And yet this is just the edition which is demanded by the present state of Shaksperian scholarship, and which is now made possible by our new understanding of the Elizabethan theater, with its rude platform thrust out into the yard, so different from our modern theaters, in which the stage is withdrawn behind a picture-frame. The Tudor platform-stage is wholly unlike the picture-frame stage of to-day; but it is very like the "pageant," or the scaffold on which the mysteries and miracle-plays were presented. It was to the simple conditions of his semi-medieval theater that Shakspere adjusted himself, rude as those conditions may now appear to us who are accustomed to the sumptuous picturesqueness of our own luxuriant playhouses. In accepting the theater as he found it, and in availing himself of all its possibilities, such as they were, Shakspere showed his usual common sense. Only by striving to reconstruct for ourselves in our mind's eye, as it were, the playhouse where he plied his trade and earned his living, can we come to any adequate appreciation of his art, of his craftsmanship as a playwright, of his dramaturgic skill. And in any honest effort to understand how his mighty dramas were originally produced by himself and by his fellow actors in the round O of the wooden Globe Theater, unroofed and unlighted except by the dingy daylight of northern Europe, we need always to keep fast in our mind the fact that all preconceptions are false that may be derived from our memory of latter-day performances in theaters of a type which the Elizabethan dramatists could not foresee, and of which the conditions are often the exact opposite of those they accepted without hesitation. That is to say, the most profitable way to reconstruct mentally the Tudor playhouse is to banish from our minds every impression made by our modern theater, with its elaborate complexity, and to study out for ourselves the simple circumstances of performance in the Middle Ages. And as a first step toward the proper standpoint, we must cast out our traditional belief that Shakspere always accepted the classicist formula of five acts, proclaimed by Horace, and employed by Seneca. That he did use it in one or two plays seems indisputable, and he may very well have employed it in a few others, but there is no reason to suppose that he would have submitted himself any more willingly to the rule of five acts than he did to the rule of the three unities.