f Conversation
and led directly to the Drama of Illusion. As soon as the picture-frame
proscenium was adopted, the audience demanded a picture to be placed within
the frame. The stage became essentially pictorial, and began to be used to
represent faithfully the actual facts of life. Now for the first time was
realised the graphic value of the curtain-fall. It became customary to ring
the curtain down upon a picture that summed up in itself the entire
dramatic accomplishment of the scene, instead of terminating an act with a
general exodus of the performers or with a semicircle of bows.

The most extraordinary advances in natural stage-settings have been made
within the memory of the present generation of theatre-goers. Sunsets and
starlit skies, moonlight rippling over moving waves, fires that really
burn, windows of actual glass, fountains plashing with real water,--all of
the naturalistic devices of the latter-day Drama of Illusion have been
developed in the last few decades.

III

Acting in Elizabethan days was a presentative, rather than a
representative, art. The actor was always an actor, and absorbed his part
in himself rather than submerging himself in his part. Magnificence rather
than appropriateness of costume was desired by the platform actor of the
Drama of Rhetoric. He wished all eyes to be directed to himself, and never
desired to be considered merely as a component part of a great stage
picture. Actors at that time were often robustious, periwig-pated fellows
who sawed the air with their hands and tore a passion to tatters.

With the rapid development of the theatre after the Restoration, came a
movement toward greater naturalness in the conventions of acting. The
player in the "apron" of a Queen Anne stage resembled a drawing-room
entertainer rather than a platform orator. Fine gentlemen and ladies in the
boxes that lined the "apron" applauded the witticisms of Sir Courtly Nice
or Sir Fopling Flutter, as if they themselves were partakers in the
conversation. Actors like Colley Cibber acquired a great reputation for
their natural representment of the manners of polite society.

The Drama of Conversation, therefore, was acted with more natural
conventions than the Drama of Rhetoric that had preceded it. And yet we
find that Charles Lamb, in criticising the old actors of the eighteenth
century, praises them for the essential unreality of their presentations.
They carried the spectator far away from