The principal burden of entertaining the audience rested with the clown, who, unembarrassed by any {261}reference to the subject-matter of the play, popped in and out at will, cracked his jokes, danced and sung and made himself familiar with the outsiders upon the stage. Before an audience satisfied with this rudimentary setting, upon a stage crowded with smirking gallants and flirting maids of honor, we are assured that Hamlet and Wolsey delivered their soliloquies, Anthony his impassioned oratory, and Isabella her pious strains; while the clowns and pot-wrestlers discoursed among themselves of Athens and Troy, and Hecuba and Althea, of Galen and Paracelus, of "writs of detainer," and "fine and recovery," and "præmunire," and of the secrets of the pharmacopoeia! "At this public theater," says Mr. Smith, "to which every one could obtain access, and the lowest of the people ordinarily resorted... we are called upon to believe that the wonderful works which we so greatly admire and feel we can only appreciate by careful private study--that not only Englishmen like Coleridge confess, in forty years of admiring study of Greek, Latin, English, Italian, Spanish, and German philosophers, literature, and manners, to have found bursting upon him with increased power, wisdom, and beauty in every step," * but foreigners like Schlegel, Jean Paul, and Gervinus, "have fallen down before in all but heathen adoration"--were performed. In 1880, when we force a common-school education at state expense upon the people, the Shakespearean plays are disastrous to managers. * Bacon and Shakespeare, p. 91.