d upon the English
stage. The actors were merely furnished with a "plat," or plot of the
performance, and were required to fill in and complete the outline, as
their own ingenuity might suggest. Portions of the entertainments were
simply dumb show and pantomime, but it is clear that spoken dialogue
was also resorted to. In such cases the "extemporal wit," or gagging
of the comic actors, was indispensably necessary. The "comedians of
Ravenna," who were not "tied to any written device," but who,
nevertheless, had "certain grounds or principles of their own," are
mentioned in Whetstone's "Heptameron," 1582, and references to such
performers are also to be found in Kyd's "Spanish Tragedy," and Ben
Jonson's "Case is Altered." In "Antony and Cleopatra" occurs the
passage:

The quick comedians
Extemporally will stage us and present
Our Alexandrian revels.

And Mr. Collier conjectures that when Polonius, speaking of the
players, informs Hamlet that, "for the law of writ and the liberty,
these are your only men," he is to be understood as commending their
excellence, both in written performances and in such as left them at
liberty to invent their own discourse.

But however intelligible and excusable its origin, it is certain that
by the time Shakespeare was writing, the "extemporal wit" of the
theatre had come to be a very grave nuisance. There is no need to set
forth here his memorable rebuke of the clowns who demonstrate their
"pitiful ambition" by speaking more than their parts warrant. It is to
be observed, however, that while this charge is levelled only at the
clowns, or comic performers, the faults of the serious players by no
means escape uncriticised. The same speech condemns alike the rant of
the tragedians and the gag of the comedians. Both are regarded as
unworthy means of winning the applause of the "groundlings" in one
case, and the laughter of "barren spectators" in the other. Sad to
say, Hamlet, in his character of reformer of stage abuses, failed to
effect much good. The vices of the Elizabethan theatre are extant, and
thriving in the Victorian. It is even to be feared that the
interpolations of the clowns have sometimes crept into and disfigured
the Shakespearean text, much to the puzzlement of the commentators.
Often as Hamlet's reforming speech has been recited, it has been
generally met and nullified by someone moving "the previous question."
At the same time, while there is an