And, indeed, a great dramatist, as he was, could not but have felt very
much hampered at being obliged continually to interrupt the progress of a
play in order to send on some one to explain to the audience that the
scene was to be changed to a particular place on the entrance of a
particular character, and after his exit to somewhere else; that the
stage was to represent the deck of a ship in a storm, or the interior of
a Greek temple, or the streets of a certain town, to all of which
inartistic devices Shakespeare is reduced, and for which he always amply
apologises. Besides this clumsy method, Shakespeare had two other
substitutes for scenery--the hanging out of a placard, and his
descriptions. The first of these could hardly have satisfied his passion
for picturesqueness and his feeling for beauty, and certainly did not
satisfy the dramatic critic of his day. But as regards the description,
to those of us who look on Shakespeare not merely as a playwright but as
a poet, and who enjoy reading him at home just as much as we enjoy seeing
him acted, it may be a matter of congratulation that he had not at his
command such skilled machinists as are in use now at the Princess's and
at the Lyceum. For had Cleopatra's barge, for instance, been a structure
of canvas and Dutch metal, it would probably have been painted over or
broken up after the withdrawal of the piece, and, even had it survived to
our own day, would, I am afraid, have become extremely shabby by this
time. Whereas now the beaten gold of its poop is still bright, and the
purple of its sails still beautiful; its silver oars are not tired of
keeping time to the music of the flutes they follow, nor the Nereid's
flower-soft hands of touching its silken tackle; the mermaid still lies
at its helm, and still on its deck stand the boys with their coloured
fans. Yet lovely as all Shakespeare's descriptive passages are, a
description is in its essence undramatic. Theatrical audiences are far
more impressed by what they look at than by what they listen to; and the
modern dramatist, in having the surroundings of his play visibly
presented to the audience when the curtain rises, enjoys an advantage for
which Shakespeare often expresses his desire. It is true that
Shakespeare's descriptions are not what descriptions are in modern
plays--accounts of what the audience can observe for themselves; they are
the imaginative method by which he creates in the mind of the spectators
the image of that which he desires them to see. Still, the quality of
the drama is action. It is always dangerous to pause for
picturesqueness. And the introduction of self-explanatory scenery
enables the modern method to be far more direct, while the loveliness of
form and colour which it gives us, seems to me often to create an
artistic temperament in the audience, and to produce that joy in beauty
for beauty's sake, without which the great masterpieces of art can never
be understood, to which, and to which only, are they ever revealed.

To talk of the passion of a play being hidden by the paint, and of
sentiment being killed by scenery, is mere emptiness and folly of words.
A noble play, nobly mounted, gives us double artistic pleasure.