ould be, of the
stage stagey, challenging the actor to act up to them or beyond them,
if he can. The more heroic the overcharging, the better for the
performance.

In dragging the reader thus for a moment behind the scenes, I am
departing from a rule which I have hitherto imposed on myself so rigidly
that I never permit myself, even in a stage direction, to let slip a
word that could bludgeon the imagination of the reader by reminding him
of the boards and the footlights and the sky borders and the rest of
the theatrical scaffolding, for which nevertheless I have to plan as
carefully as if I were the head carpenter as well as the author. But
even at the risk of talking shop, an honest playwright should take at
least one opportunity of acknowledging that his art is not only limited
by the art of the actor, but often stimulated and developed by it. No
sane and skilled author writes plays that present impossibilities to
the actor or to the stage engineer. If, as occasionally happens, he asks
them to do things that they have never done before and cannot conceive
as presentable or possible (as Wagner and Thomas Hardy have done,
for example), it is always found that the difficulties are not really
insuperable, the author having foreseen unsuspected possibilities both
in the actor and in the audience, whose will-to-make-believe can perform
the quaintest miracles. Thus may authors advance the arts of acting and
of staging plays. But the actor also may enlarge the scope of the drama
by displaying powers not previously discovered by the author. If the
best available actors are only Horatios, the authors will have to
leave Hamlet out, and be content with Horatios for heroes. Some of the
difference between Shakespeare's Orlandos and Bassanios and Bertrams and
his Hamlets and Macbeths must have been due not only to his development
as a dramatic poet, but to the development of Burbage as an actor.
Playwrights do not write for ideal actors when their livelihood is at
stake: if they did, they would write parts for heroes with twenty arms
like an Indian god. Indeed the actor often influences the author too
much; for I can remember a time (I am not implying that it is yet wholly
past) when the art of writing a fashionable play had become very
largely the art of writing it "round" the personalities of a group of
fashionable performers of whom Burbage would certainly have said that
their parts needed no acting. Everything has its abuse as