their art. Theirs
was a true _drame libre_, having its analogies with the present attempts
of the vers-librists to free poetry from its restrictions of rhyme and
metre. But while the tendency of poetry has always been away from its
restrictions, the _mise-en-scene_ in the drama has continually, with the
attempts to make it conform to nature, tightened its throttling bands on
the real vitality of the stage.

Those who periodically wonder why the dramatists of the Elizabethan
age--the greatest productive period in the history of the English
stage--no longer hold the stage, with the exception of Shakespeare, and
who lament that even Shakespeare is yielding his traditional place, have
apparently given little thought to this loss of freedom as a contributing
cause. While the writers of _vers libre_ have so far freed themselves that
some of them have ceased to write poetry at all, it is a question whether
the scenic freedom of the old dramatists may not have played such a vital
part in the development of their art, that they owed to it at least some
of their pre-eminence.

Shakespeare's plays, as Shakespeare wrote them, read better than they act.
Hundreds of Shakespeare-lovers have reached this conclusion, and many more
have reached it than have dared to put it into words. The reason is, it
seems to me, that we can not, on the modern stage, enact the plays of
Shakespeare as he intended them to be acted--as he really wrote them.

If we compare an acting edition of any of the plays with the text as
presented by any good editor, this becomes increasingly clear. Shakespeare
in his original garb, is simply impossible for the modern stage.

The fact that the Elizabethan plays were given against an imaginary
back-ground enabled the playwright to disregard the old, hampering unity
of place more thoroughly than has ever been possible since his time. His
ability to do so, was the result not of any reasoned determination to set
his plays without "scenery," but simply of environment. As the scenic art
progressed, the backgrounds became more and more realistic and less and
less imaginary. The imagination of the audience, however, has always been
more or less requisite to the appreciation of drama, as of any other art.
No stage tree or house has ever been close enough to its original to
deceive the onlooker. He always knows that they are imitations, intended
only to aid the imagination, and his imagination has always been obliged
to do