used for indefinitely located scenes requiring space for relatively few actors. All Elizabethan dramas abound in brief scenes of monologue or casual conversation, in which the chorus, hero or villain, a couple of court gentlemen, or a knot of clowns occupy the attention of the audience in the intervals between weightier scenes involving a great number of figures and demanding clear localization. In many of these cases, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the slighter passage was particularly devised for the purpose of beguiling the time, while behind the drawn intermediate curtain, the rear stage was being decorated.1 By some such method as this, we may be sure, changes of place were marked without that tedious period of blank expectancy between the scenes which no Elizabethan audience would ever have endured, and which becomes possible even in the modern theatre only when the number of changes is greatly reduced.

It is certain that the Elizabethan popular theatre made use of numerous stage properties and attempted, according to its standards, a considerably more realistic imitation of life than seems often to be imagined. Frank anachronism, of course, must be conceded, both in the dress of the actors and in scenic decoration. Apart, however, from this failure to distinguish between the fashions of the ages, the dramatists and managers were undoubtedly fully aware of the pictorial limitations of their staging, and eager to heighten the illusion of the spectators. Though the bulk of the expense of setting out a play went in purchase of cos1 Cf. The Puritan, III, iii, iv. See also A. H. Tolman, "Alternation in the Staging of Shakespeare's Plays," Mod. Phil., vi (1909), 617 ff.

tumes for the performers, Henslowe's lists of expenditures are in themselves sufficient evidence of the attention paid to scenic furnishings; and everything we know of the procedure of the day emphasizes the fallacy of assuming for the theatre of Shakespeare's time a smaller regard for pictorial effect than can be clearly proved for the performances of the mystery cycles two centuries before. Practicable furniture of many kinds — trees that could be climbed or lopped off, hedges and arrases that would really conceal — did undoubtedly exist, and could certainly be replaced by other fittings when change of scene rendered them glaringly out of keeping.

Of scenery in the modern sense there can hardly be a question; but painted cloths may have been used somewhat ambitiously to suggest buildings, or even landscape, — particularly perhaps in connection with the upper balcony stage. The boards hung up to proclaim the scene of action, and occasionally the title of the play as well, were merely the equivalent of the modern theatre programme, and cannot be regarded as in any sense a substitute or alternative for visual scenery.

Altogether, the numerous plays printed directly from the prompter's copies used in the theatres, and such documents as "Henslowe's Diary" and the records of eye-witnesses of performances bear out inherent probability in showing the stage of 1600 to have been unusually plastic and inventive in its solution of the external problems of presentation, and not indifferent—as it has sometimes been held — but sensitive in the highest degree to the real capabilities of stage business and scenic effect.

The external development of the Elizabethan theatre, with which we have just been concerned, was influenced at several points by the course of critical opinion regarding the drama. We have seen how the governmental regulation of player companies, by checking the free evolution of a vulgar democratic stage, kept the popular drama for a time in subjection to the interests of private aristocratic performance, but ended by enriching the former with the heritage of experiment and innovation which the learned writers for the private stage had accumulated. Thus the public theatre of 1590 acquired a breadth of scope and a universal adaptability impossible to a purely indigenous plebeian growth. In addition to this influence of practical policy, two great waves of formal controversy, which came to a head during the reign of Elizabeth, left their mark upon the drama as upon other species of literature. The first of these forces was the all-embracing tide of Puritan philosophy, which, beginning in a more or less academic and impartial query concerning the justification of ornamental art in general, directed its arraignment not only against the stage, but against practically all poetry and fiction, music, and dancing. This attitude of mind, voiced in its mildest aspect by Ascham, repeats itself in slightly more specialized form in the works of Northbrook and Gosson, — the earliest important antagonists of the theatre, — and finds a response equally catholic and far-reaching in Sidney's noble "Apologie for Poetrie." However, in the heat of the quarrel thus punctiliously opened, attention concentrated itself more and more upon the most concrete object of dispute: the contemporary stage.