the mere form of their plays. It is the lesser
men who invent new tricks of technique and startle the public with
innovations. Moliere merely perfected the type of Italian comedy that his
public long had known. Shakespeare quietly adopted the forms that lesser
men had made the crowd familiar with. He imitated Lyly in _Love's Labour's
Lost_, Greene in _As You Like It_, Marlowe in _Richard III_, Kyd in
_Hamlet_, and Fletcher in _The Tempest_. He did the old thing better than
the other men had done it,--that is all.

Yet this is greatly to Shakespeare's credit. He was wise enough to feel
that what the crowd wanted, both in matter and in form, was what was needed
in the greatest drama. In saying that Shakespeare's mind was commonplace, I
meant to tender him the highest praise. In his commonplaceness lies his
sanity. He is so greatly _usual_ that he can understand all men and
sympathise with them. He is above novelty. His wisdom is greater than the
wisdom of the few; he is the heir of all the ages, and draws his wisdom
from the general mind of man. And it is largely because of this that he
represents ever the ideal of the dramatist. He who would write for the
theatre must not despise the crowd.

III

All of the above-mentioned characteristics of theatre audiences, their
instinct for contention and for partisanship, their credulity, their
sensuousness, their susceptibility to emotional contagion, their incapacity
for original thought, their conservatism, and their love of the
commonplace, appear in every sort of crowd, as M. Le Bon has proved with
ample illustration. It remains for us to notice certain traits in which
theatre audiences differ from other kinds of crowds.

In the first place, a theatre audience is composed of individuals more
heterogeneous than those that make up a political, or social, or sporting,
or religious convocation. The crowd at a foot-ball game, at a church, at a
social or political convention, is by its very purpose selective of its
elements: it is made up entirely of college-folk, or Presbyterians, or
Prohibitionists, or Republicans, as the case may be. But a theatre audience
is composed of all sorts and conditions of men. The same theatre in New
York contains the rich and the poor, the literate and the illiterate, the
old and the young, the native and the naturalised. The same play,
therefore, must appeal to all of these. It follows that the dramatist must
be broader in his appeal than any oth