Had they been shown there, they would almost inevitably have got into the prints. It is a peculiarity of the surreptitious First Quarto of Romeo and Juliet, that its later sheets, which differ typographically from the earlier ones, although they do not number either acts or scenes, insert lines of ornament at the points at which acts and scenes may be supposed to begin. It must be added that, so far as an Elizabethan playwright looked upon his work as made up of scenes, his conception of a scene was not as a rule that familiar to us upon the modern stage. The modern scene may be defined as a piece of action continuous in time and place between two falls of a drop-curtain. The Elizabethans had no drop-curtain, and the drawing of an alcove curtain, at any rate while personages remain on the stage without, does not afford the same solution of continuity. The nearest analogy is perhaps in such a complete clearance of the stage, generally with a shift of locality, as enables the imagination to assume a time interval. A few texts, generally of the seventeenth century, are divided into scenes on this principle of clearance; and it was adopted by the editors of the First Folio, when, in a half-hearted way, they attempted to divide up the continuous texts of their manuscripts and quartos.[1] But it was not the principle of the neo-classic dramatists, or of Ben Jonson and his school. For them a scene was a section, not of action, but of dialogue; and they started a new scene whenever a speaker, or at any rate a speaker of importance, entered or left the stage. This is the conception which is in the mind of Marston when he regrets, in the preface to The Malcontent, that 'scenes, invented merely to be spoken, should be enforcively published to be read'. It is also the conception of the French classicist drama, although the English playwrights do not follow the French rule of liaison, which requires at least one speaker from each scene to remain on into the next, and thus secures continuity throughout each act by making a complete clearance of the stage impossible.[2]
