its part. In Shakespeare's time the imagination did all the work;
and as imaginary houses and trees have no weight, the services of the
scene-shifter were not required to remove them and to substitute others.
The scene could be shifted at once from a battlefield in Flanders to a
palace in London and after the briefest of dialogues it could change again
to a street in Genoa--all without inconveniencing anyone or necessitating
a halt in the presentation of the drama. Any reflective reader of
Shakespeare will agree, I think, that this ability to shift scenes, which
after all, is only that which the novelist or poet has always possessed
and still possesses, enables the dramatist to impart a breadth of view
that was impossible under the ideas of unity that governed the drama of
the Ancients. Greek tragedy was drama in concentration, a tabloid of
intense power--a brilliant light focussed on a single spot of passion or
exaltation. The Elizabethan drama is a view of life; and life does not
focus, it is diffuse--a congeries of episodes, successive or
simultaneous--something not re-producible by the ancient dramatic methods.

Today, while we have not gone back to the terrific force of the Greek
unified presentation, we have lost this breadth. We strive for it, but we
can no longer reach it because of the growth of an idea that realism in
_mise-en-scene_ is absolutely necessary. Of course this idea has been
injurious to the drama in more ways than the one that we are now
considering. The notable reform in stage settings associated with the
names of Gordon Craig, Granville Barker, Urban, Hume and others, arises
from a conviction that _mise-en-scene_ should inspire and reflect a
mood--should furnish an atmosphere, rather than attempt to reproduce
realistic details. To a certain extent these reforms also operate to
simplify stage settings and hence to make a little more possible the quick
transitions and the play of viewpoint which I regard as one of the glories
of the Elizabethan drama. This simplification, however, is very far from a
return to the absolute simplicity of the Elizabethan setting. Moreover, it
is doubtful whether the temper of the modern audience is favorable to a
great change in this direction. We live in an age of realistic detail and
we must yield to the current, while using it, so far as possible, to gain
our ends.

This being the case, it is certainly interesting to find that, entirely
without the aid or consent