rs of his glorious
achievements. How is the disturbing fact to be accounted for? Is it
possible that it is attributable to some decay in us of the
imagination--to a growing slowness on our part to appreciate works of
imagination? When one reflects on the simple mechanical contrivances
which satisfied the theatrical audiences, not only of Shakespeare's
own day, but of the eighteenth century, during which Shakespeare was
repeatedly performed; when one compares the simplicity of scenic
mechanism in the past with its complexity in our own time, one can
hardly resist the conclusion that the imagination of the theatre-going
public is no longer what it was of old. The play alone was then "the
thing." Now "the thing," it seems, is something outside the
play--namely, the painted scene or the costume, the music or the
dance.

Garrick played Macbeth in an ordinary Court suit of his own era. The
habiliments proper to Celtic monarchs of the eleventh century were
left to be supplied by the imagination of the spectators or not at
all. No realistic "effects" helped the play forward in Garrick's time,
yet the attention of his audience, the critics tell us, was never
known to stray when he produced a great play by Shakespeare. In
Shakespeare's day boys or men took the part of women, and how
characters like Lady Macbeth and Desdemona were adequately rendered by
youths beggars belief. But renderings in such conditions proved
popular and satisfactory. Such a fact seems convincing testimony, not
to the ability of Elizabethan or Jacobean boys--the nature of boys is
a pretty permanent factor in human society--but to the superior
imaginative faculty of adult Elizabethan or Jacobean playgoers, in
whom, as in Garrick's time, the needful dramatic illusion was far more
easily evoked than it is nowadays.

This is no exhilarating conclusion. But less exhilarating is the
endeavour that is sometimes made by advocates of the system of
spectacle to prove that Shakespeare himself would have appreciated the
modern developments of the scenic art--nay, more, that he himself has
justified them. This line of argument serves to confirm the suggested
defect of imagination in the present generation. The well-known chorus
before the first act of _Henry V._ is the evidence which is relied
upon to show that Shakespeare wished his plays to be, in journalistic
dialect, "magnificently staged," and that he deplored the inability of
his uncouth age to realise that wis