ty of _Macbeth's_ belief in them; but when the play was
originally produced, the superstitious groundlings would have felt
themselves cheated of an alluring spectacle if the sheeted ghost had not
stalked out on the stage to shake his gory locks.

In the spacious days of Elizabeth, the half-roofed theaters were only a
little less medieval than the pageants of the mysteries had been; and
the task of the stage-manager must have been very simple indeed. There
was no scenery, and the performance took place by daylight, so that all
the producer of a new play had to do was to arrange such elementary
business as was possible on a platform encumbered with an indefinite
number of spectators. Like all stage-managers, then and now, he had of
course to direct the actors themselves; and _Hamlet's_ speech to the
_Players_ gives us good reason to believe that Shakspere must have been
an excellent trainer, however modest may have been his own native gifts
as an actor. Moliere, like Shakspere in so many ways, was like him in
being author and actor and manager; and in the 'Impromptu de Versailles'
he has left us a most instructive record of his own methods of
rehearsing his own company.

But, altho the playhouse in which Moliere performed was roofed and
lighted, and altho he had some scenery, yet there were spectators
sitting on his stage as on Shakspere's, and the conditions were those of
the platform and not of the picture. Oddly enough, the most pictorial of
all the theaters that have preceded our own time is the theater of the
Athenians. Few spectacles can ever have excelled in beauty an outdoor
performance in the theater of Dionysius, when the richly-appareled
chorus circled into the orchestra, to the sound of music, in the spring
sunshine, with the breeze from the Bay of Salamis blowing back their
floating draperies, that could not but fall into lines of unexpected
delight and ineffable grace. Stage-management, which was necessarily
neglected by the great Elizabethans, owing to the rudeness of their
playhouses, was studied as an art by the great Greeks and held by them
in high esteem. The dramatic poet was himself the producer, training the
three actors, arranging the evolutions of the chorus, and accepting full
responsibility for the perfection of the complete work of art. Silent
himself, he caused the music he controlled.

(1903.)

End of Project Gutenberg's Inquiries and Opinions, by Brander Matthews

*** END