in All's Well that Ends Well (I. 3)1 speak of "young Charbon" (i.e. chair bonne) the Puritan, and old Poysam (i.e. poisson) the Papist as though they represented two extremes to which he himself was in a mean. We know that he had learned the Church Catechism because he makes Hamlet speak of his hands as "pickers and stealers" (III. ii. 348), and there may be another reference in Biron's "special grace" (I. i. 153). We know that he had stood godfather, according to the rite of the Church of England, to a friend's child.2 He was himself baptised according the same rite, and I can see no reason for refusing to believe that he remained until death a member of the Church of his baptism. How far he was an orthodox member of that communion is another and far more difficult question, which cannot here be considered.

3

H. C. BEECHING.

1One would like to consider a good deal of the Clown's talk in this scene as mere actor's "gag" of the kind Hamlet protests against (III. ii. 42); but unhappily he is "foul mouthed," as the Countess rightly calls him, all through the play. Later in the scene there seems to be an approving reference to one of the many orders for the wearing of the surplice which followed upon Parker's Advertisements: "That man should be at woman's command and yet no hurt done! Though honesty be no Puritan, yet it will do no hurt : it will wear the surplice of humility over the black gown of a big heart. I am going forsooth." The topical sense of this passage may be exhibited in a paraphrase: "It wont hurt me to obey my mistress any more than it will hurt the Puritans to obey the Queen, though they object to the 'regiment of women.' They may keep their heart as proud as they please in their black gown, but they must be content to wear the surplice over it according to order."

In his will he leaves "to my godson William 20s. in gold."

3In some notes by an Archdeacon Davies, of Saperton, Gloucestershire, between 1688 and 1708 occurs the sentence "He died a Papist." This would mean that Shakespeare was reconciled to the Roman Church on his death-bed. But even Halliwell-Phillipps, who held that Shakespeare was Romanist in sympathy, allows the impossibility of any such reconciliation at New Place, considering the well-known Puritanism of his daughter and her husband, and the penalties for proselytising. He suggests that Shakespeare may have gone so far as to decline the offices of the vicar. The tradition seems to me on a level with that preserved by another local clergyman, to the effect that the poet died from the results of a drinking bout, which happily can be refuted by the fact that he made his will in January, corrected it in March, and died in April.

I

THE STAGE OF THE GLOBE.

N order to obtain a full understanding of any distinct mode of artistic expression, it is necessary to track it to its source, and to study the conditions under which its original utterances were shaped and its character and conventions took their everlasting bent. Thus romance first becomes intelligible when you have learnt the life-history of the minstrel folk who gave it birth; and the refrains and rhythms of lyric yield a new meaning, as you discern in them the uplifting of choric feet about the sacred tree, or the swaying bodies of the oarsmen at the rowlock or the women at the loom. Above all is this true in the case of forms so elaborate as those of drama, whose very existence depends upon the substitution of costly co-operation for the freedom of the singlehanded entertainer, and whose traditions early attain to a stability based upon the conservatism of a syndicate and the permanence of an architectural structure. If then one desires to differentiate the drama of the Renascence from the drama of the Middle Ages on the one side or the drama of the Restoration on the other, it is almost inevitable to begin by determining the nature of the stage upon which the Renascence plays were produced, and estimating the reaction which its dimensions and arrangement must have had upon the putting-together and the presentation of these.

Such an investigation is congenial enough to a generation whose historic sense has been rendered acute by contact with the pregnant conceptions of evolutionary science and philosophy. More than one attempt has been made in recent years to reconstruct a Shakespearean stage and to remodel histrionic methods, perverted by the misunderstandings of two centuries, in harmony therewith. As in all matters concerning Shakespeare, German enterprise has taken a foremost and honourable share in this endeavour. As far back as 1840 Karl Immermann produced Twelfth Night upon a stage designed by himself for the purpose at Düsseldorf. Immermann's experiment was an isolated one, and he did not as a matter of fact arrive at anything very closely approaching what we can imagine a

Shakespearean stage to have been. It was not until 1888 that the discovery by Dr. Karl Theodor Gaedertz of a drawing of the interior of the Swan theatre, of which more will be said below, stimulated a really wide-spread interest in the matter. The famous Munich Shakespeare-Bühne, organised by Karl von Perfall and Jócza Savits, was opened with a performance of King Lear on June 1, 1889, and yielded a long series of Shakespearean and other plays up to 1905. The example of Munich was followed more spasmodically at Breslau and Prague; and at Paris, in a production of Measure for Measure at the Théâtre de l' Œuvre in 1898. The English Elizabethan Stage Society, under the direction of Mr. William Poel, initiated its Shakespeare stage with a performance of Measure for Measure in 1893, and endured until 1905. In America the Department of English of Harvard University built an Elizabethan stage for a revival of Ben Jonson's Epicæne in 1895, and rebuilt it in accordance with the latest research for Mr. ForbesRobertson to play Hamlet upon in 1904. It must of course be borne in mind that these ventures, with the possible exception of the Harvard one, were conceived in the interests of histrionic reform rather than in those of pure archæology. The two objects are related, but ought not to be confused. The representation of Shakespeare's plays on the modern theatre has no doubt come to disaster, partly owing to the substitution after the Restoration of a picture-stage for a platform-stage, and partly owing to the bad taste of nineteenth-century stage-managers—notably Sir Henry Irving and Mr. Beerbohm Tree-who have persisted in elaborating scenic effect along lines of cost rather than of beauty, with results to the structure and movement of the plays no less ruinous than the havoc wrought by eighteenth-century adapters upon their texts. Obviously such reforms are required as will enable the dialogue of a play to be given in its entirety and in the order in which it was written; will prevent breaches of continuity in the progress of each act; and will restore declamation to its proper place in the equipment of the mime. I have seen nothing more ridiculous than a recent revival of Richard II, in which the performer of John of Gaunt, instead of coming forward to the footlights and spouting the patriotic harangue at the beginning of the second act, spoke it in the arms of his attendants, and with realistic representations of the feeble gestures, the halting utterance, and the broken accents of a dying man. Probably the actors themselves are more to blame than even the carpenters and the scene-shifters; but clearly if any kind of scenic illusion lends to the mutilation either of the words or of the spirit of a play as Shakespeare wrote it, that particular

kind of scenic illusion stands self-condemned. On the other hand, it seems to me a mere pedantry to maintain that no scenic illusion can possibly be appropriate in the performance of Shakespeare's plays upon a modern stage, which was not available in the sixteenth century. The Elizabethan companies were limited by their poverty, by their mobility, and by the imperfect development of mechanical invention. It is difficult, in view of Shakespeare's apologies in the choruses to Henry V. for his "wooden O" and its "unworthy scaffold," and for the

Four or five most vile and ragged foils,
Right ill-disposed in brawl ridiculous,

that must needs body forth the great name of Agincourt, to feel that he would not have gladly welcomed more spacious and decorative opportunities. And have not his lavish passages of description, such as that of Cleopatra's barge upon the Cydnus, again and again the air of verbal scene-painting, making its appeal to the imagination through the ear in default of the eye? Probably the scenic reformer's best course is, while preserving the essentials of the Shakespearean theatre, so far as he can discover them, to allow himself to be guided in details by his own sense of beauty rather than by a minuter respect for archæology. After all, perhaps it comes to much the same thing in the long run. Mr. Gordon Craig hangs his stage with curtains, because they are more beautiful and mysterious than painted scenes, and in so doing he half unconsciously reproduces the folded arrases of the Globe.

To the scholar, on the other hand, the archæological detail is important for its own sake and quite apart from any artistic use that may, by reproduction or adaptation, be made of it. The disinterested curiosity of his imagination will not be at rest until he knows precisely how it was all done at the time; and the very difficulty of the enquiry is his lure. This difficulty does not arise so much from any paucity of material, as from the failure of the material which exists to group itself into a coherent picture. The sources of information are, indeed, both varied and numerous. In the first rank are the few engravings and drawings which show the interior of a playhouse. Of these there are only four dating from before the end of the seventeenth century; and one of them, that of the Red Bull in 1672, is already too late to throw much light upon the Shakespearean period. Two little wood-cuts are found upon the title-pages respectively of William Alabaster's Roxana (1632) and Nathanael Richards' Messallina (1640). These have received less attention than the drawing of the Swan already referred

X.

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