bolism can Shakespeare's stage
directions in the Trial scene be represented on the stage?

"A Hall in Blackfriars. Enter two vergers with short silver wands; next
them two scribes in the habit of doctors.... Next them with some small
distance, follows a gentleman bearing the purse with the great seal and a
Cardinal's hat; then two priests bearing each a silver cross; then a
gentleman usher bareheaded, accompanied with a sergeant-at-arms bearing a
silver mace; then two gentlemen bearing two great silver pillars; after
them, side by side, the two Cardinals, Wolsey and Campeius; two noblemen
with the sword and mace," etc.

I confess my symbolic imagination was completely gravelled, and in the
absence of any symbolic substitute, I have been compelled to fall back on
the stage directions.

Yet we are gravely told by the writer of a recent article that "all
Shakespeare's plays" lend themselves of course to such symbolic treatment.
We hear, indeed, that the National Theatre is to be run on symbolic lines.
If it be so, then God help the National Theatre--the symbolists will not.
No "ism" ever made a great cause. The National Theatre, to be the
dignified memorial we all hope it may be, will owe its birth, its being
and its preservation to the artists, who alone are the guardians of any
art. It is the painter, not the frame-maker, who upholds the art of
painting; it is the poet, not the book-binder, who carries the torch of
poetry. It was the sculptor, and not the owner of the quarry, who made the
Venus of Milo. It is sometimes necessary to re-assert the obvious.

Now there are plays in which symbolism is appropriate--those of
Maeterlinck, for instance. But if, as has been said, Maeterlinck resembles
Shakespeare, Shakespeare does not resemble Maeterlinck. Let us remember
that Shakespeare was a humanist, not a symbolist.

_The End_

The end of the play of Henry VIII. once more illustrates the pageantry of
realism, as prescribed in the elaborate directions as to the christening
of the new-born princess.

It is this incident of the christening of the future Queen Elizabeth that
brings to an appropriate close the strange eventful history as depicted in
the play of Henry VIII. And thus the injustice of the world is once more
triumphantly vindicated: Wolsey, the devoted servant of the King, has
crept into an ignominious sanctuary; Katharine has been driven to a
martyr's doom; the adulterous union has been blessed by the Court