actor's sash was not properly fastened, he would creep up behind him, even though the actor were speaking, and tie it properly. We were not supposed to see him do this. As a matter of fact, it was curious how soon one failed to note his presence."

Just as the Japanese attendants in black are supposed to be invisible, like the spectators on the English stage, so we can find analogues to Shakspere's medley of prose and verse in the classic Sanskrit drama, in which the heroes speak the nobler Sanskrit, while the women and the servants are allowed only the humbler Pali. In the medieval Portuguese passion-plays, the devil often spoke Spanish; and in the more modern pieces written for the east side Jewish theaters of New York, it is only the broadly comic characters who are frankly Yiddish in their vocabulary.

It is not easy always to distinguish between a convention and a tradition. Strictly speaking, a convention is a departure from the fact in order to give the spectator something he would otherwise have to forego. A tradition is an accepted way of doing things, which may or may not be completely "natural." Conventions are all traditions, but not all traditions are conventions. In the Latin drama, we find a tradition taken over from the Greek drama, the frequent employment of an intriguing slave, who plots for his master's benefit. This scheming servant may be truthfully portrayed along the traditional lines; but when he reappears in Molière, he has no longer any relation to real life; he stands forth as a tradition which has become a convention. In the Greek drama, again, we find the "recognitions" which Aristotle discussed, such as the sudden discovery by parents of long-lost children. Now, in

Greece, where there was ever intermittent war and casual piracy, children were captured and sold as slaves; and it was always possible that they might be restored to their parents at the end of the play. But when the Latin drama took over this tradition of the Greek drama, it became only a convention, since the conditions of life had changed and there was little likelihood that sons might be sold into slavery and bought by their own fathers, as in the "Captives" of Plautus. And when this Greek tradition, which had hardened into a convention in Rome, is transplanted into Italian comedy and into French, its conventionality is seen to be flagrant, a fact which did not prevent Molière from employing it.

When Molière borrows plots from the Italians, he is forced to make a convention out of another tradition. In Southern Italy, where the comedy-of-masks flourished, people live out of doors; and the traditional scene of the Italian improvised play is a public square, in which all the characters meet to talk about their private affairs. But when Molière transplanted this tradition to Paris, where the climate is colder and damper, and where business is transacted indoors, when he represented M. de Pourceaugnac and the two doctors sitting down for their comic consultation in chairs set out in the street, he was obviously transforming the Italian tradition into a mere convention.

The traditions of the medieval stage survived for a long while, and they are visible abundantly in Shakspere's plays and even in the earlier pieces of Corneille. In our modern theaters, the changes of scenery are consecutive; the scene of the second act may be different from that of the first act, and the later acts may

66

each have its own set. But on the medieval stage, especially in France, the traditions of the earliest performance of the passion-play in the church had led to a wholly different arrangement. In the church, the several episodes were acted in several places, each of which was known as a station"; and in France, when the mystery was thrust out of the church, these stations were all erected in one long line at the back of the platform on which the performance took place, and they were known as “mansions." Thus it was that the French theater came to have the "simultaneous set," all the places needed in the action being then in sight at once, not displayed consecutively, as is the custom to-day. It is this tradition of bringing together places actually remote, which Shakspere follows in "Richard III," when he sets on the stage at the same time the tent of Richard and the tent of Richmond. Probably these tents were represented in the Globe Theater only by a looping back (at the extreme right and at the extreme left) of the tapestry pendant from the upper gallery. When Corneille adapted the "Cid" from the Spanish, he employed this simultaneous set, erecting on the stage the mansions required for his plot, and letting the stage itself serve as a neutral ground where all the characters might meet as they entered each from his own dwelling. This was absolutely in accord with the medieval tradition.

IV

Of all the conventions of the drama, none has a more interesting history than the soliloquy, the speech in which a character talks aloud, not to any person on the stage with him, but directly to the audience. And one