the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.  Now this overdone, or come tardy off, though it make the unskilful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve; the censure of the which one must in your allowance o’erweigh a whole theatre of others.  O, there be players that I have seen play, and heard others praise, and that highly, not to speak it profanely, that, neither having the accent of Christians nor the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man, have so strutted and bellowed that I have thought some of Nature’s journeymen had made men and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably.

When we try to picture what the theatre in Shakespeare’s time was like, it strikes us that it must have been difficult to carry out those principles.  One would think it must have been almost impossible for the actors to keep up the illusion of the play, surrounded as they were by such distracting elements.  Figure to yourselves a crowd of fops, chattering like a flock of daws, carrying their stools in their hands, and settling around, and sometimes upon the stage itself, with as much noise as possible.  To vindicate their importance in their own eyes they kept up a constant jangling of petty, carping criticism on the actors and the play.  In the intervals of repose which they allowed their tongues, they ogled the ladies in the boxes, and made a point of vindicating the dignity of their intellects by being always most inattentive during the most pathetic portions of the play.  In front of the house matters were little better:  the orange girls going to and fro among the audience, interchanging jokes—­not of the most delicate character—­with the young sparks and apprentices, the latter cracking nuts or howling down some unfortunate actor who had offended their worships; sometimes pipes of tobacco were being smoked.  Picture all this confusion, and add the fact that the female characters of the play were represented by shrill-voiced lads or half-shaven men.  Imagine an actor having to invest such representatives with all the girlish passion of a Juliet, the womanly tenderness of a Desdemona, or the pitiable anguish of a distraught Ophelia, and you cannot but realize how difficult under such circumstances great acting must have been.  In fact, while we are awe-struck by the wonderful intellectuality of the best dramas of the Elizabethan period, we cannot help feeling that certain subtleties of acting, elaborate by-play, for instance, and the finer lights and shades of intonation, must have been impossible.  Recitation rather than impersonation would be generally aimed at by the actors.