The drama is now, and always has been, dependent upon the theater. It is only in the playhouse itself that a play reveals its full force. For the complete disclosure of its power, a drama demands not only the theater itself, with the actors and all the accessories, it requires also the presence of the spectators, that we may feel the contagion of communal emotion aroused by its passionate appeal. It has to be born on the stage and to prove thereon its right to live, before it can hope for survival in the study. It must perforce please the playgoers of its own time and of its own country for whom it was specially composed, because only after it has gained their approval is there any chance of its winning the favor of succeeding generations. The theater can exist without the drama, as it did in imperial Rome when the stage was given over to dancers and acrobats and animal trainers. But the drama can never exist without the theater; and thus it is that those of us who love the drama of our own tongue and who want to see it flourish luxuriantly both to-day and to-morrow, cannot but take a keen interest in the organization of the theater. We would like to see it organized on a sound basis, for we are well aware that any defect in its organization will necessarily react injuriously upon the development of the drama. It need not surprise us that the organization of the theater in the United States in the opening decades of the twentieth century has been the subject of attacks as violent as they are vociferous. I say that it need not surprise us, because all students of the history of the stage are aware that the organization of the theater has never been satisfactory in any country or at any period—except possibly in Greece in the glorious days when Æschylus and Sophocles and Euripides brought forth their rival masterpieces in the spacious Theater of Dionysus just below the towering Parthenon. And we cannot tell whether or not the organization of the Athenian theater was really as satisfactory as it seems to have been, since there may have been many an adverse criticism which has not come down to us after twenty centuries. We do know that the organization of the theater in Rome in the period of Plautus and Terence was most unsatisfactory, with its actors who were slaves and who might be scourged if they failed to receive the plaudits they begged for piteously at the end of the play and with its audiences made up of a mob of freedmen often imperfectly familiar with the Latin tongue.