"The voice of Mercury is harsh after the songs of Apollo.' But the Folio makes him add: "You this way, I that way," probably an aside to an actor who had mistaken his exit. Some of these are very curious. In The Troublesome Raine we have: "Enter the nobles and crowne King John, and then crie, God Save the King." And sometimes the stage direction gives the actors a hint only as to what they shall say, as (Troublesome Raine): "Enter Philip leading a Frier, charging him to show where the Abbot's gold lay." In the blackletter Quarto of 1598 of "The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, containing the Honourable Battell of Agin-court," the stage descriptions are of the crudest. We have: Speaks to himself, and, half a page further on: She goes aside and speakes as followeth, instead of aside. He goith, instead of exit (in one instance). He weeps, instead of weeps. The king dieth, instead of dies. Enter knights raunging. He delivereth a ton of tennis balls. She beateth him. "Strike, Drummer. The Frenchmen crie within, S. Dennis, S. Dennis, Mount Foy, S. Dennis. The Battell. Enter King of England and His Lords." "Enters Dericke roming. After him a Frenchman and takes him prisoner." "Here the Frenchman laies down his sword, and the clowne takes it vp and hurles him downe." "Here, while he turnes his backe, the Frenchman runnes his wayes." "Enters Dericke with his girdle full of shooes." "Enters Iohn Cobbler roning, with a packe full of apparell."

So far, at least, we are able to conjecture what would have been the properties used to play Titus Andronicus, and can imagine how large a part the action of a smite on the neck with a sword, "to signify death," must have been of the whole. But some of these stage directions require a little further light. We have "Enter Lavinia ravished" in Act II., and possibly might conclude that the actor was content to satisfy this business with a generally dishevelled appearance and make-up, were it not that flowing and dishevelled hair was stage language for virginity at that period. But the audiences at this date were not apt to be squeamish, and stood realism quite as stoutly as

it has ever been clamored for since. The priests who engineered the Miracle plays had stopped at nothing in their conviction that Bible scenes might be given to the people in the most realistic doses. The libretto and stage directions of at least one of these Coventry mysteries, The Woman Taken in Adultery, would scarcely be admitted to these pages. One of the least offensive of these directions may perhaps be quoted, but it is best to quote it in its original dog-Latin. It runs: "Hic juvenis quidam extra currit in diploide, caligis non ligatis et braccas in manu tenens, et dicit accusator." And in the Mystery or Morality of Mary Magdalene (one of the Digby Mysteries), in order to emphasize the blissfulness of her later state, the priestly authors considered it necessary to delineate the young lady's original lapse from the path of exact moral rectitude, in a scene which, judging from the stage directions, was certainly not the least spirited and realistic of the piece. (But this was certainly no worse than what the modern stage has done in the last realistic renaissance. In Paris in 1873 there was played a piece called Susanna and the Elders, concerning which a morning newspaper gravely announced: "Ce soir, si la police ne prenient pas, Suzanne ne fira point d'opposition a l'acte de seduction; and there was nothing in a certain scene in Sardou's La Tosca lacking to bring it up, if not to the level of a Miracle play, at least to the ravishment act in Titus Andronicus. And if priests had paused at nothing less than reality, why should profane players have been contented with mere verisimilitude? A ballad written to lampoon Marlowe recites that "He had also a player been,

Upon the Curtain stage,

But broke his leg in one lewd scene
When in his early age."

From which we need not hesitate to conclude that the ravishment scene between Chiron, Demetrius, and Lavinia, in the play we are considering, was done without overmuch delicacy or prudery. For the rest of the play, at any rate, Lavinia's lost hands and tongue could have been done not so very repulsively by a bandage or two and a little carmine. The burial scene in

the first act, the hiding of the gold, and the pit into which Titus's
sons are tumbled, were, of course, effected by using the trap. As
to the business which accompanied, the passage V., ii., 180:
"This one hand yet is left to cut your throats,

Whilst that Lavinia 'tween her stumps doth hold
The basin that receives your guilty blood,"

the stage direction, run around or struggle, must be implied, as, doubtless the attempt to act two able-bodied young men standing up in a row to have their throats cut by a onearmed old man, while a girl holds up a basin under the chin of each during the operation (which is precisely the action the text calls for), would have been hooted off the stage by the extremely particular, even if not especially orderly, audiences we are soon to get a glimpse of. Equally we must presume a little dumb show or pantomime, not hinted at in either text or stage directions, for the pie that was made of the ground-up bones of Chiron and Demetrius. Perhaps a basin covered with canvas was borne in by Titus Andronicus "dressed as a cook," with his one hand and stump (which stump later on does not seem to have troubled him, when he came to the stage directions, fifteen lines apart: "Killing Lavinia," "killing Tamora.") I suppose the business, two lines further down, which directs Saturnius to kill Titus, or, at the space of two lines more, Lucius to kill Saturnius, to assume that everybody in this play carried a sword, and the direction: "A great tumult. The people in confusion disperse. Marcus, Lucius, and their partisans go up into the balcony," to signify that this "pavilion " scene required the full depth of the stage, so that the balcony above described could be used, and the curtains be rolled up. In Scene ii. of Act. V., line 9, we have "Titus opens his study door," having first read: "Rome before Titus's house." In Scene i. of Act IV. is a realistic piece of acting which well merits attention. (It could not have been better done to-day.) Titus, Marcus, and young Lucius have entered; and Lavinia, tongueless and handless, rushes in after them. She tries in dumb show to aid them in conjecturing who has assaulted and mutilated her. Young Lucius, it seems, on enter

ing, has a parcel of books under his arm, out of which he has been pursuing his studies in Roman literature. He drops these books and cries to Titus for help, fearing that his aunt Lavinia means him some evil. But Titus tells him that she loves him too well to do him harm. Meanwhile Lavinia turns over the books and lifts them one by one between her stumps. This Marcus says he thinks" means that there was more than one confederate in the act." Lavinia, satisfied with this interpretation of her pantomime, drops all but one book, which she tosses up and down. Titus asks Lucius what book this is, and Lucius says: "Grandsire, it is Ovid's Metamorphoses." Lavinia then stops tossing the book and begins turning the leaves with her stumps and finds :

"The tragic tale of Philomel

Which treats of Tereus' treason and his rape."

Of course, all now understand that Lavinia would tell of the assault upon her, whereupon Marcus (we quote stage directions) "writes his name" (in the dust) "with his staff, and guides it with feet and mouth," saying: "I have writ my name without the help of any hand at all." Lavinia thereupon is quick to see the point, and, on being handed the staff, "takes" it "in her mouth and guides it with her stumps and writes: ""Stuprum, Chiron, Demetrius;" and so the painful story, which has already been partly acted and partly told in Scene iii. of Act II. with such horrible minuteness under the repulsive supervision of Tamora, is revealed to Lavinia's father, brother, and nephew. That Titus should, after all, kill Lavinia is, of course, a touch of Virginius, and Titus so states the precedent on accomplishing the act.

In Scene ii. ("a forest. Horns and cry of hounds heard. Horns wind a peal "), of course, the pit in which Aaron hides his gold, and into which he leads Quintus and Martius, is the trap of which we have spoken. When Titus goes mad and shoots off arrows, with letters tied to them, at his enemies, one of which contains the singularly inapposite quotation from Horace: "Integer vitæ," etc.; when (V., i., 51) a ladder is brought in and held for Araon (with a black baby in his arms)

to ascend in order to be hung (though the text seems to forget. all about it, and Aaron lives to be buried alive in the last scene); and when (IV., iv., 75) a clown brings in two pigeons in a basket (IV., ii., 20); when (III., i., 232) “Enter a messenger with two heads and a hand" (that is, carrying these members), as. well as when Titus with his one hand cuts the throats of Chiron and Demetrius (who do not appear to resist the opera-tion, but obey Titus's order to "prepare their throats" with acquiesence not to say alacrity, while Lavinia catches the blood in her basin), we may well imagine that the acting of young Shakespeare's first dramatic effort (in view of the general massacre and carnage, it does not seem a mixing of metaphor to call it "fleshing his maiden sword") made a considerable draft upon the property man of the theatre.

(To be concluded.)

APPLETON MORGAN.

A STUDY IN "MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING."

Quarto.

II.

THE STATUTE OF JAMES.

HE Folio editors have in some instances altered passages in which occur the name of God; * in others they have omitted them altogether.t One of the latter occurs in this play, Bankside lines, 1919-1922,

"One reformation indeed there seems to have been made, and that very laudable: I mean the substitution of more general terms for a name too often unnecessarily invoked on the stage; . . . and their caution. against profaneness is, in my opinion, the only thing for which we are indebted to the judgment of the Folio editors."-Steevens.

"I doubt whether we are so much indebted to the judgment of the editors of the Folio edition for their caution against profaneness as to the Statute 3 Jac. I., c. 21, which prohibits, under severe penalties, the use of the sacred name in any plays or interludes. This occasioned the playhouse copies to be altered, and they printed from the playhouse copies." -Blackstone, quoted by Malone. Edition 1821, Vol. I., p. 112.

Confer Walker's "Examination of the Text of Shakespeare," Vol. I., pp. 213-218; Cambridge Edition, 1863, Vol. I., pref., p. xx.