light; outdoors they are more trouble than they are worth. But all the conditions of indoor playing made for a less robust sort of drama. Such surroundings are favourable to prettiness of every sort. So then the movement took shape which resulted in the scenic theatre as we now know it. The conventions of locality hardened more and more, and the actor became, so to speak, a collaborator with the scenery—and not always the more prominent partner. Sheer illusion did not come into question for a very long time. But the decorative tradition of the Court Mask would have been picked up where Lyly and his school had left it, and adapted to the plays then being written until plays came to be written which were themselves adapted to decoration.[1] One may surmise, though, that this movement gathered strength rather after 1616—at which date Dr. Chambers’ investigations most unluckily stop—than before. One can but wish he would continue them, and show us how scenery, as we now understand it—as he, by my contention, a little prematurely understands it—did come by its own, and what were the dramatic losses and gains in this passage from the freedom of the platform stage to our present confines of visual illusion.
And I could wish besides that for aid to such scientific research—Dr. Chambers’ and much excellent work akin to it—there existed something like a laboratory in which theories and deductions could be put to practical test. The notion is not quite a fantastic one. With its far more imperative demands well satisfied, our English theatre could easily make provision for a thing of the sort; though it is no part of my present task even to adumbrate its workings. But they would certainly spare the researchers much speculation and their critics much argument. For the playwrights of three hundred years ago were practical men—they had to be. The chief component of the medium they worked in, the human actor, is still extant, and little changed by lapse of time. And by the process of trial and error the rest of the material, puzzling as it may seem in the careless record left of it, would often fit into place with surprising ease. Even the most expert of stage-managers, even the playwright himself, will find that his own play, coming into action, surprises him by its behaviour, sometimes pleasantly, sometimes
- ↑ Though, of course, such plays—plays intended primarily for indoor performance—had been written, occasionally all through the intervening period. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is probably one of them.
