parts that every actor, for this reason, longs to represent.  And since the crowd is partisan, it wants its favored characters to win.  Hence the convention of the “happy ending,” insisted on by managers who feel the pulse of the public.  The blind Louise, in The Two Orphans, will get her sight back, never fear.  Even the wicked Oliver, in As You Like It, must turn over a new leaf and marry a pretty girl.

Next to this prime instinct of partisanship in watching a contention, one of the most important traits in the psychology of crowds is their extreme credulity.  A crowd will nearly always believe anything that it sees and almost anything that it is told.  An audience composed entirely of individuals who have no belief in ghosts will yet accept the Ghost in Hamlet as a fact.  Bless you, they have seen him!  The crowd accepts the disguise of Rosalind, and never wonders why Orlando does not recognise his love.  To this extreme credulity of the crowd is due the long line of plays that are founded on mistaken identity,—­farces like The Comedy of Errors and melodramas like The Lyons Mail, for example.  The crowd, too, will accept without demur any condition precedent to the story of a play, however impossible it might seem to the mind of the individual.  Oedipus King has been married to his mother many years before the play begins; but the Greek crowd forbore to ask why, in so long a period, the enormity had never been discovered.  The central situation of She Stoops to Conquer seems impossible to the individual mind, but is eagerly accepted by the crowd.  Individual critics find fault with Thomas Heywood’s lovely old play, A Woman Killed with Kindness, on the ground that though Frankford’s noble forgiveness of his erring wife is beautiful to contemplate, Mrs. Frankford’s infidelity is not sufficiently motivated, and the whole story, therefore, is untrue.  But Heywood, writing for the crowd, said frankly, “If you will grant that Mrs. Frankford was unfaithful, I can tell you a lovely story about her husband, who was a gentleman worth knowing:  otherwise there can’t be any story”; and the Elizabethan crowd, eager for the story, was willing to oblige the dramatist with the necessary credulity.

There is this to be said about the credulity of an audience, however,—­that it will believe what it sees much more readily than what it hears.  It might not believe in the ghost of Hamlet’s father if the ghost were merely spoken of and did not walk upon the stage.  If a dramatist would convince his audience of the generosity or the treachery of one character or another, he should not waste words either praising or blaming the character, but should present him to the eye in the performance of a generous or treacherous action.  The audience hears wise words from Polonius when he gives his parting admonition to his son; but the same audience sees him made a fool of by Prince Hamlet, and will not think him wise.