to learn the name of the particular play that had been pillaged-and incidentally murdered by the gentleman who would step airily before the curtain in response to the cry of "Author!" An improvement in the law of copyright, which enabled French dramatists to protect their property, did much to promote the renascence of the British Drama. Whatever the reason, the renascence came. Its first faint flush was perceptible in the sixties in T. W. Robertson's Society, Caste and Ours. In the seventies the sky seemed to darken again; but the dawn was clearly perceptible in the eighties; and in the nineties, behold! the day. I am not going, at this point, to name names or to trace tendencies, but merely to express my conviction that the British drama of the present century is, for the first time since the Civil War, a creditable and even a distinguished branch of the national literature. I suggest that the apologetic, if not contemptuous, tone in which we are accustomed to speak of our living drama is an unconsidered survival from the midVictorian period. And, if such a view appears paradoxical, say that it is partly because we stand too near the phenomenon to see it in its true proportions, but mainly because we do not possess that common denominator, that generally applicable standard of value, without which we can make no just comparison between the old drama and the new. I The theory suggested in my first lecture-namely, that the purification of drama by the expulsion of operatic and exaggerative elements is a mark, not of decline, but of progress does not provide us with the standard of value of which we are here in search. It enables us to clear our minds of the prejudice which regards an archaic and impure form as inherently superior to a modern, logical and pure form; it enables us to dismiss the tacit assumption of so much that passes for dramatic criticism, to the effect that the merit of drama lies in its poetic adornments, not in its dramatic essence; but it does not enable us to reduce to a common denominator works which are cast in such different forms that they seem to defy any critical juxtaposition. Where, then, are we to look for our criterion of specifically dramatic values? It seems to me that a possible test is to be found in the amount of sheer intellectual power which has gone to the making of a play-I am tempted to say, the pressure of intellect to the square inch. Of course this needs qualification. If Sir Isaac Newton, or (shall we say?) Sir Francis Bacon, had written a play, no doubt a great deal of intellectual power would have been applied to the task; but, in all probability, it would have been hopelessly misapplied. We must, then, expand our formula, and say: intellectual power expressing itself in terms of the theatre-using that mechanism to the ends for which it is specifically adapted. And what are those ends? Clearly, I think, the awakening of certain emotions in a given assemblage of people, by means of the presentation of imagined actions or episodes more or less resembling the actions or episodes of real life. This, you may say, is a very cumbersome formula; but it can be sufficiently summed up in the phrase: intellectual power expressing itself in forms appropriate to the theatre. "The theatre," however, is a term of no fixed connotation. It changes from age to age, not only in material form, but in the character, the receptivity, of its audiences. And here we come at once upon a debatable point. I wish to suggest to you that the conditions of the modern theatre and the mentality of modern audiences make drama a much more difficult and. delicate art than it was in the days of our forefathers, and that consequently the production of a good play of today demands greater intellectual power than the production of a play of similar status (so to speak) in the days of Elizabeth. The dramatist of today works in a very much harder medium than that of his predecessors; and this I conceive to be to the advantage of his art. Many people, I know, take the opposite view. They look back with yearning to the fluid, go-as-you-please medium in which the Elizabethans worked, and argue that art is cabin'd, cribb'd, confin'd by the technical niceties of modern dramaturgy. Their argument practically is that, since we cannot get rid of an irreducible minimum of convention, there is no reason why we should not accept the maximum while we are about it. Only the other day I heard a distinguished novelist-none other than Mr. George Moore maintaining fervently that the first requisite for what he called the revival of the drama was the re-establishment of the soliloquy and the aside in all their pristine liberty. That question will presently come up for discussion. For the moment, I merely mention Mr. Moore's view as an example of a tendency of thought from which I make so bold as to dissent. My contention is that the softness, the ductility, of the medium in which the Elizabethan dramatist worked, tended, not to the ennoblement, but to the cheapening of his product, and that, conversely, the stringency of modern conditions requires the application of greater mental to the production of the average play. power You will not understand me to argue that Sir James Barrie or Mr. Bernard Shaw is a greater man than Shakespeare. Consummate genius can express itself in any form, and can ennoble any form. Nor am I arguing that the Elizabethan form may not have been peculiarly congenial to the peculiar genius of Shakespeare. But I do suggest that no small part of Shakespeare's greatness lay in the fact that he outgrew the Elizabethan form, and abused its facilities and licenses far less than even the best of his contemporaries. You will see my point better if I enumerate some of these facilities and licenses. The first and most obvious facility is the indeterminateness of place and time. The Elizabethan stage, as we all know, was practically a bare platform, incapable of presenting anything like a picture. The legend that changes of scene were notified by the exhibition of a placard is quite exploded.* Locality, indeed, was often indicated by the use of movable properties. If you saw a throne you knew " *At most, a placard may sometimes have announced the country or town where the action was supposed to take place as, for instance, "Sicily,' "Cyprus," "Bohemia," "Rome," "Verona," "Inverness," "Elsinore." But even for this the evidence is inconclusive. you were at court. If a table with flagons on it, and two or three benches were placed on the stage, you were probably in, but possibly outside, a tavern. When Juliet appeared on the Upper Stage quite probably at an actual projection in the form of a balcony-you were at no loss to conjecture (even if the dialogue had not made it clear) that she was speaking from her chamber window to Romeo in the garden below. When a bed was thrust forth (as frequently happened) or when the curtains of the Rear Stage were drawn and revealed Imogen or Desdemona in bed-the stage directions are "Enter Imogen in her bed" and "Enter Othello and Desdemona in her bed❞—well, you knew you were in a bedroom. But when no visible object indicated locality, it seems clear that the Elizabethan public troubled very little about it. With scarcely an exception, all the scene-indications in the Elizabethan plays we read are inserted by modern editors. Never absolutely never do we find in the quartos, "Scene-Venice: A Street" or "Scene-London: A Room in the Palace." The only scene-indication that ever occurs in the stage-directions takes this form: "Enter Faustus in his Study" or "Enter Sir Thomas Moore . . . as in his Chamber in the Tower"-and even this is exceedingly rare. Often, no doubt, the dialogue suggests the scene, as when King Duncan, coming to visit Macbeth, says: This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself But such indications are very far from being typical. I do not think it would be too much to say that the normal state of mind of the Elizabethan audience was one of absolute vagueness and carelessness as to the particular locality the stage was supposed to represent. They saw actors come in and declaim, or come in and cut jokes and play pranks, and troubled their heads very little as to where they were and why they had come there. Then, even when the author had, by dialogue or properties, definitely located his scene, he was of course at liberty to change it whenever, and as often as he pleased. He was thus in great measure exempt from one of the difficulties of the modern playwright-that of plausibly getting characters on and off the stage. It may be said and it is said—that this difficulty arises from the conventional rule, seldom broke nowadays, of "one act one scene," and that we sacrifice a reasonable freedom to the mere mechanical trouble of scene-shifting. But this is not so. Even apart from devices such as the turntable stage, the old system of alternating "front scenes" and "sets, which still obtains in melodrama, renders it perfectly simple to change the scene half-a-dozen times in an act if we think it desirable. We don't do it because we don't think it desirable. We feel, not only that the illusion is broken by jumping about from place to place, but that the dramatist is over-simplifying his task, and depriving us of the pleasure of recognising the delicate ingenuity with which he weaves the threads of his fabric so as to make each section present, so to speak, a continuous surface. The pseudo-Aristotelian "unity of place" was something quite different. It had no valid artistic reason, and was attained on the French stage only by adopting as your scene some perfectly vague locality-"A Hall in a Palace" or "A Public Place"-where anyone could meet anyone else without manifest absurdity. There is no good reason why a whole play should be tied down to one scene, though cases can be cited in modern drama in which an admirable effect of concentration is thus attained. But there is good reason why, in a play which aims at making us feel that we have lived through a real experience, a certain scenic stability and continuity should be preserved. Time, again, the Elizabethans treated as sketchily as place. I am not referring to the practice, which Sir Philip Sidney's classical prejudices led him to ridicule, of concentrating a whole lifetime into a play. To this there is no sound objec tion, though the themes which demand a jump of many decades are naturally rare. I do not regard the twenty years' interval in The Winter's Tale as an artistic blemish. The once popular Rip Van Winkle was not a great work of |