Punch, or the London Charivari, page 29 by Various Authors
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hat, since the audience has to bear the strain of unavoidable convention, you should not wantonly add to their worry. And, anyhow, the human figures on your stage (I leave out fairies and superhumans for the moment) are bound to challenge reality by the fact that they are alive. If Mr. BARKER wants to be consistent (and he would probably repudiate so Philistine a suggestion) his figures should be marionettes worked by strings; and for words--if you must have words--he might himself read the text from a corner of the top landing of his proscenium.
[Illustration: Hermia (Miss Laura Cowie). "I upon this bank will rest my head."]
And the strange thing is that no one in the world has a nicer sense of the beauty of SHAKSPEARE'S verse than Mr. BARKER. Indeed he protests in his preface: "They (the fairies) must be not too startling.... They mustn't warp your imagination--stepping too boldly between SHAKSPEARE'S spirit and yours." (The italics are my own comment.) He is of course free, within limits, to choose his own convention about fairies, because we have never seen them, though some of us say we have. Mr. CHESTERTON naturally says they can be of any size; Mr. BARKER says they can be of any age from little Peaseblossom and his young friends to hoary antiques with moustaches like ram's horns and beards trickling down to their knees. And as many as like it, and are not afraid of being poisoned, may have gilt faces that make them look like Hindoo idols with the miraculous gift of perspiration. But he should please remember that the play is not his own. It is, in point of fact, SHAKSPEARE'S, and I am certain he was not properly consulted about the Orientalisation of the fairies out of his Warwickshire woodlands. You will be told that he has been properly consulted; that he himself makes Titania say that Oberon has "come from the furthest steppe of India," and that she too had breathed "the spiced Indian air." But on the same authority Mr. BAR