but it was a responsive one, and it enjoyed the acting with little help to illusion in the way of scenery.  In fact, scenery did not exist, as we understand it.  A board inscribed with the name of the country or city indicated the scene of action.  Occasionally movable painted scenes were introduced.  The interior roof of the stage was painted sky-blue, or hung with drapery of that tint, to represent the heavens.  But when the idea of a dark, starless night was to be imposed, or tragedy was to be acted, these heavens were hung with black stuffs, a custom illustrated in many allusions in Shakespeare, like that in the line,

   “Hung be the heavens in black, yield day to night”

To hang the stage with black was to prepare it for tragedy.  The costumes of the players were sometimes less niggardly than the furnishing of the stage, for it was an age of rich and picturesque apparel, and it was not difficult to procure the cast-off clothes of fine gentlemen for stage use.  But there was no lavishing of expense.  I am recalling these details to show that the amusement was popular and cheap.  The ordinary actors, including the boys and men who took women’s parts (for women did not appear on the stage till after the Restoration) received only about five or six shillings a week (for Sundays and all), and the first-class actor, who had a share in the net receipts, would not make more than ninety pounds a year.  The ordinary price paid for a new play was less than seven pounds; Oldys, on what authority is not known, says that Shakespeare received only five pounds for “Hamlet.”

The influence of the theatre upon politics, contemporary questions that interested the public, and morals, was early recognized in the restraints put upon representations by the censorship, and in the floods of attacks upon its licentious and demoralizing character.  The plays of Shakespeare did not escape the most bitter animadversions of the moral reformers.  We have seen how Shakespeare mirrored his age, but we have less means of ascertaining what effect he produced upon the life of his time.  Until after his death his influence was mainly direct, upon the play-goers, and confined to his auditors.  He had been dead seven years before his plays were collected.  However the people of his day regarded him, it is safe to say that they could not have had any conception of the importance of the work he was doing.  They were doubtless satisfied with him.  It was a great age for romances and story-telling, and he told stories, old in new dresses, but he was also careful to use contemporary life, which his hearers understood.

It is not to his own age, but to those following, and especially to our own time, that we are to look for the shaping and enormous influence upon human life of the genius of this poet.  And it is measured not by the libraries of comments that his works have called forth, but by the prevalence of the language and thought of his poetry in all subsequent literature, and by its entrance into the current of common thought and speech.  It may be safely said that the English-speaking world and almost every individual of it are different from what they would have been if Shakespeare had never lived.  Of all the forces that have survived out of his creative time, he is one of the chief.