ed at the highest level, if
Shakespearean drama is to be fitly rendered in the theatre. The worst
of the evils, which are inherent in scenic excess, with its
accompaniment of long runs, is its tendency to sanction the
maintenance of the level of acting at something below the highest.
Phelps was keenly alive to this peril, and his best energies were
devoted to training his actors and actresses for all the roles in the
cast, great and small. Actors and actresses of the first rank on
occasion filled minor parts, in order to heighten the efficiency of
the presentation. Actors and actresses who have the dignity of their
profession at heart might be expected to welcome the revival of a
system which alone guarantees their talent and the work of the
dramatist due recognition, even if it leave histrionic incompetence no
hope of escape from the scorn that befits it. It is on the aspiration
and sentiment of the acting profession that must largely depend the
final answer to the question whether Phelps's experiment can be made
again with likelihood of success.

VII

Foreign experience tells in favour of the contention that, if
Shakespeare's plays are to be honoured on the modern stage as they
deserve, they must be freed of the existing incubus of scenic
machinery. French acting has always won and deserved admiration. There
is no doubt that one cause of its permanently high repute is the
absolute divorce in the French theatre of drama from spectacle.

Moliere stands to French literature in much the same relation as
Shakespeare stands to English literature. Moliere's plays are
constantly acted in French theatres with a scenic austerity which is
unknown to the humblest of our theatres. A French audience would
regard it as sacrilege to convert a comedy of Moliere into a
spectacle. The French people are commonly credited with a love of
ornament and display to which the English people are assumed to be
strangers, but their treatment of Moliere is convincing proof that
their artistic sense is ultimately truer than our own.

The mode of producing Shakespeare on the stage in Germany supplies an
argument to the same effect. In Berlin and Vienna, and in all the
chief towns of German-speaking Europe, Shakespeare's plays are
produced constantly and in all their variety, for the most part, in
conditions which are directly antithetical to those prevailing in the
West-end theatres of London. Twenty-eight of Shakespeare's
thirty-seven plays