In New York at the present day a singular similarity to Elizabethan conventions may be noted in the Chinese theatre in Doyer Street.  Here we have a platform drama in all its nakedness.  There is no curtain, and the stage is bare of scenery.  The musicians sit upon the stage, and the actors enter through an arras at the right or at the left of the rear wall.  The costumes are elaborate, and the players frequently parade around the stage.  Long speeches and set colloquies are common.  Only the crudest properties are used.  Two candlesticks and a small image on a table are taken to represent a temple; a man seated upon an overturned chair is supposed to be a general on a charger; and when a character is obliged to cross a river, he walks the length of the stage trailing an oar behind him.  The audience does not seem to notice that these conventions are unnatural,—­any more than did the ’prentices in the pit, when Burbage, with the sun shining full upon his face, announced that it was then the very witching time of night.

The Drama of Rhetoric which was demanded by the physical conditions of the Elizabethan stage survived the Restoration and did not die until the day of Addison’s Cato.  Imitations of it have even struggled on the stage within the nineteenth century.  The Virginius of Sheridan Knowles and the Richelieu of Bulwer-Lytton were both framed upon the Elizabethan model, and carried the platform drama down to recent times.  But though traces of the platform drama still exist, the period of its pristine vigor terminated with the closing of the theatres in 1642.

When the drama was resumed in 1660, the physical conditions of the theatre underwent a material change.  At this time two great play-houses were chartered,—­the King’s Theatre in Drury Lane, and the Duke of York’s Theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.  Thomas Killigrew, the manager of the Theatre Royal, was the first to introduce women actors on the stage; and parts which formerly had been played by boys were soon performed by actresses as moving as the great Elizabeth Barry.  To William Davenant, the manager of the Duke’s Theatre, belongs the credit for a still more important innovation.  During the eighteen years when public dramatic performances had been prohibited, he had secured permission now and then to produce an opera upon a private stage.  For these musical entertainments he took as a model the masques, or court celebrations, which had been the most popular form of private theatricals in the days of Elizabeth and James.  It is well known that masques had been produced with elaborate scenic appointments even at a time when the professional stage was bare of scenery.  While the theatres had been closed, Davenant had used scenery in his operas, to keep them out of the forbidden pale of professional plays; and now in 1660, when he came forth as a regular theatre manager, he continued to use scenery, and introduced it into the production of comedies and tragedies.