Shakespeare’s plays, as Shakespeare wrote them, read better than they act.  Hundreds of Shakespeare-lovers have reached this conclusion, and many more have reached it than have dared to put it into words.  The reason is, it seems to me, that we can not, on the modern stage, enact the plays of Shakespeare as he intended them to be acted—­as he really wrote them.

If we compare an acting edition of any of the plays with the text as presented by any good editor, this becomes increasingly clear.  Shakespeare in his original garb, is simply impossible for the modern stage.

The fact that the Elizabethan plays were given against an imaginary back-ground enabled the playwright to disregard the old, hampering unity of place more thoroughly than has ever been possible since his time.  His ability to do so, was the result not of any reasoned determination to set his plays without “scenery,” but simply of environment.  As the scenic art progressed, the backgrounds became more and more realistic and less and less imaginary.  The imagination of the audience, however, has always been more or less requisite to the appreciation of drama, as of any other art.  No stage tree or house has ever been close enough to its original to deceive the onlooker.  He always knows that they are imitations, intended only to aid the imagination, and his imagination has always been obliged to do its part.  In Shakespeare’s time the imagination did all the work; and as imaginary houses and trees have no weight, the services of the scene-shifter were not required to remove them and to substitute others.  The scene could be shifted at once from a battlefield in Flanders to a palace in London and after the briefest of dialogues it could change again to a street in Genoa—­all without inconveniencing anyone or necessitating a halt in the presentation of the drama.  Any reflective reader of Shakespeare will agree, I think, that this ability to shift scenes, which after all, is only that which the novelist or poet has always possessed and still possesses, enables the dramatist to impart a breadth of view that was impossible under the ideas of unity that governed the drama of the Ancients.  Greek tragedy was drama in concentration, a tabloid of intense power—­a brilliant light focussed on a single spot of passion or exaltation.  The Elizabethan drama is a view of life; and life does not focus, it is diffuse—­a congeries of episodes, successive or simultaneous—­something not re-producible by the ancient dramatic methods.

Today, while we have not gone back to the terrific force of the Greek unified presentation, we have lost this breadth.  We strive for it, but we can no longer reach it because of the growth of an idea that realism in mise-en-scene is absolutely necessary.  Of course this idea has been injurious to the drama in more ways than the one that we are now considering.  The notable reform in stage settings associated with the names of Gordon Craig, Granville Barker, Urban,