owed their fame and advancement to their skill and inventiveness in the matter of gagging.  No doubt these early actors bore some relation to the jesters who were established members of noble households, and of whom impromptu jokes and witticisms were looked for upon all occasions.  Moreover, at this time, as Mr. Payne Collier judges, “extemporal plays,” in the nature of the Italian Commedie al improviso, were often presented upon the English stage.  The actors were merely furnished with a “plat,” or plot of the performance, and were required to fill in and complete the outline, as their own ingenuity might suggest.  Portions of the entertainments were simply dumb show and pantomime, but it is clear that spoken dialogue was also resorted to.  In such cases the “extemporal wit,” or gagging of the comic actors, was indispensably necessary.  The “comedians of Ravenna,” who were not “tied to any written device,” but who, nevertheless, had “certain grounds or principles of their own,” are mentioned in Whetstone’s “Heptameron,” 1582, and references to such performers are also to be found in Kyd’s “Spanish Tragedy,” and Ben Jonson’s “Case is Altered.”  In “Antony and Cleopatra” occurs the passage: 

                The quick comedians
    Extemporally will stage us and present
    Our Alexandrian revels.

And Mr. Collier conjectures that when Polonius, speaking of the players, informs Hamlet that, “for the law of writ and the liberty, these are your only men,” he is to be understood as commending their excellence, both in written performances and in such as left them at liberty to invent their own discourse.

But however intelligible and excusable its origin, it is certain that by the time Shakespeare was writing, the “extemporal wit” of the theatre had come to be a very grave nuisance.  There is no need to set forth here his memorable rebuke of the clowns who demonstrate their “pitiful ambition” by speaking more than their parts warrant.  It is to be observed, however, that while this charge is levelled only at the clowns, or comic performers, the faults of the serious players by no means escape uncriticised.  The same speech condemns alike the rant of the tragedians and the gag of the comedians.  Both are regarded as unworthy means of winning the applause of the “groundlings” in one case, and the laughter of “barren spectators” in the other.  Sad to say, Hamlet, in his character of reformer of stage abuses, failed to effect much good.  The vices of the Elizabethan theatre are extant, and thriving in the Victorian.  It is even to be feared that the interpolations of the clowns have sometimes crept into and disfigured the Shakespearean text, much to the puzzlement of the commentators.  Often as Hamlet’s reforming speech has been recited, it has been generally met and nullified by someone moving “the previous question.”  At the same time, while there is an inclination to decry perhaps too strenuously the condition of the modern