If a theatre were established in this country for the performance of Shakespeare's plays with the simplicity and rapidity with which they were acted in his time, it might limit the endless experiments, mutilations, and profitless discussions that every revival occasions. "To read a play," said Robert Louis Stevenson, "is a knack, the fruit of much knowledge and some imagination, comparable to that of reading score"; the reader is apt to miss the proper point of view. In omitting one-third of the play every time Shakespeare is acted, the most appropriate scenes for representation may not always be chosen. But were the entire play acted occasionally, the author's point of view could not fail to declare itself. It is interesting to note that Germany, always to the fore in Shakespearian matters, has obtained in Baron Perfall, the director of the Royal Court Theatre in Munich, an advocate for the performance of Shakespeare's plays as they were originally acted. The Elizabethan dramatists, as a rule, deprecated the printing of their plays. They regretted that "scenes invented merely to be spoken should be inforcively published to be read." Elocution was to the playwrights an all-important consideration. They acknowledge that the success of their labours "lay much in the actor's voice"; that he must speak well, "though he understand not what," for if the actor had not "a facility and natural dexterity in his delivery, it must needs sound harsh to the auditor, and procure his distaste and displeasure." A good tragedy, in Ben Jonson's opinion, "must have truth of argument, dignity of persons, gravity and height of elocution"; "words," he says, "should be chosen that have their sound ample, the composition full, the absolution plenteous, and poured out all grave, sinewy, and strong." And Thomas Heywood, in 1612, thus writes in defence of the actor's art: "Tully, in his booke, 'Ad Caium Herennium,' requires five things in an orator--invention, disposition, eloqution, memory, and pronuntiation; yet all are imperfect without the sixt, which is action: for be his invention never so fluent and exquisite, his disposition and order never so composed and formall, his eloquence and elaborate phrases never so materiall and pithy, his memory never so ferme and retentive, his pronuntiation never so musical and plausive; yet without a comely and elegant gesture, a gratious and a bewitching kinde of action, a natural and familiar motion of the head, the hand, the body, and a moderate and fit countenance suitable to all the rest, I hold all the rest as nothing. A delivery and sweet action is the glosse and beauty of any discourse that belongs to a scholler; and this is the action behoovefull in any that professe this quality, not to use any impudent or forced motion in any part of the body, nor rough or other violent gesture, nor, on the contrary, to stand like a stiffe starcht man, but to qualifie everything according to the nature of the person personated: for in