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And this is curious, considering the general colour of the dress of a century in which, as Baudelaire says, 'Nous celebrons tous quelque enterrement. The archaeologist of the future will probably point to this age as the time when the beauty of black was understood; but I hardly think that, as regards stage-mounting or house decoration, it really is.
The nineteenth, according to him, is "noteworthy for the extraordinary advance made in the presentation of plays on the stage." In other words, the seventeenth is great drama, the eighteenth great acting, and the nineteenth great stage-mounting.
Shakespeare is frequently played but, although the stage-mounting has been exceptionally good, and we have had such very fair actors as Creswick, and Hoskins, and Scott-Siddons, a high, authority has recently declared that Rignold's 'Henry V. is the only Shakespearean performance, that has paid for many years. The average quality of the acting on the Australian boards is by no means good.
The incident shows a lamentable love of stage-mounting for which some of the critics of the time no doubt took the poet severely to task. In connection with the love of pageantry which then prevailed, it is well known that Shakespeare and Ben Jonson were wont to arrange the Masques which were so much in vogue in their time. The Fire The Globe Theatre was burnt on June 29th, 1613.
Mr H.B. Irving, in a lecture given at the Royal Institution, ascribed the alleged pre-eminence of actors during the Garrick period to the weakness of the current drama and the economy in stage-mounting, two matters that forced the players to tremendous exertion in order to hold the house, which, by the way, he believes to have been very finely critical.
This raises rather a large question about stage-mounting; if the majority are not sensitive, then business instinct demands that the colour-scheme should be crude.
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