lying dead. If the reader has any doubts let him note this further fact: after Ferdinand has gone off the Duchess revives for a moment, and then definitely dies; whereupon Bosola, soliloquising over her corpse, says, 'Come, I'll beare thee hence And execute thy last will; that's deliver Thy body to the reverend dispose Of some good women.' The stage had to be cleared; the Duchess's body could not be left lying about; so Bosola had to carry it off. But no provision is made for removing the children-and why? Simply because they are not, and never were, on the open stage, but in some curtained recess. Nor can there be any reasonable doubt that this recess was what we have called the Rear Stage. It could not have been anything temporarily constructed for the purpose, for in that case how were the children to be conveyed into it and away again unseen? Still less is it credible that the long and crowded scene was acted in front of a 'middle curtain,' the whole space behind it being reserved for the momentary exhibition of the bodies of two children.

Observe, now, that this play is stated, with unusual circumstance and emphasis, to have been played at both a 'public' and a 'private' theatre. Observe, too, that the very absence of definite and explicit stage-directions tends to show that the author relied upon a well-established, clearly-understood form of stage, in view of which his intentions needed no elaborate exposition. Bearing these facts in mind, together with the fact that few indeed are the plays of the period which do not presuppose the existence of some such recess, we surely cannot resist the conclusion that a Rear Stage, which could be curtained off without impeding the view of the two main entrancedoors, was an indispensable feature of the normal Elizabethan playhouse.

It is now time that we should describe in general outline what we conceive to have been the structure of the typical stage, which Shakespeare and his contemporaries seem almost always to have had in view. We know from the Fortune contract that the stage extended

* We have chiefly in view the stage of the public or unroofed theatres. These theatres, being by many years the first erected, would establish the type; and we find no clear evidence of any marked structural difference between the stage of the public and that of the private houses.

to the 'middle' of the 'yard' or pit, and was protected from the weather by a 'shadow.' That two doors,* visible to the audience, formed the chief means of entrance and exit, is beyond dispute; in so far the Swan drawing is borne out. But it is equally beyond dispute that there must have been other means of access to the stage; and here the Swan drawing entirely fails us. Apart from innumerable passages in which more than two means of egress and regress are imperatively demanded, the evidence of the commonest stage-directions speaks for more than two doors. Out of 43 cases, taken at random, in which doors are mentioned, we find that in 11 cases the wording runs, 'at one door. at the other door,' in 21 cases, 'at one door . . . at an other door,' and in 11 cases, 'at several doors.' As 'several' in this phrase means simply different,' it carries no implication as to the number of the doors. On the other hand, 'one . . . the other' implies two only, while ‘one . . an other' implies more than two; and of this the plain interpretation surely is that there were, as a matter of fact, three or more doors, but that two were so prominent and so plainly formed a complementary pair that when the playright or stage manager had them especially in mind, he used the definite article, while he used the indefinite article to imply any convenient door.' It cannot be maintained, by the way, that the different forms of expression point to different theatres, some having two doors only and others more than two; for 'one . . . the other' and 'one . . . an other' are not infrequently to be found in the same play. Where, then, are we to place the third (and the possible fourth and even fifth)

6

The doors mentioned in innumerable stage-directions must be conceived as visible. A playwright states the point at which an actor is to appear to the audience; he does not lay down the route behind the scenes by which he is to reach that point. It does not follow, of course, that the doors could never be concealed from the audience, though we hold that the evidence points to this conclusion.

Mr G. F. Reynolds, on p. 7 of his excellent treatise, has assembled a large number of stage-directions in which three entrances are explicitly referred to. For instance, Enter three in blacke clokes at three doors' (Four Prentices of London'); Enter Joculo, Frisco, and Mopso at three severall doores' ('Maid's Metamorphosis'). An often-quoted example occurs at the beginning of 'Eastward Hoe': Enter Maister Touch-stone and Quick-silver at Severall dores. At the middle dore, Enter Golding discovering a Gold-smith's shoppe.' Vol. 208.-No. 415.

...

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entrance? The Rear Stage, or recess between the two main doors, which we have seen to be so indispensable in other respects, comes to our aid here as well. It is certain that there were some means of access to the Rear Stage from behind, since the cases are innumerable in which persons or objects are revealed or concealed upon it. There must, then, have been at least one opening to it: and a little reflection will show us that in all probability (since bulky 'properties' had often to be placed upon and removed from it) access to it would be as little obstructed as possible. Thus there is every reason to suppose that it was not in any true sense of the word a ‘niche' or ' alcove,' but rather a corridor, some six or seven feet deep, and open at each end. Nor can we see any reason to doubt that there would be a large door in the middle of its back wall. Why should the Elizabethan playwright have denied himself such an obvious convenience? Apart from stage-directions naming, or clearly pointing to, a 'middle' door, we conceive that this door was habitually used to figure the gate of a town or castle of which the Upper Stage had served as the battlements. For example, it was probably by the middle door that Henry V entered Harfleur. The two other doors had been used for other entrances; it would have been absurd for the Rear Stage curtains to figure the gates of a town; and for Henry and his army to go off by one of the side-entrances to the Rear Stage would have been, under the circumstances, wholly ineffective. Dr Wegener believes that the whole Rear Stage could not only be curtained off, but shut off with doors. The reasons he adduces are plausible; but there are almost insuperable architectural difficulties in the way of this theory.

The existence of an Upper Stage to figure battlements, balconies, windows, etc., is admitted by all parties. There is, indeed, a considerable number of plays in which there is no evidence of its being used; but we cannot assign plays which require the Upper Stage to one theatre and plays which do not require it to another. It seems to have been always there for the playwright to use if he chose. There are some plays, however, which seem to demand that characters placed on the Upper Stage should be able to see what was passing on the Rear Stage; and this is the primary reason which has induced Mr Walter

H. Godfrey, in his recent reconstruction of the Fortune Theatre (p. 462), to bring the Upper Stage forward at both ends, thus placing the main entrance-doors in oblique panels of wall, and providing over each of them a balconylike projection. There are several other arguments of considerable force for this oblique position of the entrance-doors; but it cannot as yet be said to be proven. That the stage was provided with traps is certain; also that they were freely used. It is certain, too, that some sort of windlass was placed in the upper regions (no doubt in the lower part of the turret) by means of which gods and other aerial beings could be lowered and hauled up again. When we add that the walls were draped with arras hangings, and that the boards themselves were generally strewn with rushes, we have given, perhaps, as clear an outline of the typical Elizabethan stage as the imperfect nature of the evidence permits of our attaining.

Postscript.-Too late for full discussion in this article, a remarkable pamphlet has been published by Mr Victor E. Albright, of Columbia University, entitled 'A Typical Shaksperian Stage' (New York, The Knickerbocker Press). Working, in part at least, from different data, and by different methods, Mr Albright arrives at conclusions very similar to those embodied in Mr Godfrey's Fortune Theatre design (p. 462). His essay is one of the ablest studies of the Elizabethan Theatre that have yet appeared.

WILLIAM ARCHER.

Art. IX. THE IDEAS OF MR H. G. WELLS.

The Time Machine. London: Heinemann, 1895.-When the Sleeper Wakes; Love and Mr Lewisham. London: Harper, 1899, 1900.-Anticipations; Mankind in the Making. London: Chapman and Hall, 1902-3.-The Food of the Gods; Kipps. London: Macmillan, 1904–5. -A Modern Utopia; The Future in America. London: Chapman and Hall, 1905-6.-Socialism and the Family. London: Fifield, 1906.-In the Days of the Comet. London: Macmillan, 1906. New Worlds for Old. London: Constable, 1908.

REMARKABLE as Mr H. G. Wells is as an individual author, he is still more remarkable as a representative figure. He exhibits in a striking manner the virtues and defects of a new and increasing class in the English bourgeoisie. He is a revolutionary fanatic with that doctrinaire cast of mind which, as it used to be more common in France than in England, is sometimes regarded as a mark of race, but which, in matter of fact, is merely the product of a certain kind of intellectual atmosphere and a certain kind of training. He is the child of an age of schwärmerei, with the qualities of that age enhanced by a scientific education of a peculiar sort. No inconsiderable part of his originality is due to the fact that he happened to appear in a period of unsettlement, when the English mind was, for the first time, losing hold of the world of experience and groping wildly in a world of theory.

From the epidemic of frantic sciolism produced by the eighteenth century movement of enlightenment, the English middle classes escaped somewhat lightly. Their knowledge was the fruit of experiment rather than of deduction; and a happy play of circumstances enabled them to elaborate, out of their own affairs, the principles of modern industrial civilisation. But their exemption from the general disease of thought of their age was purchased at a heavy price. Having initiated, as a matter of practice, the movement of illumination which the spokesmen of the French bourgeoisie adopted as a matter of theory, they acquired a dangerous contempt for mere ideas. Their placidity of mind soon degenerated into