f the inner stage of the Elizabethans.
Similarly the method of stage presentation has changed only gradually
from Shakespeare's day to ours. The alternation from outer to inner
stage was very common in the Restoration theaters, where flat scenes
were used instead of a curtain, and it may still be seen in the
production of melodrama or of Shakespeare's plays. A painted drop shuts
off a few feet of the stage, which becomes a street or a hall, while
properties and scenery are being arranged in the rear. When the drop
goes up, we pass from the street or the court of the wicked Duke to the
Forest of Arden, just as the Elizabethans did.

The Elizabethan stage affected Shakespeare's dramatic art in many ways.
The absence of scenery, of women actors, and of a front curtain, the use
of a bare stage that served for neutral or unspecified localities,
naturally influenced the composition of every play. But the theatrical
presentation was by no means as crude or as medieval as these
differences from modern practice seem to indicate. The intimacy
established between actors and audience by the projecting stage, the
rapidity of action hastened by the lack of scenery or furniture, the
possibilities of rapid changes of scene rendered intelligible by the use
of the inner stage, were all manifest advantages in encouraging dramatic
invention. The traditions formed in this theater for the presentation of
_Hamlet_, _Romeo and Juliet_, and the other plays, were handed on from
Shakespeare and Burbage to Lowin and Taylor, to Betterton, Cibber, and
Garrick, down to the present day; and have perhaps been less
revolutionized by scenery and electric lights than we might imagine.

CHAPTER VII

THE TEXT OF SHAKESPEARE

The main difficulties that stand in the way of determining the actual
form in which Shakespeare left his plays are due, first, to the total
absence of manuscripts, and, secondly, to the fact that he, like his
contemporaries, regarded dramatic literature as material for performance
on the stage, not as something to be read in the library. The most
obvious evidence of this lies in his having himself issued with every
appearance of personal attention his poems of _Venus and Adonis_ and
_Lucrece_, while he permitted his plays to find their way into print
without any trace of supervision and, in some cases, apparently without
his consent. When the author sold a play to the theatrical company which
was to perform it, he appears to