The really great dramatic movements of the world—­that of Spain in the age of Calderon and Lope, that of England in the spacious times of great Elizabeth, that of France from 1830 to the present hour—­have broadened their appeal to every class.  The queen and the orange-girl joyed together in the healthiness of Rosalind; the king and the gamin laughed together at the rogueries of Scapin.  The breadth of Shakespeare’s appeal remains one of the most significant facts in the history of the drama.  Tell a filthy-faced urchin of the gutter that you know about a play that shows a ghost that stalks and talks at midnight underneath a castle-tower, and a man that makes believe he is out of his head so that he can get the better of a wicked king, and a girl that goes mad and drowns herself, and a play within the play, and a funeral in a churchyard, and a duel with poisoned swords, and a great scene at the end in which nearly every one gets killed:  tell him this, and watch his eyes grow wide!  I have been to a thirty-cent performance of Othello in a middle-western town, and have felt the audience thrill with the headlong hurry of the action.  Yet these are the plays that cloistered students study for their wisdom and their style!

And let us not forget, in this connection, that a similar breadth of appeal is neither necessary nor greatly to be desired in those forms of literature that, unlike the drama, are not written for the crowd.  The greatest non-dramatic poet and the greatest novelist in English are appreciated only by the few; but this is not in the least to the discredit of Milton and of Meredith.  One indication of the greatness of Mr. Kipling’s story, They, is that very few have learned to read it.

Victor Hugo, in his preface to Ruy Blas, has discussed this entire principle from a slightly different point of view.  He divides the theatre audience into three classes—­the thinkers, who demand characterisation; the women, who demand passion; and the mob, who demand action—­and insists that every great play must appeal to all three classes at once.  Certainly Ruy Blas itself fulfils this desideratum, and is great in the breadth of its appeal.  Yet although all three of the necessary elements appear in the play, it has more action than passion and more passion than characterisation.  And this fact leads us to the theory, omitted by Victor Hugo from his preface, that the mob is more important than the women and the women more important than the thinkers, in the average theatre audience.  Indeed, a deeper consideration of the subject almost leads us to discard the thinkers as a psychologic force and to obliterate the distinction between the women and the mob.  It is to an unthinking and feminine-minded mob that the dramatist must first of all appeal; and this leads us to believe that action with passion for its motive is the prime essential for a play.