An interval of a quarter of a century is rather different from one of four-and-twenty hours? Undoubtedly; but my point is that one’s impressions begin to wane and to alter in “values” from the very outset. After all it is the business of critics not merely to criticize, analyse, and judge a play, to try and “place” it in the realm of art; they have also the perhaps minor but still important duty of acting as public “tasters.” They have to represent facts, to give the public a reasonably accurate notion of what they are likely to see. And they are in a much better position for doing this if they set down their facts and their views of the facts at once, while they are still quivering with the excitement (or yawning with the boredom) of them. PLAYS WITHIN PLAYS Representative arts will represent everything they can, including themselves. The theatre likes to show an image of its own life, life behind the scenes, actors acting on the stage, audiences listening, applauding, or interrupting in front. Hence the plays within plays which Shakespeare found so alluring. It was a comparatively simple problem of technique in his time because of the simplicity of the “platform” stage and of the Elizabethan playhouse. A standing audience, as his for the most part was, is obviously easier to represent than a seated audience; it is just a crowd of “citizens” like any other stage crowd. The only important question for the stage-manager was the relative position of the mimic players and the mimic public. Clearly your mimic players must be seen by the real public, or what becomes of your play within a play? The position of your mimic public must have been more or less dependent on their importance in the action. But, I take it, the Elizabethan arrangement, in any case, must have been of a pre-Raphaelite symmetry. I presume the play scene in _Hamlet_ must have taken place in the lower part of the permanent erection at the back of the stage and that the mimic public was ranged down each side of the stage. The old arrangement has remained essentially unaltered. The mimic players are generally shown in some raised, arcaded terrace at the back of the stage; the King and Queen face Hamlet and Ophelia (in profile with respect to the real public) in front. It would obviously never do to let Hamlet and the King face the performers in the rear and so turn their backs on the real public, for the whole point of the scene is the effect of the mimic play on the King and on Hamlet watching the King. But I do not, for my part, see why more might not be made out of this “psychologic” effect by an arrangement which placed the mimic players nearer the front of the actual stage, on one side, so that the King might be turned full-face towards us as he watched them. If the King were played by an actor of the first importance (which he seldom or never is), with a gift of facial play, we may be sure that this would be done.