cal
apparatus. In becoming familiar with these aids the reader will receive
the necessary hints to a further acquaintance with the more technical
books which study the earlier, more difficult part of dramatic
evolution, and give attention to the complex story of the development of
the theater as an institution.

A few things stand out for special emphasis here in regard to this
developmental time. Let it be remembered that the story of English drama
in its unfolding should be viewed in twin aspects: the growth of the
play under changing conditions; and the growth of the playhouse which
makes it possible. What has been said already of the physical framework
of the early English theater throws light at once, as we saw, upon the
nature of the play. And in fact, throughout the development, the play
has changed its form in direct relation to the change in the nature of
the stage upon which the play has been presented. The older type is a
stage suitable for the fine-languaged, boldly charactered, steadily
presented play of Shakespeare acted on a jutting platform where the
individual actor inevitably is of more prominence, and so poorly lighted
and scantily provided with scenery that words perforce and robustious
effects of acting were necessitated, instead of the scenic appeals,
subtler histrionism and plastic face and body work of the modern stage
which has shrunk back to become a framed-in picture behind the
proscenium arch. As the reader makes himself familiar with Marlowe, who
led on to Shakespeare, with the comedy and masque of Ben Jonson, with
the romantic and social plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, the lurid tragic
writing of Webster, the softer tragedy of Ford and the rollicking folk
comedy, pastoral poetry or serious social studies of Dekkar and Heywood,
he will come to realize that on the one hand what he supposed to be the
sole touch of Shakespeare in poetic expression was largely a general
gift of the spacious days of Elizabeth, poetry, as it were, being in the
very air men breathed[A]; and yet will recognize that the Stratford man
walked commonly on the heights only now and again touched by the others.
And as he reads further the plays of dramatists like Massinger,
Tourneur, Shirley, and Otway he will find, along with gleams and
glimpses of the grand manner, a steady degeneration from high poetry and
tragic seriousness to rant, bombast, and the pseudo-poetry that is
rhetoric, with the declension of tragedy into me