e entitled _Mrs. Leffingwell's Boots_ was
considered a failure by its producing managers until the very last
rehearsals, because it depended for its finished effect on many intricate
and rapid intermovements of the actors, which until the last moment were
understood and realised only in the mind of the playwright. The same
author's best and most successful play, _The Witching Hour_, was declined
by several managers before it was ultimately accepted for production; and
the reason was, presumably, that its extraordinary merits were not manifest
from a mere reading of the lines. If professional producers may go so far
astray in their judgment of the merits of a manuscript, how much harder
must it be for the layman to judge a play solely from a reading of the
dialogue!

This fact should lead the professors and the students in our colleges to
adopt a very tentative attitude toward judging the dramatic merits of the
plays of other ages. Shakespeare, considered as a poet, is so immeasurably
superior to Dryden, that it is difficult for the college student unfamiliar
with the theatre to realise that the former's _Antony and Cleopatra_ is,
considered solely as a play, far inferior to the latter's dramatisation of
the same story, entitled _All for Love, or The World Well Lost_.
Shakespeare's play upon this subject follows closely the chronology of
Plutarch's narrative, and is merely dramatised history; but Dryden's play
is reconstructed with a more practical sense of economy and emphasis, and
deserves to be regarded as historical drama. _Cymbeline_ is, in many
passages, so greatly written that it is hard for the closet-student to
realise that it is a bad play, even when considered from the standpoint of
the Elizabethan theatre,--whereas _Othello_ and _Macbeth_, for instance,
are great plays, not only of their age but for all time. _King Lear_ is
probably a more sublime poem than _Othello_; and it is only by seeing the
two pieces performed equally well in the theatre that we can appreciate by
what a wide margin _Othello_ is the better play.

This practical point has been felt emphatically by the very greatest
dramatists; and this fact offers, of course, an explanation of the
otherwise inexplicable negligence of such authors as Shakespeare and
Moliere in the matter of publishing their plays. These supreme playwrights
wanted people to see their pieces in the theatre rather than to read them
in the closet. In his own lifetime, Shakesp