a small model of the stage for a "dramatic museum" for your
school. If you have not tried this, you do not know how much it
helps in seeing plays of other times, like Shakespeare's or
Molière's; and it is useful also for modern dramas. Such small
stages can be used for puppet theatres as well. "The Knave of
Hearts" is intended as a marionette play, and other
dramas--Maeterlinck's and even Shakespeare's--have been given in
this way with very interesting effects.

If you bring these plays to a performance for others outside your
own class, you will find that the simplest and least pretentious
settings are generally most effective. The Irish players, as Mr.
Yeats tells us, "have made scenery, indeed, but scenery that is
little more than a suggestion--a pattern with recurring boughs and
leaves of gold for a wood, a great green curtain, with a red
stencil upon it to carry the eye upward, for a palace." Mr. John
Merrill of the Francis Parker School describes the quite excellent
results secured with a dark curtain in a semicircle--a
cyclorama--for background, and with colored lights.[1] Such a
staging leaves the attention free to follow the lines, and the
imagination to picture whatever the play suggests as the place of
the action.

[Footnote 1: John Merrill: "Drama and the School," in _Drama_,
November, 1919.]




THE PHILOSOPHER OF BUTTERBIGGENS[1]