rologue describe the earlier system thus:--

For to speak truth, men act, that are between
Forty or fifty, wenches of fifteen,
With bone so large and nerve so uncompliant,
When you call Desdemona, enter Giant.

Profound commiseration seems due to the Elizabethan playgoer, who was
liable to have his faith in the tenderness and gentleness of Desdemona
rudely shaken by the irruption on the stage of a brawny,
broad-shouldered athlete, masquerading in her sweet name. Boys or men
of all shapes and sizes squeaking or bawling out the tender and
pathetic lines of Shakespeare's heroines, and no joys of scenery to
distract the playgoer from the uncouth inconsistency! At first sight
it would seem that the Elizabethan playgoer's lot was anything but
happy.

VII

The Elizabethan's hard fate strangely contrasts with the situation of
the playgoer of the nineteenth or twentieth century. To the latter
Shakespeare is presented in a dazzling plenitude of colour. Music
punctuates not merely intervals between scenes and acts, but critical
pauses in the speeches of the actors. Pictorial tableaux enthral the
most callous onlooker. Very striking is the contrast offered by the
methods of representation accepted with enthusiasm by the Elizabethan
playgoer and those deemed essential by the fashionable modern manager.
There seems a relish of barbarism in the ancient system when it is
compared with the one now in vogue.

I fear the final conclusion to be drawn from the contrast is, contrary
to expectation, more creditable to our ancestors than to ourselves.
The needful dramatic illusion was obviously evoked in the playgoer of
the past with an ease that is unknown to the present patrons of the
stage. The absence of scenery, the substitution of boys and men for
women, could only have passed muster with the Elizabethan spectator
because he was able to realise the dramatic potency of the poet's work
without any, or any but the slightest, adventitious aid outside the
words of the play.

The Elizabethan playgoer needs no pity. It is ourselves who are
deserving objects of compassion, because we lack those qualities, the
possession of which enabled the Elizabethan to acknowledge in
Shakespeare's work, despite its manner of production, "the delight and
wonder of his stage." The imaginative faculty was far from universal
among the Elizabethan playgoers. The playgoing mob always includes
groundlings who delight exclusively in dumb sh