when the theatre
could compete successfully against the amphitheatre. Plautus and Terence
complained that the Roman public preferred a gladiatorial combat to their
plays; a bear-baiting or a cock-fight used to empty Shakespeare's theatre
on the Bankside; and there is not a matinee in town to-day that can hold
its own against a foot-ball game. Forty thousand people gather annually
from all quarters of the East to see Yale and Harvard meet upon the field,
while such a crowd could not be aggregated from New York alone to see the
greatest play the world has yet produced. For the crowd demands a fight;
and where the actual exists, it will scarcely be contented with the
semblance.

Hence the drama, to interest at all, must cater to this longing for
contention, which is one of the primordial instincts of the crowd. It must
present its characters in some struggle of the wills, whether it be
flippant, as in the case of Benedick and Beatrice; or delicate, as in that
of Viola and Orsino; or terrible, with Macbeth; or piteous, with Lear. The
crowd is more partisan than the individual; and therefore, in following
this struggle of the drama, it desires always to take sides. There is no
fun in seeing a foot-ball game unless you care about who wins; and there is
very little fun in seeing a play unless the dramatist allows you to throw
your sympathies on one side or the other of the struggle. Hence, although
in actual life both parties to a conflict are often partly right and partly
wrong, and it is hard to choose between them, the dramatist usually
simplifies the struggle in his plays by throwing the balance of right
strongly on one side. Hence, from the ethical standpoint, the simplicity
of theatre characters. Desdemona is all innocence, Iago all deviltry. Hence
also the conventional heroes and villains of melodrama,--these to be hissed
and those to be applauded. Since the crowd is comparatively lacking in the
judicial faculty and cannot look upon a play from a detached and
disinterested point of view, it is either all for or all against a
character; and in either case its judgment is frequently in defiance of the
rules of reason. It will hear no word against Camille, though an individual
would judge her to be wrong, and it has no sympathy with Pere Duval. It
idolizes Raffles, who is a liar and a thief; it shuts its ears to Marion
Allardyce, the defender of virtue in _Letty_. It wants its sympathetic
characters, to love; its antipathe