But plays as perfect in design as "Julius Caesar," "Othello," and "Macbeth" were the exception, not the rule, upon the Elizabethan stage. They were the outcome of nearly twenty years' experiment in play-writing, a period during which Shakespeare mastered his art and schooled his audience to appreciate the serious unmixed with the ludicrous. When he first wrote for the stage, plays needed to have in them all that the taste of the day demanded in the way of comic interlude and music. A dramatic representation was a continuous performance given without pause from beginning to end, and the dramatists, in compliance with the custom, used the double story, so often to be found in the plays of the time, in order that the movement should be continued uninterruptedly. The characters in each story appeared on the stage in alternate scenes, with every now and then a full scene in which all the characters appeared together. Ben Jonson condemned this form of play. He ridiculed the use of short scenes, and the bringing on to the stage of the characters in pairs. Yet he himself found it necessary to conform to the requirements of the day, as is shown in his first two comedies, written to be acted without pause from beginning to end. Later on he adopted the Terentian method of construction, that of dividing the plays into acts and making each act a complete episode in itself; and in his dedication prefixed to the play of "The Fox," he claims to have laboured "to reduce not only the ancient forms, but manners of the scene." There can be no doubt, therefore, that Ben Jonson disliked Shakespeare's tolerance of the hybrid class of play then in vogue. Yet Shakespeare, if he thought it was not possible to work to the satisfaction of his audience according to the rules and examples of the ancients, none the less strove to put limits to the irregularities of his contemporaries. At the Universities scholars regarded his plays as compositions that were written for the public stage and therefore of no intrinsic value; while Londoners must have looked upon them as representations of actual life when compared with the formless dramas they were accustomed to see. He desired unity of fable with variety of movement, and endeavoured to abolish the use of impromptu dialogue by writing his own interludes and making them part of the play. Shakespeare wished to satisfy his audience and himself at the same time; and by the force of his dramatic genius he succeeded where others failed, and wrote plays which, if unsuitable for the modern stage, are still being acted.