to sit on the stage, he could get "a good stool for sixpence." There, with others of his kind, seated likewise or lying on the rushes, he would smoke, lay wagers, or play cards, and sometimes interrupt the play by loud laughing or talking, even in the midst of a tragic part. There was some attempt at scenery in the Elizabethan theaters; a painted canvas was hung as a cloud, or run on grooves to represent a house or a wall; and in one play, given at Oxford in 1605, there were three changes 1 of scene. The costumes and hangings were usually of the most elegant and costly kind, but the stage effects were in general crude and inadequate. In the old plays we find such significant stage directions as these: "Exit Venus; or, if you can conveniently, let a chair come down from the top of the stage and draw her up." In more than one place in the choruses of Henry V, Shakespeare seems to be impatient of the slender resources of his stage-setting, as when he asks: "Can this cock-pit hold The vasty fields of France? or may we cram That did affright the air at Agincourt?" And in the wonderful description that precedes the battle of Agincourt he complains: "And so our scene must to the battle fly; The name of Agincourt. Yet, sit and see, Minding true things by what their mockeries be.” The private theaters were smaller and more comfortable than the public. They had seats in the pit and were entirely under roof. Performances were given by candle or torch light, and the audiences were usually more select. The following description by J. A. Symonds gives us a vivid notion of the performance of a play in Shakespeare's time: "Let us imagine that the redlettered play-bill of a new tragedy has been hung out beneath the picture of Dame Fortune [i.e. at 'The Fortune' Theater, the great rival of Shakespeare's theater, 1 F. E. Schelling, Elizabethan Drama, I, p. 172. 'The Globe']; the flag is flying from the roof, the drums have beaten, and the trumpets are sounding for the second time. It is three o'clock upon an afternoon of summer. We pass through the great door, ascend some steps, take our key from the pocket of our trunk hose, and let ourselves into our private room on the first or lowest tier. We find ourselves in a low, square building, not unlike a circus; smelling of sawdust and the breath. of people. The yard below is crowded with simpering mechanics and 'prentices in greasy leather jerkins, servants in blue frieze, with their master's badges on their shoulders, boys and grooms elbowing each other for bare standing ground and passing jests on their neighbours. Five or six young men are already seated before the curtain playing cards and cracking nuts to while away the time. A boy goes up and down among them offering various qualities of tobacco for sale, and furnishing lights for the smokers. The stage itself is strewn with rushes; and from the jutting tiled roof of the shadow, supported by a couple of stout wooden pillars, carved with satyrs at the top, hangs a curtain of tawny-colored silk. This is drawn when the trumpets have sounded for the third time, and an actor in a black velvet mantle, with a crown of bays upon his flowing wig, struts forward, bowing to the audience. He is the Prologue." WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (1564-1616) "I loved the man, and do honour his memory, on this side idolatry, as much as any. He was indeed honest, and of an open and free nature; had an excellent phantasy, brave notions, and gentle expressions, wherein he flowed with that facility that sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped." - BEN JONSON. "His mind and his hand went together: And what he thought, he uttered with that easiness that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers." - HEMINGE and CONDELL, Editors of the First Folio edition of the Plays (1623). "The stream of time, which is continually washing the dissoluble fabrics of other poets, passes without injury by the adamant of Shakespeare." DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON. "The greatest genius that perhaps human nature has yet produced, our myriad-minded Shakespeare." Early Surroundings. There is on Henley Street, in Stratford-on-Avon, Warwickshire, an old house, with gabled roof and low-ceilinged rooms, which every year is made the object of thousands of pilgrimages. Here William Shakespeare was born, on or about the twentythird day of April, 1564. His father, John Shakespeare, the son of a small farmer in the neighboring village of Snitterfield, added to his regular business of glover sundry dealings in wool, corn, and hides, and possibly the occupation of butcher. His mother, Mary Arden, the daughter of a wealthy farmer near Stratford, was connected with one of the oldest and most distinguished families in Warwickshire. The Ardens came of both Norman and Saxon blood, and thus represented "the |