has been assailed on technical grounds but in my opinion unwarrantably (see p. 175, above). They have been charged also with carrying the play (and the trilogy) past the natural stopping-point and to an inconclusive close. But despite any considerations which can be urged in its support, this objection ignores the Greek feeling concerning the paramount importance of interment and cannot be allowed. Even modern audiences have sometimes felt a certain sympathy with this point of view. “The typical Elizabethan tragedy does not deal with the mistakes of a night, but with the long—often life-long—struggles of its hero. Such a play must have an appropriate ending. After the audience has sympathized with a Hamlet or a Brutus through many a scene, it is not satisfied with a sudden death and a drop of a curtain with a thud. It asks to see the body solemnly and reverently borne off the stage as if to its last resting place. And this was the respect which the honored dead received on the Elizabethan stage.”[353] I find them one and all to be merely examples of a new artificiality—the artificiality of naturalism.—GORDON CRAIG. CHAPTER VIII THE INFLUENCE OF THEATRICAL MACHINERY AND DRAMATIC CONVENTIONS[354] We have already noted that the Greek theater had no facilities for the direct representation of interior scenes (see pp. 237-42, above). Of the many subterfuges there mentioned as available for or utilized by the ancient playwrights it is now in place to elaborate upon one. I refer to the _eccyclema_, one of the strangest and most conventional pieces of machinery that any theater has ever seen.