ent twaddle from beginning to end. It is not true that persons rode on horseback to the play; and if they had, it is ridiculous to suppose that they would have entrusted their horses to be held in the street in all weathers for a period of three or four hours. It is a contemptible calumny that Shakespeare ever sunk so low as to stand shivering night after night holding a horse, or, as the Doctor would have us believe, half-a-dozen horses, for the sake of a few pence haughtily bestowed by town gallants who had been sitting at their ease witnessing some play of Greene or of Marlowe, while Shakespeare, forsooth, already a man of two-and-twenty, brimming over with the highest fancies, consorted as a stable-boy with the lowest dregs of the street. This precious canard first appeared in a worthless book entitled The Lives of the Poets, published as the work of Theophilus Cibber, but said to be written by a Scotchman of the name of Shiels, who was an amanuensis of Dr. Johnson. Even Rowe rejected the story, and there is not a shadow of foundation for it. A theatre, considered merely in its aspect as a place of amusement, was a very different thing in the time of Shakespeare from what it has become since. With the increase of wealth, civilization, and luxury, gorgeous theatres sprang up a century later in every populous city of Europe. Architecture lent its most elaborate graces; decorative art was exhausted to furnish the richest embellishments; every new mechanical appliance was made available to enhance the delusion and increase the interest of the scene; skilfully painted canvas realized the locality in which the action was laid; lights, unknown to our ancestors, brilliant as the day, yet capable of being tempered to any strength, illuminated the scene; music, instrumental and vocal, of the most perfect kind,-marbles, mirrors, gildings, draperies, every conceivable adjunct was present calculated to add to sensuous delight; and, finally, "fair women and brave men," in every variety of attractive and picturesque costume, seemed to tread enchanted ground in presence of a rapt and breathless audience. Such is what a theatre,-a San Carlo or La Scala,-latterly became. When Shakespeare went to London it was a circular wooden booth, in many instances open to the sky, except over the stage and gallery, where it was roofed in from the weather. Some lanterns shed a dim light through the body of the house, and a few branches, with candles stuck into them, hung over the stage. The orchestra, if so it might be called, was composed of several trumpets, cornets, and hautboys. The stage itself was generally strewed with rushes, except on extraordinary occasions, when it was matted. It had a fixed roof, painted blue to represent the sky; and when tragedies were performed it was generally hung with black. There was little or no movable painted scenery. containing the name was supposed to be. A board was hung up of the place where the action The stage properties were of the humblest description. The exhibition of a bedstead indicated a bedchamber; a table with pen and ink, a sitting room. A few rude models or drawings of towers, walls, trees, tombs, and animals, were sometimes introduced. No such phenomenon as a female actress existed, or would have been tolerated. All female parts were played by boys or young men, who frequently wore masks or visards. The performance was often by daylight, beginning at three o'clock P.M. The prices of admission varied from a shilling to a penny. At the conclusion of each performance the actors knelt on the stage and offered up a prayer for the Queen. Sir Philip Sidney, in a treatise published in 1583, graphically alludes to the rough and simple condition of the stage. He says,-- "In most pieces the player, when he comes in, must ever begin with telling where he is, or else the tale will not be conceived. Now you shall have three ladies" (that is, boys in female attire) "walk to gather flowers, and then we must believe the stage to be a garden; by and by we hear news of a shipwreck in the same place, then we are to blame if we accept it not for a rock. Upon the back of that comes out a hideous monster, with fire and smoke, and then the miserable beholders are bound to take it for a cave; while in the meantime two armies fly in, represented with four swords and bucklers, and then what hard heart will not receive it for a pitched field?" Shakespeare himself, in his prologue to "King Henry the Fifth," asks pardon for the spirit "that hath dar'd On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth That did affright the air at Agincourt?" It is one of the glories of Shakespeare that all this poverty of mechanical aid was to him a matter of perfect indifference, and that, though professionally connected with the stage, he never wrote a single line that smelt of the footlights and of stage varnish. His muse soared to the "brightest heaven of invention;" he wrote to suit no actor; he adapted himself to no stage conventionalities; he never stooped to think whether his plays would be performed or not. All that wondrous poetry emanated from him as light does from the sun, or music from an Æolian harp. It might have been a painful thought to a lesser genius that a painted or visared youth was to desecrate Desdemona, caricature Ophelia, and render Juliet ludicrous. But it irked him not a jot. He saw those radiant shapes in his mind's eye, and they were his and ours for evermore, incapable of obscuration or debasement. What gratitude can be excessive, what love too much for the man who has given us not only "the gentle lady married to the Moor"-not only the fair Ophelia - not only the exquisite daughter of the Capulets, but Imogen, Hermione, Perdita, Miranda, Viola, Isabella, Rosalind, Constance, Portia, Cordelia! Thank heaven! it was not that they might "strut their hour" upon the stage that he conceived of beings such as these, warmer, purer, and more tenderly human than the finest prototypes of classical antiquity. The Antigones, the Electras, the Iphigenias-beautiful impersonations though they be-are cold, and stately, and statuesque, beside the flesh and blood realities of Shakespeare. He delighted not to paint abstraction, he dealt with the sensibilities which throb in every bosom,-he touched "the very pulse of the machine." The creature he presented to us was, as one of the greatest of his successors has said,— "A being breathing thoughtful breath, A traveller between life and death, With something of angelic light." If there be one thing more wonderful than another in Shakespeare's genius, it is his delicate and profound appreciation of female character through every variety of shade, every gradation of beauty. And he had his reward, though no Siddons or O'Neil, no Madame Mars, Pasta, Rachel, or Ristori ever gladdened his eye, or led him to anticipate that the portraits he had hung up in the hearts of all the world might yet walk from their frames and speak his words to ravished ears. One of the earliest theatres known to exist in |