recent Shakespearean revivals offer the spectator reaches him mainly
through the eye. That is the manager's avowed intention. Yet no one
would seriously deny that the Shakespearean drama appeals, both
primarily and ultimately, to the head and to the heart. Whoever seeks,
therefore, by the production of Shakespearean drama chiefly to please
the spectator's eye shows scant respect both for the dramatist and for
the spectator. However unwittingly, he tends to misrepresent the one,
and to mislead the other, in a particular of first-rate importance.
Indeed, excess in scenic display does worse than restrict
opportunities of witnessing Shakespeare's plays on the stage in London
and other large cities of England and America. It is to be feared that
such excess either weakens or distorts the just and proper influence
of Shakespeare's work. If these imputations can be sustained, then it
follows that the increased and increasing expense which is involved in
the production of Shakespeare's plays ought on grounds of public
policy to be diminished.


II

Every stage representation of a play requires sufficient scenery and
costume to produce in the audience that illusion of environment which
the text invites. Without so much scenery or costume the words fail to
get home to the audience. In comedies dealing with concrete conditions
of modern society, the stage presentation necessarily relies to a very
large extent for its success on the realism of the scenic appliances.
In plays which, dealing with the universal and less familiar
conditions of life, appeal to the highest faculties of thought and
imagination, the pursuit of realism in the scenery tends to destroy
the full significance of the illusion which it ought to enforce. In