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ceipts beyond their salaries. These hirelings usually play the smaller parts, and are often of little worth as actors or men. Indeed, I think a good deal that the Puritans say against actors is true only of these hangerson of the stage, and not of the men who share in the receipts of the companies. Have you heard of Burbadge? You should hear him in Richard III.' Who is in the Admiral's company?' Well, old Henslowe manages it. They act now at the Rose, but Henslowe is building a new theatre, the Fortune, in Aldersgate Street, off to the right from where we were standing in St. Paul's. Henslowe and his son-in-law, Ned Alleyn, make a strong team. Henslowe doesn't know much about acting, but he is a Jew in money matters. He gets young fellows who want to write for the stage, or who need money, to sell him new plays, or make over old plays for him. He pays them small sums, never more than £81 for a whole new play, and by lending money to these needy fellows he keeps them under his control. It is Ned Alleyn who makes this company a success, for he is Burbadge's rival. He used to be splendid in Marlowe's ‘Dr. Faustus.'

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Speaking of Henslowe, I wonder if you think, as most people seem to, that men write plays just because they have the knack. If you do, you are much mistaken. Playwriting is a regular business here, and every man who now writes successful plays,-Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker, yes, even this Shakspere of whom I have been telling you,has drudged hard before any play really his own has made a great success. They begin by making over some old play that Henslowe or Burbadge wants to revive. They have been tinkering some of Marlowe's plays lately—not for the better, I think. Theatrical fashions change very quickly, you see. Why, I remember that when I was a lad, ten years ago, everybody crowded to see the plays of John 1 Money in 1600 was worth five times what it is now.

Lyly, yet when some were revived the other day they did seem dull and artificial enough. We have learned a great deal about play-writing in these years between 1590 and 1600, and we have had such splendid plays from Shakspere, Ben Jonson, Dekker, and a half-dozen others, that the old work does usually need making over. Well, as I was saying, a young man just fresh from Oxford or Cambridge, who comes up to London hoping to be a literary man, because he has acted in or written a play for some festivities at his college in honor of a visit from some nobleman or the Queen-the growth of our drama owes a great deal to the Queen and her love of it, God bless her— is lucky if he gets a chance to write an entertainment for some nobleman to whom he is introduced, or who saw him act or heard his play at Oxford. 'What kind of entertainment?' Oh, something to pass the time gayly at a wedding or after a big dinner. I have heard that this very play of A Midsummer Night's Dream' was written originally to be played as part of the ceremonies at a wedding. I don't know whether that is true, for I was out of the country when it first appeared. Young fellows don't get such chances often, however. It is more likely that at some one of the eating-houses-we call them ' ordinaries 'they will fall in with some of the actors or playwrights and that these will give them their first chance. Very likely the player wants a good part, and knows the company in which he is a sharer needs new plays, and so as he falls into chat with the young man who happens to sit opposite him, and draws from him one or two plots that are in his head, he cries- Why, you're just the man Henslowe has been looking for to make over "The Bat

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tle of Alcazar"; he wants to give it next Sunday. It's Wednesday now. Can you do it?' Did you ever see a young dramatist who wouldn't undertake such a task? Or perhaps Burbadge wants to take advantage of the popular

interest in some political event or some new publication, and is hurrying to put a play about it on the stage before Henslowe can. Then he will give an act to each of three or four men and tell each to have his work ready within fortyeight hours. That is why you hear of plays by three or four men, for instance, Munday, Chettle, Haughton, and Dekker. Each of them wrote an act, and then, after talking over the whole play when their parts were done, gave it the final touches. After a man has done much of this hack-work of making over plays and patching them up, he gets a chance to have a play given that he has written entirely. Usually he begins, by imitating in plot, or in language, or in the characters, some well-known writer. John Lyly has had a line of imitators. Shakspere, for instance, knows Lyly's plays thoroughly, and you will find places in his earlier work the originals of which I can show you in Lyly's plays. Little by little a man works out from this to a style of his own, learns dramatic construction, and becomes master of his art and of himself. Marlowe, poor fellow, had just done that when he died. Tamburlaine' is a superb attempt at many things. Edward the Second' shows the man who had come to understand dramatic construction and in whom experience had tempered an impetuous imagination. Some of us think that Shakspere is just finding his own footing, and that what he will do in the next few years will be better than anything he has yet done. There is talk that he is going to make over the old Hamlet play that I used to see when a child. Just what he can do with it I hardly see, for it was blood and thunder and ghosts, and little else. I have been thinking that he likes to do more poetic work, to study character more than this plot will permit.

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Well, here we are at the Garden Stairs. Just see how the boatmen are all making for Paul's Wharf, and the Temple and the Whitefriars Stairs. The people will begin to

flock to the river soon, and you will see the Thames alive with boats threading their way in and out across to the Bankside. Come round with me into this side street and we will get something to eat at the Falcon Inn, where Shakspere and his friends often go after the play for some ale and a chat. You see it doesn't look, from the street, much different from any of the other buildings, except that it is longer. Come in through this big archway in the centre and you will see how it differs. There you see the courtyard inside is a parallelogram with three galleries running round it. The rooms open on these galleries. The yard is the thoroughfare for everybody going in or out. Usually it is cleaner than it is now, but to-day is market-day and all this litter of hay, straw, and refuse is from the crowd of people and horses who came in here last night. As we go back through the archway let us turn in at this door on the left. This is the ordinary.' You see those high-backed settles facing each other, with tables between, divide all one side into compartments, one or two curtained off. At that long table running down the side of the room I have often seen the Globe sharers gather after a play. Let us go into one of these compartments and have a bite of something to stay our hunger till the play is over. Then we will dine royally. Drawer!-That is what we call the boy who waits-Drawer, quick! two mugs of ale and some bread and cheese. Quick, I say!

"I ought to have told you outside there that, years ago, most of our dramatic performances took place in innyards like this of the Falcon. The actors would hang curtains from the floor of the second balcony at the end of the yard, raise a slight platform, and act their play. The audience stood in the yard, or, if better off and willing to pay more, sat in the galleries. When the actors wanted to represent at the same time the interior and the exterior of a building, those supposed to be within the house appeared

in the second balcony. The actors used that second balcony, also, for city walls, etc. It is the origin of the recessed balcony that you will see in all our theatres. Really our theatres to-day are modelled on these old inn-yards.

"Why, why, do you see that man in a plain brown suit, with the broad, white, roll-over collar, the one who is waiting about the door as if expecting some one? Well, that's Shakspere. Evidently he doesn't play to-day. He is a good actor himself—not at all the equal of Burbadge, but creditable. Well, you are in luck! That big, coarse-featured man who has just come in and is greeting Shakspere noisily, is Benjamin Jonson. He hasn't been known long, but he is rising. He's the son of a bricklayer, but they say he is very learned. He gave his first play, 'Every Man in his Humour,' two years ago. Now he seems to be interesting himself in close studies of our London life. If we can, we must see his Every Man in his Humour.' It will give you a better idea of London than any amount of talking by me and days of sight-seeing. Jonson's plays are very different from Shakspere's, for he believes firmly, as every university man must, I should think, in copying the classic models in tragedy and comedy. He imitates Plautus and Terence in the latter. Shakspere doesn't seem to care about any past dramatic laws, but makes his own. It's a wonder he gets the results he does, but you can't deny that he gets them.

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"I am sorry we can't linger over ale and pipes, but we must be going on, if we are to avoid the crowd at the Globe. I sent my page, Philip, to hold the seats for us, but as there are only two entrances, and those not big, the crowd is often great. The houses on this side of the river are, as you see, of a rather poorer class than those on the other side. Shakspere lives over yonder; you see it is very convenient for either the theatre or the inn. There's the Globe. is circular, you see, and narrows toward the top. You will

It