Another theorist is Mr. Corbin, in the _Century Magazine_ for December, 1911. He proves to his own satisfaction that Burbage and his colleagues had means for darkening the stage.[42] It seems this author staged “The Winter’s Tale” in New York a few years ago. In this play a bear has to appear on the stage, and this part was acted by a man on all fours. At first the scene was played on a lighted stage, and all the New Yorkers present laughed at the sight of the actor in a bearskin. Then they hit upon the device of darkening the stage, and having the actor-bear run quickly across. When this was done, no one’s risibilities were affected. This forms one of Mr. Corbin’s chief arguments for his assumption that the Elizabethan stage was darkened; namely, that it would have offended the good taste of the audience to see in broad daylight in a serious scene, an actor impersonating a bear. If human nature can endure this convention in Peking, with the above-mentioned tiger, why should we assume that three hundred years ago people felt as we do now, and base on this the novel theory that stages were darkened in those days? A large measure of the success attained by “The Yellow Jacket” was due to the fact that the Chinese stage conventions employed seemed so funny to us provincial Westerners that they caused a great deal of happy laughter. But this is really quite as intelligent as the attitude of the rustic who sought out Richard III after the performance and offered to sell him a good horse for less than a kingdom. It is very strange that even otherwise scholarly men, like, for example, Victor Albright in “The Shakespearean Stage”, struggle with all fours against the possibility that in the theater of the gentle Shakespeare there might have been committed such desecrations as setting properties on the stage in full view of the audience. He approaches the evidence with blinkers when it seems to contradict his theory. He says (page 126): “Only the dramatists had not yet learned to use explicit stage directions.” On page 143 he tells us that the Elizabethans did not read stage directions literally. Then on page 106: “Here in the midst of a street scene is a direction to set the stage with a table, stand, chairs, stools, etc.,—just such properties as are used in the next scene, a counting room. We cannot believe that a manager would disturb an important scene by setting the stage for a coming one.” Further, on page 110: “The placing and replacing of a regular setting in full view of the audience never was a _general custom_. It is contrary to the very nature of the stage,—an illusive, make-believe world.” In my opinion it is contrary only to the very nature of a provincial New Yorker. Let me add in passing that William Archer holds that “in the generality of cases properties were brought on in full sight of the audience, often in the middle of the action.”[43]