Excerpt from A Study of the Drama As we seize the importance of these lines of ap proach, the historical and the practical, we see that a soundknowledge of the drama is not possible unless we seek to attain both a perspective of its develop ment and an insight into its technic. Just as the study of music is most stimulating when it includes an in quiry into the value of each of the several instruments, and also into their gradual combination into the most marvelous instrument of them all, the modern orches tra, so the study of the drama is most likely to be profit able when it leads us to consider the successive modi fications in the shape and size of the theaters wherein plays were acted; the varying circumstances of per formance to which the playwrights had to conform; the conventions of the art, some of them shifting from century to century or from country to country, and some of them immutable in the very nature of the drama. Especially stimulating is it for us to recognize the real unity of history, the continuity of the art of the drama, which enables us so often to explain the past by the present and the present by the past. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.