In
Shakespeare's day boys or men took the part of women, and how
characters like Lady Macbeth and Desdemona were adequately rendered by
youths beggars belief. But renderings in such conditions proved
popular and satisfactory. Such a fact seems convincing testimony, not
to the ability of Elizabethan or Jacobean boys--the nature of boys is
a pretty permanent factor in human society--but to the superior
imaginative faculty of adult Elizabethan or Jacobean playgoers, in
whom, as in Garrick's time, the needful dramatic illusion was far more
easily evoked than it is nowadays.
This is no exhilarating conclusion. But less exhilarating is the
endeavour that is sometimes made by advocates of the system of
spectacle to prove that Shakespeare himself would have appreciated the
modern developments of the scenic art--nay, more, that he himself has
justified them. This line of argument serves to confirm the suggested
defect of imagination in the present generation. The well-known chorus
before the first act of _Henry V._ is the evidence which is relied
upon to show that Shakespeare wished his plays to be, in journalistic
dialect, "magnificently staged," and that he deplored the inability of
his uncouth age to realise that wish.
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