wrote his immortal poetry in the
shape of theater plays. This was sad, indeed! The result was that in
both the older teaching and academic criticism emphasis was always
placed upon Shakespeare the poet, the great mind; and Shakespeare the
playwright was hardly explained at all; or if explained the
illumination was more like darkness visible, because those in the seats
of judgment were so ignorant of play technic and the requirements of the
theater as to make their attempts well-nigh useless. It remained for our
own time and scholars like George P. Baker and Brander Matthews, with
intelligent, sympathetic comprehension of the play as a form of art and
the playhouse as conditioning it, to study the Stratford bard primarily
as playwright and so give us a new and more accurate portrait of him as
man and creative worker.

I hope it is beginning to be apparent that intelligent play-going starts
long before one goes to the theater. It means, for one thing, some
acquaintance with the history of drama, and the theater which is its
home, both in the development of English culture and that of other
important nations whose dramatic contribution has been large. This
aspect of culture will be enlarged upon in the following chapters.

Much can be done--far more than has been done--in this historical
survey in school and college to prepare American citizens for rational
theater enjoyment. There is nothing pedantic in such preparation. Nobody
objects to being sufficiently trained in art to distinguish a chromo
from an oil masterpiece or to know the difference in music between a
cheap organ-grinder jingle and the rhythmic marvels of a Chopin. It is
equally foolish to be unable to give a reason for the preference for a
play by Shaw or Barrie over the meaningless coarse farce by some stage
hack. It is all in the day's culture and when once the idea that the
theater is an art has been firmly seized and communicated to many all
that seems bizarre in such a thought will disappear--and good riddance!

The first and fundamental duty to the theater is to attend the play
worthy of patronage. If one be a theater-goer, yet has never taken the
trouble to see a certain drama that adorns the playhouse, one is open to
criticism. The abstention, when the chance was offered, must in fact
either be a criticism of the play or of the person himself because he
refrained from supporting it.

But let it be assumed that our theater-goer is in his seat, ready