it, which had
neither floor nor roof. The shilling spectators sat on the stage,
where they were accommodated with stools and tobacco pipes, and whence
they chaffed the actors or the "opposed rascality" in the yard. There
was no scenery, and the female parts were taken by boys. Plays were
acted in the afternoon. A placard, with the letters "Venice," or
"Rome," or whatever, indicated the place of the action. With such rude
appliances must Shakspere bring before his audience the midnight
battlements of Elsinore and the moonlit garden of the Capulets. The
dramatists had to throw themselves upon the imagination of their
public, and it says much for the imaginative temper of the public of
that day, that it responded to the appeal. It suffered the poet to
transport it over wide intervals of space and time, and "with aid of
some few foot and half-foot words, fight over York and Lancaster's long
jars." Pedantry undertook, even at the very beginnings of the
Elisabethan drama, to shackle it with the so-called rules of Aristotle,
or classical unities of time and place, {102} to make it keep violent
action off the stage and comedy distinct from tragedy. But the
playwrights appealed from the critics to the truer sympathies of the
audience, and they decided for freedom and action, rather than
restraint and recitation. Hence our national drama is of Shakspere,
and not of Racine. By 1603 there were twelve play-houses in London in
full blast, although the city then numbered only one hundred and fifty
thousand inhabitants.

Fresh plays were produced every year. The theater was more to the
Englishman of that time than it has ever been before or since. It was
his club, his novel, his newspaper all in one. No great drama has ever
flourished apart from a living stage, and it was fortunate that the
Elisabethan dramatists were, almost all of them, actors and familiar
with stage effect. Even the few exceptions, like Beaumont and
Fletcher, who were young men of good birth and fortune, and not
dependent on their pens, were probably intimate with the actors, lived
in a theatrical atmosphere, and knew practically how plays should be
put on.

It had now become possible to earn a livelihood as an actor and
playwright. Richard Burbage and Edward Alleyn, the leading actors of
their generation, made large fortunes. Shakspere himself made enough
from his share in the profits of the _Globe_ to retire with a
competence, some seven years