It must also be remembered that of the plays wholly written by Shakespeare, with the one exception of "The Tempest," all are so constructed that characters who leave the stage at the end of an episode are never the first to reappear, a reappearance which would involve a short pause and an empty stage; nor, even, does a character who ends one of the acts marked in the folio ever begin the one that follows, as Ben Jonson directs shall be done in his tragedy of "Sejanus" (1616). Can we reasonably suppose, then, that a method so consistently carried out by Shakespeare throughout all his plays respecting the exit and the re-entrance of characters was due to mere accident, and not to deliberate intention on the part of the dramatist? And in acted drama the exact position where a pause comes in the movement of the story is a matter of importance to the proper understanding of the play. Yet, in the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays the divisions made are so irrelevant to the story that Heminge and Condell may have considered them as merely ornamental. It may never have occurred to them that the divisions would some day be used as an authority for actors as well as for readers. The result has been disastrous to both. A slavish adherence by the actor to these unfortunate divisions for over two hundred years, has caused the representation of Shakespeare's plays on the stage to be in most cases unintelligent, if not almost unintelligible; while, on the other hand, it has for an equally long period been the means of misleading scholars as to Shakespeare's method of dramatic construction. Until editors ignore the acts and scenes in the folio edition of 1623 and take the form of the play as it appears in the quartos--that is, without divisions--no progress can be made with the study of Shakespeare's dramatic art. It is now more generally recognized, especially by American scholars, that the folio divisions are a real stumbling-block and must go overboard. In some of the early comedies, perhaps, pauses can be made where the acts are marked, in the folio, without serious injury to the representation, but the comedies were written to be acted without break, and gain immensely when so given. Besides, the lengths of the present divisions are absurdly unequal. The last act of "Love's Labour's Lost" is more than twice the length of the first act, and nearly four times the length of the second and third acts. In a theatre, it should be the shortest act. Then, the "Comedy of Errors" was acted as an after-supper interlude at Gray's Inn. Time there would not allow of its having four intervals. Throughout Shakespeare's early and middle periods his plays in their dramatic form of construction provide no opportunity for regular intervals, nor should they ever have been divided into five acts. To put more than one break into "Romeo and Juliet," "The Merchant of Venice," "Macbeth," "King Lear," "Hamlet" (acting version) injures the drama.