tackle that creaked and groaned in the most sublunary and mechanical manner. At the back of the stage was a balcony, which, like the furniture in the Duke Aranza's cottage served" a hundred uses." It was inner room, upper room, window, balcony, battlements, hill side, Mount Olympus, any place, in fact, which was supposed to be separated from and above the scene of the main action. It was in this balcony, for instance, that Sly and his attendants sat while they witnessed the performance of The Taming of the Shrew. The wardrobes of the principal theatres were rich, varied, and costly. It was customary to buy for stage use slightly worn court dresses and the gorgeous robes used at coronations. Near the end of the last century, Steevens tells us, there was "yet in the wardrobe of Covent Garden Theatre a rich suit of clothes that once belonged to James I." Steevens saw it worn by the performer of Justice Greely in Massinger's New Way to pay Old Debts. The Allen papers and Henslowe's Diary inform us fully upon this point. In the latter there is a memorandum of the payment of £4 14s., equal to $120, for a single pair of hose; and by the former we see that £16, equal to $400, was the price of one embroidered velvet cloak, and £20 10s., equal to $512, that of another. Costume of conventional significance was also worn; for Henslowe records the purchase at the large price of £3 10s. of "a robe for to goo invisibell." A comparison of the prices paid for dresses, with those paid for the plays in which they were worn, shows us that the absence of scenery and of stage decoration, to which it has been supposed we owe much of the rich imagery in the Elizabethan drama, was due only to poverty of resource, and not to the higher value set by the public, and consequently by the theatrical proprietors, upon the intellectual part of their entertainment. The highest sum which Henslowe records as having been paid by him before 1600, as the full price of a play, is £8—not half what was given for a cloak that might have been worn in it; the lowest sum is £4-not as much as the hero's hose might have cost. By 1613, theatrical competition had raised the price of a play by a dramatist of repute to £20, which, being equal to $500 of the present day, was perhaps quite as much as the proprietors could afford, and was not an inadequate payment for such plays as went to make up the bulk of the dramatic productions of the day. Happily, nearly all of these have perished; and of those which have survived, the best claim the attention of posterity only because Shakespeare lived when they were written. Culmination of the Drama in Shakespeare. BY THOMAS SPENCER BAYNES. The dramatic conditions of a national theatre were, at the outset of Shakespeare's career, more complete, or rather in a more advanced state of development, than the playhouses themselves or their stage accessories. If Shakespeare was fortunate in entering on his London work amidst the full tide of awakened patriotism and public spirit, he was equally fortunate in finding ready to his hand the forms of art in which the rich and complex life of the time could be adequately expressed. During the decade in which Shakespeare left Stratford the playwright's art had undergone changes so important as to constitute a revolution in the form and spirit of the national drama. For twenty years after the accession of Elizabeth the two roots whence the English drama sprang -the academic or classical, and the popular, developed spontaneously in the line of mysteries, moralities and interludes continued to exist apart, and to produce their accustomed fruit independently of each other. The popular drama, it is true, becoming more secular and realistic, enlarged its area by collecting its materials from all sources-from novels, tales, ballads, and histories, as well as from fairy mythology, local superstitions, and folk-lore. But the incongruous materials were, for the most part, handled in a crude and semi-barbarous way, with just sufficient art to satisfy the cravings and clamours of unlettered audiences. The academic plays, on the |