girl who sat stolidly on the bench by the window ignoring the whimperings from the clothes-basket.

"Aye." There was nothing in the girl's tone to indicate her thoughts. After a moment her eyes wandered up to the toby-jug on the mantel, and she said:

The baby was there. Jessie's heart resumed action again. She bent over the basket and tenderly touched the baby's warm, sleeping face; then her thoughts returned to Bella. She looked about for fresh proof that she had really gone.

Against the toby-jug a sheet of writ

Jessie, with most of her attention centered on the commotion in the basket, answered:

"I can get the pram for thirty shillings, an' I 've been promised the use o' Maggie Duncan's cradle for nathing; but she kens fine I'll make her next gown on account o't."

8 4

In the straggling light next morning Jessie slipped a long, thin leg out of bed, and her toes went searching with catlike caution for a crocheted slipper. Finding it, they wriggled into it.

Jessie was making one of her countless trips to the clothes-basket by the fireside in the next room to see if all was well. She clutched her long, pink flannellet nightgown to keep it from touching the floor, and was moving carefully past Bella's bed, when its flatness made her look at it again.

It was empty! Jessie hastened into the next room with fussy concern, sure that whatever Bella was doing for the baby was wrong.

But Bella was n't there! Her hat was n't hanging on the back of the door, where it had hung for six weeks. Her shoes were n't on the peat-backet, where she had put them last night.

The baby! Jessie gave a cry that ended in a strangled sound, half-laugh, half-sob, as she sprang to the clothesbasket and dropped down beside it.

for it and carried it to the window. In the graying light she peered at the words written upon it until they formed into things of meaning. And she read:

"I am going to Edinburgh. I have taken two pounds from the toby-jug; that leaves enough for the pram. It is ill done of me, but I will no' stay in Drumorty. If I get a place, I 'll send back the siller, and if Geordie will wed me, I'll come back for the bairn. You have been kinder to me than I am deserving, and I will no' forget. You can

send the bairn to the almshouse. It will be better there than with me if Geordie will no' have me."

Jessie trembled as she read. Bella had gone! And the baby was here, was hers to keep! Joy sent her heart racing heavenward. sank to her knees beside the clothesbasket, stretching greedy arms about it and whispering passionately:

She turned and

"She 'll no' come back; she 'll no' come back; and ye 'll be my ain, my ain wee lamb!"

Then in the flush of her riches, kneeling there in the still gray morning, she thought of Bella and her poverty; Bella, stealing out loveless in the night; Bella who had borne the suffering and the shame; Bella with empty arms. And a great remorse for the greed of her own rejoicing tore at her breast, and she cried in anguish:

"God be merciful to her, and forgie me, a covetous sinner!"

HAKSPERE has been acted pro

turned over all but one or two parts

from five hundred to a thousand times every season for the last fifteen years— seventy-five hundred performances at the very least, and not a hundred and fifty that have given any real idea of the theatrical power and brilliance and effectiveness of this great practical playwright. A good deal of the poetry has survived these productions, and some of the sheer melodrama and slapstick comedy, but almost none of the expert dramaturgy, the rounded sense of the theater, the deliberate skill in the organization of scene and plot which made Shakspere's plays popular successes three hundred years ago. We have applauded half a dozen of our stars for keeping Shakspere alive when they were actually doing their best to crush the amazing vitality out of him. The indictment is long, but it can be summarized in five points. They have loaded down the plays with ugly realistic scenery. They have cut up and rearranged the plays to fit this scenery. They have ripped out whole scenes, episodes, and characters to make room for the long waits with which this scenery interrupts the swiftly running story. They have

have permitted these actors to drone out the words which some one who knew a good deal about Shaksperian production said should be spoken "trippingly on the tongue."

We have sent our boys and girls from high school to see Shakspere thus hacked, tortured, and half dead after preparing them with a course in boredom which treats Shakspere as an apostle of culture instead of a playwright who is quite as likable and clever a story-teller as George M. Cohan or D. W. Griffith. The miracle of it all is that we should have a dramatist of such supreme genius that he can go through these tortures and come out with the breath of life still in him.

If we want to stop this horrid and inhuman spectacle, if we want to enjoy in Shakspere the full, tremendous vitality which his contemporaries felt, if we want to make his plays as genuinely popular in America as they are in Germany, we have only to recognize three facts and act upon them. We must recognize that Shakspere knew what he was about, and we must play his pieces as he wrote them. We

must recognize that he wrote them for a very special sort of stage and we must give them a kind of production that approximates the conditions of this stage. We must recognize that upon Shakspere's own stage the plays were acted swiftly and lyrically, and we must ban producers who mangle Shakspere and "Shaksperian" actors who mouth his words.

"Back to Shakspere!" is the essential formula.

How distant he has grown in all the three hundred years in which English and American editors, actors, producers, and critics have dealt with him! It is an amazing history of distortion: plays pirated and carelessly and inaccurately printed in the playwright's lifetime, supplied with scene and act divisions years later by editors lacking both knowledge and imagination, rewritten and altered by a long line of busy inferiors, bewigged and knickerbockered by Garrick, smothered in scenery by Irving and Tree, cut up and rearranged to please the stage hands of the realistic theater; yet alive enough through it all to prove to a few German producers that Shakspere knew his business and that his disciples and parasites did not know theirs.

The problem of understanding Shakspere, of piercing three hundred years of obfuscation, of finding out what sort of stage he wrote for and how the conditions of that stage could be approximated in our own playhouses, was a terrifically hard problem, the hardest ever faced in the theater, the hardest perhaps in all literature. When the problem was first attacked, a hundred years ago, there were virtually no documents, no records, no pictures to aid in the research, and to day there are very few. The task was

a double one, doubly involved. It was necessary to reconstruct Shakspere's stage almost entirely from a study of his plays, and it was equally necessary to make over his plays, to bring them back to what must have been their original form, in the light of this knowledge of his stage.

Modern understanding of Shakspere begins with Goethe and ends with the movies. In the seventy-seventh year of his life, nine years after he had put aside the directorship of the Court Theater in Weimar, Goethe made a discovery. Reading one of the first editions of Shakspere, a quarto, he noticed that there were virtually no scene or act divisions; these had been supplied by editors of a later time. But, more than that, Goethe noticed that scene divisions were not particularly important. The play flowed along as well even though the word "Exeunt" took the place of "Curtain," and the castle of Macbeth or the forest of Arden was described in the dialogue instead of in the stage directions. This discovery excited Goethe inordinately, for it created a new picture of the poet's stage and the poet's method.

Goethe saw definitely, if not completely, the nature of Shakspere's method. It was a method of storytelling surprisingly like that of the movies. Shakspere played upon the mind of his audience with something of the logic which a scenario-writer uses to-day. He flung out scene after scene with no thought of the unities of time or place, but with a very clear sense of continuity in the developing narrative and emotion. He assembled his action bit by bit in a sequence of episodes that would contribute to the understanding of his audience. It did not matter to him whether they were

episodes of only a minute's duration or scenes of half an hour in length. "Hamlet" is a play that we can divide into twenty scenes, "Macbeth" falls into twenty-nine in present-day texts; yet in "Othello" there is one episode that runs for more than half an hour of playing time. Shakspere tossed his scenes back and forth, piled them on top of one another with the same freedom that a motion-picture director employs. His only test was the movie test: Do these scenes build up plot and emotion, and is their sequence clear and logical to the audience?

There are certain devices of Shakspere's dramaturgy that parallel very closely the scenography of D. W. Griffith. For example, Shakspere took as great care as the picture-producer that the logic of time should be clear. He felt it essential that there should be no long and unexplained gap of time between successive scenes. If the hero was the last to leave one scene, he was not the first to enter the next; other characters appeared at the beginning and prepared the mind of the audience for his coming, or supplied an interim in which he could be imagined as making the journey. If the jump of time and space was too great, Shakspere thrust another scene in between, just as the movies do. For this purpose the sub-plot served admirably. By alternating the events of the main plot and of its subsidiary, this matter of logical time development was taken care of while the two plots progressed smoothly and went forward with equal rapidity toward their clash at the climax.

The result is not only a parallel with the time concept of the movies; it is also a parallel with the "flash-back.' Griffith, in the climax of many of his

films, "The Birth of a Nation," for example, keeps two plots running abreast and filling the interstices of time in one another, in much the same fashion that the main plots and the sub-plots of Shakspere developed. Another interesting parallel is provided by the chorus of certain plays of Shakspere and the "descriptive subtitles," or long explanatory captions, of the movies. In the episodic "Henry V" the chorus serves to bridge the gulfs in time and place. Between the ultimatum delivered by Exeter to the King of France and the beginning of the conflict at Harfleur, for example, the chorus steps forth to tell the audience of how the people of England rallied to the war and to bid them picture the fleet descending on Harfleur. The method, at least, is the method of the scenario-writer, though the language is miles above him.

When Goethe and Tieck and Immermann and other explorers of the technic of Shakspere went back to the original quartos to study his method without the intervention of later editors trying to fit it into the shell of eighteenth-century dramaturgy, they discovered that the many short scenes were so arranged that they could be played in rapid succession, and they made the natural deduction that the Elizabethan actors played them in this fashion without the intervention of curtain or intermission. They noted, in fact, that a drop-curtain was quite outside the conception of Shakspere. No characters were ever "discovered" upon the stage: they walked on. No one was ever left on the stage at the end of a scene, not even a corpse. The living walked off, and somebody was sure to give very explicit directions for carrying away the dead bodies.