Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/372

316 Entries of rewards to such players swarm in Corporation Accounts, and it is the doings of these companies of actors which are ruled out of court by the author I have alluded to.

The dramatic activity in our country before the Shakespeare epos is extraordinary, if we consider its quantity merely. But because it was crude, and was immediately followed by surpassing art, it cannot be divorced from that art. The dramatic aptitude of the English folk, and the energy that must have been thrown into obsolete, lost, and forgotten dramas, had their reward when culture and genius condescended to them. They had made a conduit pipe through which could flow music and wisdom from the highest to the lowest. But the making of that pipe belongs to the folk. And we are to consider that however open to ridicule the folk-players might be, as in Midsummer Night’s Dream, or to correction as in Hamlet, the acting of the best of them, who naturally gravitated to the metropolis, must have been good to have attracted and retained the attention of culture. The word “drama” primarily signifies “action”; and however the playwrights may have ransacked classical sources for their plays, the dramatic action they could not borrow. That at least was original, and if not original, traditional.

All symbolic or concerted action and gesture are exceedingly traditionary. It is a point to which I shall allude in another connection presently; but I introduce it now because it applies to every stage of development. In this matter we are still children, and resent variation. We all remember that when Mr. Irving was unfolding his series of Shakespearean conceptions some years ago at the Lyceum, how his new renderings were rejected by many. We always want to see plays acted as we have seen them acted before. It is only recently that the venerable stage-tradition in Hamlet, by which the First Gravedigger was made to take off innumerable waistcoats before setting to work, has given