Elizabethan tongue. Even could his modern actors learn to use one we should still lack the Elizabethan ears for listening. And such a studying, either to speak or to listen, would kill just that spontaneous ease of appeal and response which is the very life of the theatre. How near we can come to that simple way of approach is a matter worth discussing; but the present point to make is only that these plays, like any others, should first be seen and heard in a theatre. No one, as a first step, wants to read an essay on Shakespeare, nor to study him in a class room, nor even to ponder him silently in a fireside armchair. The first process must tend to de-naturalise him (though we will here strive against that sin); the second does, as a rule, quite positively succeed in making a monster of him. While, for the third, if we are to try and imagine the play abounding in life, as he meant it should, we need, to begin with, as much technical knowledge as does a musician sitting to read over the score of a symphony. Further, no effort of a single imagination can supply in any form the diverse incalculable element of a play's acting, the human co-operation which finally makes it live.

To avoid misunderstanding though, let us insist on this about armchair students. The theatre, through two hundred years and more, has, more often than not, but abused its heritage of Shakespeare's plays, and it is to the student that we owe much of their preservation in honour. But it is true, too, past much dispute, that criticism, appreciation, speculation, excursions upon the significance of the poet's philosophy and the like, are proportionately futile as they tend to ignore for the basis of their contentions, Shakespeare, the Elizabethan playwright.

The Limitations of the Elizabethan Theatre

Let us first consider, then, his playwright's task in its very narrowest sense. He wrote for a theatre that was structurally simple. Four boards and a passion, it has been said, are all that is needed for the making of great drama, and certainly Shake

speare had to learn to rely upon little else. We may picture his early plays given in broad daylight upon a bare stage, backed probably by some hangings, painted to resemble tapestry, through openings in which the actors could come and go. The audience, in composition and temper, we could best match to-day by looking, not into a fashionable theatre, but in upon a good boxing match. We should but have to exchange for the baser modern elements that batten upon sport a few Elizabethan rufflers, apt for a brawl and too handy with their daggers. But plays were then thought of as very good sport; one can read that into the origins of our theatre. They were sport of the crudest kind too, more often than not, reeking and echoing with blood and thunder-a melodramatist of to-day would blush for it!—and thick with such clowning as we relegate to a circus.

But there was this, too, about that audience of prentices, courtiers, citizens, light ladies and bullies. They could be stirred by the sound of poetry. And upon that fact a great drama was founded. Shakespeare, who was sensitive to most current things and let little that touched him pass unexpressed, has noted the comic incongruous extreme of the matter in the character of Ancient Pistol-ruffian and coward, more highwayman than soldier, but a great theatre-goer evidently, for his swagger is to spout blank verse.

There would be more ways than one, then, of capturing such an audience. You could play down to it. Equally, though less easily doubtless, you could stir it to unwonted enthusiasms, for there is no susceptibility like this susceptibility to poetry. Shakespeare was a popular dramatist from the first, and, apparently, he never ceased to be one (though with occasions of failure, one may be sure, and it is not to be supposed that Troilus and Cressida had the vogue of As You Like It, or that Coriolanus was as quoted a character as Falstaff). But it is interesting to surmise how, without losing touch with his public, he yet developed his art, carrying them with him into unfamiliar

regions of emotion and expression. For it is a far cry from the simple fun and simpler romance of The Comedy of Errors and the Two Gentlemen of Verona to the spiritual world of King Lear and to some of the talk in Cymbeline. It may be, though, that in the very latest plays he did "lose touch" a little. There are signs of it.

During Shakespeare's playwright's career, which ran from about 1591 to 1611, the physical features of theatre and stage changed somewhat. The process was probably the natural and common one, by which plays demanded new contrivances and these in turn suggested new devices for other plays. The whole question of the finally developed structure of the Elizabethan stage and the technical uses made of it is still one involving much dispute, and what is to be written here aims at no more than rough accuracy. The data are many in the sense that each surviving play, seen in the light of its possible staging, contributes to them. But the fact that the change was, up to a point, very rapid, and the probability that each theatre was structurally developed to some extent upon the lines of its own convenience, makes more of the puzzle. Some few traditions of stagecraft had been inherited from the vanished and vanishing "mysteries" and moralities.' But the directest influence of the sort upon the newly professionalised drama was its use of the inn-yard for a theatre.

These yards were surrounded, as a rule, upon all four sides by balconies. Three sides of these and the ground accommodated the audience. On the fourth side stood the stage-projecting twenty feet or so, if that much room could be spared— while the balcony immediately above could be used as an upper stage, for the window of a house or the battlements of a castle, or to hold the musicians if need be. It was easily curtained, and from its lower edge could be hung the arras that backed the

1 This side of the question may be studied to the full in G. K. Chambers' The Mediaval Stage.

main stage itself. To this sort of setting the earlier Elizabethan plays were necessarily fitted. And the theatre buildings which prosperity soon provided, The Theatre, and later the Globe (where Shakespeare's best work was done), the Fortune, the Rose, the Swan-what charming names they found for them!— merely turned it to better account. The actors in their fine clothes were now protected from sun and rain by a pent-house roof. The arras at the back was made to draw apart and disclose an inner stage. This was first used probably as a convenient place from which to bring forward to the outer stage such properties as tables and thrones and the big curtained beds of the time. Later, a part of the play's action might be carried on there and, later still, something akin to painted scenery may have been set up, the curtains drawing to disclose it. This last possibility has been the subject of acrimonious dispute. But at some time or other the inner stage did begin to be so used, for we use it so now. Our modern stage is its elaboration; while bit by bit-shrinking finally to the curved stage-front which exists in some theatres still-the rest of our Elizabethan inheritance has disappeared. Now this enlargement-as may easily be seen if a plan is drawn-necessarily led to the provision of other means of entrance, and two doors were placed at the side and back of the main stage. Side balconies were brought into use, too, so that the players in them could both see what was happening on the inner stage and could be more conveniently talked to by the players below. At this point though-but for the making of a few trap-doors and the machinery for the lowering of some visionary god from the regions of the roof-the structural development of Shakespeare's stage halted.

It is well to have this picture in one's mind, for many seeming oddities in the plays become simple and satisfactory in its setting. It can surely but help one's appreciation of any art to have in mind the immediate circumstances under which it flourished. It is quite vital to a full understanding of Shake

speare's plays that one should grasp the essentials of his stagecraft, should see how these were imposed upon him.

How the Plays Were Performed

The plays, for instance, were performed as a rule in daylight. This in itself would rule out any mystery making of a tricky kind. So whatever supernatural impression was to be made by the Ghosts in Hamlet and Macbeth, or the fairies of A Midsummer Night's Dream, must be due to the powers of the actors and the imagination of the audience.

Again, the main stage was thrust right out among the audience. Some of the audience, indeed, sat on the stage itself. This seems to us an outrageous proceeding, but the custom endured for a century or more, and for even longer in France than in England. We must remember though, that little or no pictorial illusion was being attempted and always, in such a connection, that a theatrical convention is the most easily accepted or discarded of things. Italian actors still sometimes stop the play's action to return and bow after an applauded exit. In England, till a few years ago, plays and operas were performed with the auditorium lights turned full on, and opera box conversation hardly ceased because the curtain had risen. At the best then, an Elizabethan performance had to take account of an audience on three sides of it, while at the worst, one supposes, an actor might now and then be tripped up by the sword of some gallant gentleman who was more intent upon his own well-posed attitude than upon the play.

Now from this peninsulation of the stage several things follow. The making of stage pictures was impossible and graphic effects must be thought of, as it were, in the round. This led to an elaboration of the pageantry of fine dresses and stately movement. The dresses—to sustain such close inspection-had to be fine indeed. Large sums were spent on them. A king's costume might cost more than the writing of the play