In the spacious days of Elizabeth, the half-roofed theaters were only a little less medieval than the pageants of the mysteries had been; and the task of the stage-manager must have been very simple indeed.  There was no scenery, and the performance took place by daylight, so that all the producer of a new play had to do was to arrange such elementary business as was possible on a platform encumbered with an indefinite number of spectators.  Like all stage-managers, then and now, he had of course to direct the actors themselves; and Hamlet’s speech to the Players gives us good reason to believe that Shakspere must have been an excellent trainer, however modest may have been his own native gifts as an actor.  Moliere, like Shakspere in so many ways, was like him in being author and actor and manager; and in the ‘Impromptu de Versailles’ he has left us a most instructive record of his own methods of rehearsing his own company.

But, altho the playhouse in which Moliere performed was roofed and lighted, and altho he had some scenery, yet there were spectators sitting on his stage as on Shakspere’s, and the conditions were those of the platform and not of the picture.  Oddly enough, the most pictorial of all the theaters that have preceded our own time is the theater of the Athenians.  Few spectacles can ever have excelled in beauty an outdoor performance in the theater of Dionysius, when the richly-appareled chorus circled into the orchestra, to the sound of music, in the spring sunshine, with the breeze from the Bay of Salamis blowing back their floating draperies, that could not but fall into lines of unexpected delight and ineffable grace.  Stage-management, which was necessarily neglected by the great Elizabethans, owing to the rudeness of their playhouses, was studied as an art by the great Greeks and held by them in high esteem.  The dramatic poet was himself the producer, training the three actors, arranging the evolutions of the chorus, and accepting full responsibility for the perfection of the complete work of art.  Silent himself, he caused the music he controlled.

     (1903.)