The building specifications for The Swan playhouse called for an auditorium fifty-five feet across, the stage to be twenty-seven feet in depth, so that it reached halfway across the pit, and was entirely open on three sides. At the rear of the stage was a traverse, or draw curtain, with an alcove, or small inner stage behind it, and a balcony overhead. There was little or no scenery, but properties of various kinds were in use, chairs, beds, tables, etc. When it is added to this that shilling spectators were allowed to sit upon the stage, where for an extra sixpence they were accommodated with stools, and could send the pages for pipes and tobacco, and that from this vantage ground they could jeer at the actors, and exchange jokes and sometimes missiles, like nuts or apples, with the common people in the pit, why, it becomes almost incomprehensible to the modern mind how the players managed to carry on the action at all; and fairly marvellous how under such rude conditions, the noble blank verse declamations and delicate graces of romantic poetry with which the old dramas abound could have got past. A modern audience will hardly stand poetry, or anything, in fact, but brisk action and rapid dialogue. Cut out the soliloquies, cut out the reflections and the descriptions. Elizabethan plays are stuffed with full-length descriptions of scenes and places: Dover Cliff; the apothecary’s shop where Romeo bought the poison; the brook in which Ophelia drowned herself; the forest spring where Philaster found Bellario weeping and playing with wild flowers. In this way they make up for the want of stage scenery. It would seem as if the seventeenth century audiences were more naïve than twentieth century ones, more willing to lend their imaginations to the artist, more eager for strong sensation and more impressible by beauty of language, and less easily disturbed by the incongruous and the absurd in the external machinery of the theatre, which would be fatal to illusion in modern audiences with our quick sense of the ridiculous. You know, for example, that there were no actresses on the Elizabethan stage, but the female parts were taken by boys. This is one practical reason for those numerous plots in the old drama where the heroine disguises herself as a young man. I need mention only Viola, Portia, Rosalind, Imogen, and Julia in Shakespeare. And the romantic plays of Beaumont and Fletcher and many others are full of similar situations. Now if you have seen college dramatics, where the same practice obtains, you have doubtless noticed an inclination in the spectators to laugh at the deep bass voices, the masculine strides, and the muscular arms of the ladies in the play. But trifles like these did not apparently trouble our simple forefathers.