This seems like a digression, but is really to my purpose. Flesh-and-blood actors we shall always have with us; they will take good care of that themselves. But for the imaginative souls who are for compromise, who are for half-way houses and look back fondly to the boy-players, I would say: Why not try the puppets? These also present a “transparent medium” for the author’s expression. And, further, the purely “lyrical” passages in which Shakespeare abounds and which seem so odd in the realism of the human actors (_e.g._, the Queen’s description of Ophelia’s death) would gain immensely by being recited by the poet (or wire-puller). A puppet-show _Hamlet_ might be an exquisite experiment in that highest art whose secret is suggestion. VICISSITUDES OF CLASSICS Of Webster’s _Duchess of Malfi_, revived by the Phœnix Society, I said that it was a live classic no longer, but a museum-classic, a curio for connoisseurs. Its multiplication of violent deaths in the last act (four men stabbed and one courtesan poisoned) could no longer be taken seriously, and, in fact, provoked a titter in the audience. This sudden change of tragic into comic effect was fatal to that unity of impression without which not merely a tragedy but any work of art ceases to be an organic whole. The change was less the fault of Webster than of the Time Spirit. Apparently the early Jacobeans could accept a piled heap of corpses at the end of a play without a smile, as “all werry capital.” Violent death was not so exceptional a thing in their own experience as it is in ours. They had more simplicity of mind than we have, a more childlike docility in swallowing whole what the playwright offered them. But Webster was not without fault. One assassination treads so hastily upon the heels of the other, the slaughter is so wholesale. _Hamlet_ closes with several violent deaths, yet Shakespeare managed to avoid this pell-mell wholesale effect.