real life the poise and bearing of the
body; and all this must be reproduced on the stage, unless the
intelligence of the audience, be they ever so little skilled in
history, is to count as naught.

It cannot therefore be seriously put forward in the face of such
manifold requirements that no Art is required for the representation
of suitable action. Are we to imagine that inspiration or emotion of
any kind is to supply the place of direct knowledge of facts--of skill
in the very grammar of craftsmanship? Where a great result is arrived
at much effort is required, whether the same be immediate or has been
spread over a time of previous preparation. In this nineteenth century
the spirit of education stalks abroad and influences men directly
and indirectly, by private generosity and national foresight, to
accumulate as religiously as in former ages ecclesiastics and devotees
gathered sacred relics, all that helps to give the people a full
understanding of lives and times and countries other than their own.
Can it be that in such an age all that can help to aid the inspiration
and to increase direct knowledge is of no account whatever, because,
forsooth, it has a medium or method of its own? There are those who
say that Shakespeare is better in the closet than on the stage; that
dramatic beauty is more convincing when read in private than when
spoken on the stage to the accompaniment of suitable action. And yet,
if this be so, it is a strange thing that, with all the activity of
the new-born printing-press, Shakespeare's works were not known to the
reading public till the fame of the writer had been made on the stage.
And it is a stranger thing still, if the drama be a mere poetic form
of words, that the writer who began with _Venus and Adonis_, when he
found the true method of expression to suit his genius, ended with
_Hamlet_ and _The Tempest_.

How is it, I ask, if these responsible makers of statements be
correct, that every great writer down from the days of Elizabeth, when
the drama took practical shape from the wish of the poets to render
human life in all its phases, have been desirous of seeing their
works, when written in dramatic form, represented on the stage--and
not only represented, but represented under the most favorable
conditions obtainable, both as to the fitness of setting and the
choice of the most skilled and excellent players? Are we to take it
that the poet, with his eye in a fine phrenzy rollin