The most interesting of Prof. Adams's efforts of imagination are a conjectural plan, section, and interior sketch of the Globe Theatre of 1599. Though partly founded on Mr Godfrey's design (accepting, for instance, the oblique position of the entrance doors and the corridor Rear Stage, which were Mr Godfrey's chief contributions to the theory of the subject), Mr Adams's drawings present two or three original and interesting features. De Witt's sketch of the Swan is entirely thrown overboard. Instead of a markedly sloping

CONJECTURAL RECONSTRUCTION OF THE INTERIOR OF THE GLOBE.

The curtains to the rear stage are open; the curtains to the upper stage are closed; the music rooms,' occupied by the playhouse orchestra, are represented as above the upper stage; the painted heavens' over the stage are adorned with stars, moon, and clouds; the 'huts' are supported by the columns resting on the stage.

pent-house roof, the 'shadow' is figured as a practically horizontal ceiling, on the level of the top gallery, resting on two enormously high pillars, and having a moon, stars, and clouds painted on its lower surface. There is evidence that the heavens' were, in some cases at any

rate, thus decorated; and it is difficult to see how, if the roof had any considerable slope, the decorations could be visible to any but a mere fraction of the audience. On the other hand, the very lofty and flat 'heavens' figured by Mr Adams would but ill serve their primary purpose of protecting the players from rain and snow. Again, Mr Adams makes the curious hutch, which we see in all contemporary drawings of the exterior of Elizabethan theatres, extend to the very front of the 'heavens' and rest upon the two elongated pillars. One or two of the drawings aforesaid give some colour to this idea; but their whole proportions are so manifestly impossible that no detail can safely be deduced from them. Mr Adams does not follow Mr Godfrey in carrying the Upper Stage round the whole compass of the stagebuilding, but makes its width identical with that of the Rear Stage. There is no decisive evidence for or against this conception; but the odd little railing, not more than 18 inches high, which Mr Adams places in front of the Upper Stage, is manifestly insufficient, for reasons before stated. Finally, Mr Adams places open 'music rooms' above the Upper Stage on the level of the third gallery. This is ingenious and quite possible, the precise situation of the 'music rooms' being a puzzle for which we have no clear solution. But if there had been an open second story to the stage-building, such as is here presented, it is hard to believe that playwrights would not now and then have displaced the musicians and brought it into dramatic use; and of this we have no indication.

Simultaneously with Mr Chambers's encyclopædia of the Elizabethan stage, there appears a volume in which Mr Allardyce Nicoll essays to write almost as fully the 'History of the Restoration Drama' from 1660 to 1700, Mr Nicoll, too, is a very painstaking student who shrinks from no research. His task, however, is comparatively simple. Almost from the outset, he has only two companies to deal with instead of nearly two score; and the vicissitudes of these companies, with their migrations from theatre to theatre, are all clearly ascertained. There are, therefore, few obscurities to be elucidated, few matters of controversy to be discussed. Mr Nicoll's research, however, has thrown a little new light upon the period, and he presents a very useful compendium of Vol. 241.-No. 479.

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its stage-history. On one point he probably conveys a false impression. Founding upon a few allusions to scanty audiences, he makes out that the playhouses of the period were entirely supported, not by the general public, but by the courtiers-or, as we should say, by the smart set.' This is on the face of it improbable, and could almost certainly be disproved. It is true that the financial conditions of the theatre were difficult; but when were they otherwise? They are exceedingly difficult to-day. That the well-to-do burgher-class were no great playgoers is probable enough. Puritanism was still strong among them, and they were justly repelled by the whole playhouse atmosphere. But what of the Templars? What of the prentices? What of the lower middle-classes in general? What of the mere loose riffraff, who, if the plays may be believed, formed a large element in the population? It is inconceivable that in a city of nearly half a million inhabitants one narrow class alone should have felt the eternal fascination of the mimic world. Mr Nicoll is partly misled by an initial misconception. He writes (p. 26):

'No play, however brilliant, however splendidly produced, however popular by means of poetic beauty or of immoral suggestion, could count on a run of over a few days. . . . Even when plays had a slightly longer run than was ordinary, we find that the management often deemed it advisable to break that run by the insertion of a revival or two.'

Mr Nicoll does not seem to realise that the very idea of a 'long run' is entirely modern, and that a constant alternation of plays was, until well on in the 19th century, an established custom. The almost unprecedented run of Love for Love' extended to only thirteen performances; but the success of a play was not measured by the number of its initial performances, but by the frequency of its later repetitions. That the Court had a deplorable influence on the drama is true enough; but it must not be held solely responsible for the imbecility and bestiality that prevailed in the theatre.

Unfortunately Mr Nicoll is not, like Mr Chambers, purely an antiquary-historian; he is also a very insistent æsthetician. In all Mr Chambers's four volumes there is not a word to indicate that any one play of the period is better or worse than any other; whereas Mr Nicoll

is intensely concerned to classify, to appraise, and even to range in order of merit, all the dramatic productions which come within his ken. It is a terrible task that he has undertaken: one before which the stoutest heart might quail. 'Sir,' said Dr Johnson, in a phrase that might serve as the first axiom in a code of critical common sense, 'Sir, there is no settling the point of precedency between a louse and a flea.' This is precisely the effort to which Mr Nicoll devotes himself through many laborious pages; with the result that his work affords an extreme example of the barrenness of criticism which never attempts to go to fundamentals, and deals exclusively in personal judgments.

It is not for a moment suggested that the whole drama of the Restoration is indistinguishably contemptible. Far from it: a critical history of the period is urgently needed, in which (the mere insects being ignored) the men of real capacity and power should be studied in the light of the sane technical and spiritual principles which apply to drama as a whole. But Mr Nicoll makes no such endeavour. He is wholly unconcerned about technique: he makes no attempt to relate the rhetorical drama of the period to any rational ideal of tragedy; and in his dealings with comedy he is constantly oscillating between a preconceived, conventional enthusiasm and the sensations of disgust which now and then overmaster him. For Mr Nicoll is not one of your true Restoration-galvanisers who declare decency to be a puerile affectation and frankly glory in a modish nostalgie de la boue. On the contrary, he accepts the moral and sanitary standards of to-day, enlarging, for instance, with somewhat unnecessary emphasis, on the personal delinquencies of Nell Gwyn, Moll Davis, Mrs Barry, and their sisterhood. He even undertakes to establish degrees of comparison in filth, and to discriminate niceties of nastiness. The result is an amazing series of exercises in the art of facing both ways. In his account of Wycherley, for example, we find on two opposite pages these remarkable judgments:

(P. 226) "The Country Wife" is a bright and glorious farce, in which the innuendo so successfully employed in "The Gentleman Dancing-Master" is brought to a stage of utmost perfection. The famous "China" scene of Horner is probably

unrivalled in our literature, and, much as it has been condemned by moralists, can be nothing but admired for its sheer cleverness and for its swift biting humour.'

(P. 227) 'On women, fops, wits and lawyers indiscriminately the satire [of "The Plain Dealer"] falls, intermixed with that loathsome description of passion which only men like Shadwell and Wycherley among the Restoration dramatists could give us. Wycherley, says Congreve, was sent "to lash the crying Age," but he has lashed its sores into more fulsome aspects, until we have nought to do but turn away our eyes in misery and disgust.'

What are we to say of the criticism which can be perfectly happy with The Country Wife,' that bright and glorious' work of genius, and is merely afflicted by 'The Plain Dealer'? It is hard to see why any one who can enjoy the company of Horner should be made miserable by Manly. They are surely equal and incomparable masterpieces in what Mr Nicoll calls the 'displayal' of 'lewdity.' Such unaccountable alternations of ecstasy and abhorrence meet us on almost every page of Mr Nicoll's work. He is always feeling something so strongly that one begins to doubt whether he really feels anything at all.

Now and then, however, he strikes a personal note: as where he lays it down that Mirabell and Millamant ... are not complete figures: they are mere automata devised as mouthpieces for the poet.' This of the two living and ever-living human beings in the whole Comus rout of the Restoration! Again, he startles us where he avers that by 1676 the age was moving steadily in the direction of sentimentalism, pure intellect was being banished by feeling; emotion was taking the place of wit.' The ill-omened word 'sentimentalism' has often played havoc with critical common sense, but few have yielded so tamely as Mr Nicoll to its mischievous influence. It is surely time that a stand should be made against the cant which glorifies as 'intellectual' all sorts of brutal cynicism, and despises as sentimental' everything which betrays the smallest touch of human feeling. This is a jargon invented for the sole behoof and benefit of Restoration Comedy.

WILLIAM ARCHER.