icance in the phrase descriptive of this first building;
it was set up "in the fields," as the words run: which means, beyond
city limits, for the city fathers, increasingly Puritan in feeling,
looked dubiously upon an amusement already so much a favorite with all
classes; it might prove a moral as well as physical plague spot by its
crowding together of a heterogeneous multitude within pent quarters.
Once started, the theater idea met with such hospitable reception that
these houses were rapidly increased, until by the century's end half a
dozen of the curious wooden hexagonal structures could be seen on the
southward bank of the Thames, near the water, central in interest as we
now look back upon them being The Globe, built in 1599 from the material
of the demolished Shoreditch playhouse, and famed forever as
Shakespeare's own house. Here at three o'clock of the afternoon upon a
stage open to the sky and with the common run of spectators standing in
the pit where now lounge the luxuriant occupants of orchestra seats,
while those of the better sort sat on the stage or in the boxes which
flanked the sides of the house and suggested the inn galleries of the
earlier arrangement, were first seen the robust predecessors of
Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Kyd and Peele and Nash; and later,
Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, Ben Jonson and the other immortals
whose names are names to conjure with, even to this day. Played in the
daylight, and most crudely lighted, the play was deprived of the
illusion produced by modern artificial light, and the stage, projecting
far down into the audience, made equally impossible the illusion of the
proscenium arch, a picture stage set apart from life and constituting a
world of its own for the representation of the mimic story. There was
small need for make-up on the part of the actors, since the garish light
of day is a sad revealer of grease paint and powder; and the flaring
cressets of oil that did service as footlights must, it would seem, have
made darkness visible, when set beside the modern devices. It is plain
enough that under these conditions a performance of a play in the
particulars of seeing and hearing must have been seriously limited in
effect. To reach the audience must have meant an appeal that was
broadly human, and essentially dramatic. Fine language was
indispensable; and a language drama is exactly what the Elizabethan
theater gives us. Compelling interest of story, skillful m