Still the
sages shook their heads, distrusting the change, and prophesying evil
of it. Even Mr. Payne Collier has been moved by his conservative
regard for the Elizabethan stage and the early drama to date from the
introduction of scenery the beginning of the decline of our dramatic
poetry. He holds it a fortunate circumstance for the poetry of our old
plays, that "painted movable scenery" had not then been introduced.
"The imagination only of the auditor was appealed to, and we owe to
the absence of painted canvas many of the finest descriptive passages
in Shakespeare, his contemporaries, and immediate followers." Further,
he states his opinion that our old dramatists "luxuriated in passages
descriptive of natural or artificial scenery, because they knew their
auditors would have nothing before their eyes to contradict the
poetry; the hangings of the stage made little pretensions to anything
but coverings for the walls, and the notion of the place represented
was taken from what was said by the poet, and not from what was
attempted by the painter."
It need hardly be stated that the absence of scenes and scene-shifting
had by no means confined the British drama to a classical form,
although regard for "unity of place," at any rate, might seem to be
almost logically involved in the immovable condition of the
stage-fittings.
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