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he had to adjust the construction of his story. It is scarcely too much to say that the dramaturgic methods of Sophocles and of Shakspere, of Molière and of Ibsen, are only in small part their own or even under their own control. The major portion of their technic is the direct result of the conditions of the particular theater in which every one of them intended to have his plays acted, and which was, indeed, often the only kind of theater he knew anything about.

We are now well aware that there have been many kinds of theaters, some of them differing very widely from our snug modern playhouses. We all recognize that the immense outdoor theater of the Athenians was as unlike as possible to the small, half-roofed cockpit of the Elizabethans, and also to the long, narrow tennis-court of the Parisians under Louis XIV. But while these differences between the theaters of different times and different places may be a matter of common knowledge, we do not always apply this information. when we undertake to discuss the dramaturgic skill of the Greek poets, the Eng

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lish, and the French. We do not see at a glance how important the influence of the theater itself has been and must be on the structure of the play. We do not always keep in mind the way this influence has often dictated to the author what he could put into his play, what he had to leave out, and how he had to present what he desired to set forth. We do not give full weight to the pressure exerted on the playwright by the varying conditions of the playhouses of successive periods,-by the size of the theater, for one thing, which may be so huge as to forbid the author's choice of any but broad and simple themes,-by the elaboration of heavy scenery, which may impose on him the duty of compacting his plot so that he will need few changes of place, or by the improving modes of illumination (daylight, candles, oil-lamps, gas, and electricity), all of which have wrought in turn significant modifications of dramaturgic method. It is only as we come to a realizing sense of the influence exerted upon the art of the dramatist by the changing conditions of the various kinds of theaters that have succeeded each other through the long centuries that we can measure the wisdom of Shakspere in rejecting the advice of Sidney to model his plays after those of the Greek dramatists; and we can gage also the unwisdom of Tennyson in taking Shakspere's histories as the pattern of his own poetic dramas, composed centuries later, when theatrical conditions had entirely changed.

Very rarely have the critics of any special period of the drama been familiar with the conditions existing during any other period. The historians of Greek literature have been acquainted with our modern playhouses, and they are now studying the ruins of the theaters still accessible in Greece and in the Grecian colonies, but they are not acquainted with the methods of presenting plays in the Middle Ages, at first in the churches and later on platforms in the market-places. The historians of English literature are only now coming to have a fairly clear perception of the way in which plays were acted under the Tudors, and they have not yet seized the full significance of the changes which resulted during the Restoration from the introduction of painted scenery and of artificial light. Although Haigh composed a richly illustrated book about the

"Attic Theater" and although Despois described fully the "French Theater under Louis XIV," no one has yet prepared a satisfactory account of the English theater under Elizabeth, of the Spanish theater of about the same date, or of the English theater from the Restoration to 1830, when gas was introduced.

No one has attempted to tell the whole history of the art of scene-painting, which has had a most intimate connection with the art of the dramatist. The scholars who know only one manifestation of the drama are without the perspective which would be supplied to them by a knowledge of other aspects in other times and in other places. There is a singular unity in the drama throughout the ages, for the aim of the dramatist has always been one and the same, whether he is a Greek of old, a Frenchman of the seventeenth century, or a Scandinavian of to-day. He has always sought to interest the mass of his contemporaries in a story shown in action on the stage and setting forth a clash of contending desires. The differing methods the dramatists have employed at one time or another are to a great extent the consequence of the physical conditions of the actual theaters in which their plays were to be performed, although these methods. are affected also by traditions still surviving from the playhouses of an earlier generation. These traditions the dramatist profits by, even if they are no longer in exact accord with the actual conditions of the theater for which he is writing; and so we find the Elizabethan playwrights making use of two doors on opposite sides of the stage to indicate two wholly distinct places, a device which is apparently a survival from the several "mansions" of the French mystery, when it was acted on a long platform in the open air. In fact, it is impossible really to understand the dramaturgic methods in vogue at any particular period without taking into consideration the circumstances of performance at least half a century earlier.

No one, as already noted, has undertaken to trace the slow development of the art of the scene-painter, distinguishing sharply between true scene-painting as we now know it, a realistic perspective intended to reproduce the place itself, and that very different thing, the building up in miniature of the house or of a part of