bygone ages is to read the record of their dialogue; and this necessity has
led to the academic fallacy of considering great plays primarily as
compositions to be read. In their own age, however, these very plays which
we now read in the closet were intended primarily to be presented on the
stage. Really to read a play requires a very special and difficult exercise
of visual imagination. It is necessary not only to appreciate the dialogue,
but also to project before the mind's eye a vivid imagined rendition of the
visual aspect of the action. This is the reason why most managers and
stage-directors are unable to judge conclusively the merits and defects of
a new play from reading it in manuscript. One of our most subtle artists
in stage-direction, Mr. Henry Miller, once confessed to the present writer
that he could never decide whether a prospective play was good or bad until
he had seen it rehearsed by actors on a stage. Mr. Augustus Thomas's
unusually successful farce entitled _Mrs. Leffingwell's Boots_ was
considered a failure by its producing managers until the very last
rehearsals, because it depended for its finished effect on many intricate
and rapid intermovements of the actors, which until the last moment were
understood and realised only in the mind of the playwright. The same
author's best and most successful play, _The Witching Hour_, was declined
by several managers before it was ultimately accepted for production; and
the reason was, presumably, that its extraordinary merits were not manifest
from a mere reading of the lines. If professional producers may go so far
astray in their judgment of the merits of a manuscript, how much harder
must it be for the layman to judge a play solely from a reading of the
dialogue!

This fact should lead the professors and the students in our colleges to
adopt a very tentative attitude toward judging the dramatic merits of the
plays of other ages. Shakespeare, considered as a poet, is so immeasurably
superior to Dryden, that it is difficult for the college student unfamiliar