speech, and his speech with action, so that his auditors were "never more delighted than when he spoke, nor more sorry than when he held his peace; yet even then he was an excellent actor still, never failing in his part when he had done speaking, but with his looks and gesture maintaining it still unto the height." We learn that he was small in stature; that every thought and mood could be understood from his face; and that because of his gifts he was "only worthy to come on the stage," and because of his honesty "he was more worthy than to come on." So great was Burbage's popularity that London received the news of his death, which occurred within a few days of that of the Queen, King James's Consort, with a greater manifestation of grief than they bestowed on the lady. Perhaps Shakespeare was thinking of Burbage's unusual ability when he wrote the following lines:

"The eyes of men After a well-grac'd actor leaves the stage Are idly bent on him that enters next, Thinking his prattle to be tedious."

Dick Robinson was an actor of women's parts. Ben Jonson has left on record that he could dress better than forty women, and, in the disguise of a lawyer's wife, he could convulse a supper party with merriment. Acting so realistic as his stirred the resentment of the Puritans. Stephen Gosson writes: "Which way, I beseech you, shall they be excused that put on, not the apparel only, but the gate, the gestures, the voice, the passions of a woman." Nathan Field was the son of a minister, who was one of the earliest as well as one of the bitterest enemies of theatrical performances. While one of the Royal Chapel boys, Field distinguished himself in Ben Jonson's comedy, "Cynthia's Revels," acted entirely by children. Afterwards Field became a member of Shakespeare's company, and, like him, an author. When Burbage died, Field was his successor in the part of the Moor. It is said that as he was naturally of a jealous disposition, the character suited him, and his impersonation of it became famed as "the true Othello of the poet." Many particulars have come down to us of the clown, Kemp. His popularity with his audiences cannot be disputed. "Clowns," writes a dramatic author in 1597, "have been thrust into plays by the head and shoulders ever since Kemp could make a scurvy face.... If thou canst but draw thy mouth awry, lay thy leg over thy staff, saw a piece of cheese asunder with thy dagger, lap up drink on the earth, I warrant thee they'll all laugh mightily." It was by tricks such as these that Kemp won the good opinion "of the understanding gentlemen of the ground"; but Shakespeare was not in favour of fooling. Kemp, moreover, loved to extemporize, and Shakespeare wished to abolish a custom fatal to dramatic unity. He preferred to write the clown's part himself, and desired that no more should be spoken than was set down by the author. The interference with the clown's privilege, openly advocated by Shakespeare in a well-known passage of "Hamlet," probably led to Kemp's temporary retirement from the company. Kemp loved notoriety and money. His morris dance to Norwich and journeys to France and Italy were but gambling speculations, he undertaking to be back in a certain time, and laying wagers with large odds in his favour to that effect.

The prosperity of the actor caused many to adopt the calling. His vocation, we are told, was the most excellent one in the world for money, and therefore players grew as plentifully "as spawn of frogs in March." It was open to the actor to buy shares in his theatre, and he could, by becoming a shareholder, attain the position of owner, and would, in Shakespeare's theatre, as one of the King's players, be provided from the royal wardrobe "with a cloak of bastard-scarlet and crimson velvet for the cape." He could also term himself "gentleman," a rank he was allowed to assume, and which he was very glad to adopt in defiance of the enemies of theatrical performances, who constantly taunted him, in the words of the old statute, with being "a rogue and a vagabond." The popularity of the stage as a profession excited the envy of scholars and lawyers. They taunted the actor with his vanity in believing that his fame would descend to posterity. They blamed the public for affording these "glorious vagabonds" means to ride through the "gazing streets" in satin clothes attended by their pages, and for enabling those who had done no more than "mouth words that better wits had framed" to purchase lands and possess country houses. The actor retaliated by deriding the scholar's poverty and ridiculing the lawyer's use of bad Latin. They contended that it was better "to make a fool of the world than to be fooled of the world as you scholars are." There is an anecdote related of Nathan Field which shows that actors did not underrate their own importance.

"Nathan Field, the player, being in company with a certain nobleman who was distantly related to him, the latter asked the reason why they spelt their names differently, the nobleman's family speling it 'Feild,' and the player spelling it 'Field'? 'I cannot tell,' answered the player, 'except it be that my branch of the family were the first that knew to spell.'" It would hardly have been agreeable to this tragedian to learn that he and his fellows, Shakespeare and Burbage, were "writ down" by the Master of His Majesty's Revels as "players, jugglers, and such kind of creatures"; nor would Ben Jonson have felt flattered by the candid confession of an admirer who "could not understand how a poet could have so much principle."

Although the theatres were prosperous, their existence was often imperilled by the action of the city magnates, who forbad the acting of plays within their own jurisdiction. They viewed with annoyance the crowds that came from north and south to bring money to the playhouses, and they disliked the inducements these afforded to their sons and apprentices to neglect their occupations. No opportunity was lost by the Corporation of urging the Sovereign to abolish the theatres. The Puritans, also, if not influential at Court, were still potent in affecting public opinion against stage-plays, in the pulpit and by means of the Press; while playwrights were even more violently attacked by them than were the actors. The sonorous and majestic verse of the Elizabethan poets, that has become the pride of our country, appeared in the eyes of the "godly" but as an invention of Satan to entice the unwary into his "chapel."

"Because the sweete numbers of Poetrie flowing in verse do wonderfully tickle the hearers eares, the devill hath tyed this to most of our playes, that whatsoever he would have sticke fast to our soules might slippe down in sugar by this intisement; for that which delighteth never troubleth our swallow. Thus when any matter of love is interlarded, though the thinge it selfe bee able to allure us, yet it is so sette out with sweetnes of wordes fitness of Epithites, with Metaphors, Alegories, Hyperboles, Amphibologies, Similitudes: with Phrases so pickt, so pure, so proper; with action so smothe, so lively, so wanton, that the poyson creeping on secretly without griefe chookes us at last and hurleth us downe in a dead sleepe."

This vigorous opposition to the stage had its advantage. It kept managers alive to their responsibilities, and obliged them to maintain a high standard of work. The poets were called upon to justify the existence of playhouses, and to defend their own reputations, and in this they were triumphant. They showed that playwrights had followed the advice of Cicero, and could create a drama which was "the schoolmistress of life, the looking-glass of manners, and the image of truth." They contended that in the theatre men were shown, as in a mirror, "their faults though ne'er so small." Of Shakespeare's comedies it was said, they are "so framed to the life, that they serve for the most common commentaries of all the actions of our lives, and all such dull and heavy-witted worldings, as were never capable of the wit of a comedy, coming by report of them to his representations have found that wit there that they never found in themselves, and have parted better-witted than they came." Thomas Heywood contended that plays had made "the ignorant more apprehensive, taught the unlearned the knowledge of many famous histories, instructed such as cannot read in the discovery of all our English Chronicles, and what man have you now of that weak capacity that cannot discourse of any notable thing recorded, even from William the Conqueror; nay, from the landing of Brute until this day." Perhaps it was well for the public of Shakespeare's day that it attached an educational value to the theatre, and consciously adopted an attitude of diffidence towards the labours of the dramatist. He was left free to teach as well as to amuse. If the amusement consisted in putting into the mouths of the clowns "unsavoury morsels of unseemly sentences," the teaching consisted in making folly appear ridiculous and vice odious. So long as the dramatists were not hampered by demands from the audience to have its social, political, or aesthetic fancies humoured, and from the actor to have his egotism flattered, the drama flourished as an art as well as a business. But when managers began to consider the whims of their patrons, when the King's Players petitioned the People's Parliament for leave to continue their vocation because "they will not entertain any comedian that shall speak his part in a tone as if he did it in derision of some of the pious," then the theatre ceased to be a looking-glass that could image life truthfully. Indeed, it cannot be doubted that if ever the drama shall again enlist the best talent of the time in its service it will be when the nation becomes conscious of the power of the stage, which is capable, as Bacon says, "of no small influence, both of discipline and corruption."

THE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE

THE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE

Neither in the theatre nor on the printed page can it be said that Shakespeare's dramas to-day reflect the form of his art or the thought of his age. The versions acted on the stage are unlike those read in the study, and all are dissimilar to the "authentic copies." In order to understand the cause of these discrepancies it is necessary to trace their origin and history.

SOME MISTAKES OF THE EDITORS

A number of Shakespeare's plays were published during his lifetime, the first, "The Comedy of Errors," appearing in 1595, and the last one, "Pericles," in 1609. Some of these plays went through several editions, and the text of four of them, in their first edition, was extremely faulty, but the second editions of "Romeo and Juliet" and of "Hamlet" were probably printed direct from the author's manuscripts.

The special features of these early quartos are:

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