The strategy of Shakspere is that of Sophocles, of Molière and of Ibsen, even if the later men did not recognize their own obedience to the laws which had governed the earlier. The tactics of Sophocles were diametrically opposed to those of Shakspere, because the Greek dramatist built his massive plays to conform to the conditions of the immense open air theater of Athens with its extraordinarily intelligent spectators, whereas the English dramatist had to adjust his pieces, comic and tragic, to the bare platform of the half-timbered London playhouse, with its gallants seated on the stage and its rude and turbulent groundlings standing in the unroofed yard. So the tactics of Molière and Ibsen are strangely unlike, the French author fitting his comedies to a long, narrow theater, dimly lighted by candles, with the courtiers accommodated on benches just behind the curtain and with the well-to-do burghers of Paris making up the bulk of the audience, while the stern Scandinavian found his profit in the modern picture-frame stage, with its realistic sets and with its spectators comfortably seated in front of the curtain. Each of the four followed the methods of his own time and place; and each in turn made the best of the theatrical conditions which confronted him. But however much they may differ in practice, in tactics they worked in accord with the same principles, and employed the same strategy. Bronson Howard admitted that Aeschylus “taught the future world the art of writing a play” but he “did not create the laws of dramatic construction. Those laws exist in the passions and sympathies of the human race.” A little later in the same address, Bronson Howard declared that the laws of dramatic construction “bear about the same relation to human character and human sympathies as the laws of nature bear to the material universe.” In other words, the drama is what it is, what it always has been, what it always will be, because human nature is what it is and was and will be. And this brings us back to the inexorable fact that the eternally dominating element in the theater is the audience. “The dramatist,” so Bronson Howard reminded us, “must remember that his work cannot, like that of the novelist or the poet, pick out the hearts, here and there, that happen to be in sympathy with its subject. He appeals to a thousand hearts at the same moment; he has no choice in the matter; he must do this.” That is to say, the drama is immitigably “a function of the crowd,” as Mr. Walkley has aptly called it. Finally, Bronson Howard pointed out that there is no great difficulty in obeying the laws of dramatic construction, even if it may be impossible to declare them with precision. “Be honest and sincere” in using