That a headache too often follows hard upon a
dramatic entertainment must be tolerably plain to anyone who has ever
sat in a theatre. Surely a better state of things must have existed a
century ago, when the grandsires and great-grandsires of us Londoners
were in the habit of frequenting the theatres night after night,
almost as punctually as they ate their dinner or sipped their claret
or their punch. To look in at Drury Lane or Covent Garden, if only to
witness an act or two of the tragedy or comedy of the evening, was a
sort of duty with the town gentlemen, wits, and Templars, a hundred
years back, when George III. was king. But gas had not then superseded
wax, and tallow, and oil.
Beyond increasing the _quantity_ of light, stage management has done
little since Garrick's introduction of foot-lights, or "floats," as
they are technically termed, in the way of satisfactorily adjusting
the illumination of the stage. The light still comes from the wrong
place: from below instead of, naturally, from above. In 1863, Mr.
Fechter, at the Lyceum, sank the _floats_ below the surface of the
stage, so that they should not intercept the view of the spectator;
and his example has been followed by other managers; and of late
years, owing to accidents having occurred to the dresses of the
dancers when they approached too near to the foot-lights, these have
been carefully fenced and guarded with wire screens and metal bars.
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