"Now for the difference betwixt our Theatres and those of former times; they were but plain and simple, with no other scenes nor decorations of the stage, but only old Tapestry, and the Stage strewed with Rushes, whereas ours for cost and ornament are arrived at the height of Magnificence, but that which makes our Stage the better, makes our Playes the worse, perhaps through striving now to make them more for sight than hearing, whence that solid joy of the interior is lost, and that benefit which men formerly received from Playes, from which they seldom or never went away but far better and wiser than when they came." The short space of time--two hours and a half--in which an Elizabethan play was acted in Shakespeare's time, has excited much discussion among commentators. It can hardly be doubted that the dialogue, which often exceeds two thousand lines, was all spoken on the stage, for none of the dramatists wrote with a view to publication, and few of the plays were printed from the author's manuscript. This fact points to the employment of a skilled and rapid delivery on the part of the actor. Artists of the French school, whose voices are highly trained and capable of a varied and subtle modulation, will run through a speech of fifty lines with the utmost ease and rapidity; and there is good reason to suppose that the blank verse of the Elizabethan dramatists was spoken "trippingly on the tongue." And then only a few of the plays which were written for the public stage were divided into acts; and even in the case of a five act drama it was not thought necessary to mark each division with an interval, since the jigs and interludes were reserved for the end of the play. So with an efficient elocution and no "waits," the Elizabethan actors would have got through one-half of a play before our modern actors could cover a third. Even Ben Jonson, while disliking the form of the Elizabethan drama, recognized the advantage to the dramatist of simplicity in the method of representation. He alludes, with not a little contempt, to Inigo Jones's costly settings of the masque at the court of King James. "A wooden dagger is a dagger of wood, Nor gold nor ivory haft can make it good ... Or to make boards to speak! There is a task! Painting and carpentry are the soul of masque. Pack with your pedling poetry to the Stage. This is the money-got mechanic age!"