The Duke and his companions were dressed in serge tunics,leathernjerkins,high boots and gauntlets,and wore bycocket hats andhoods.And as they were playing in a real forest,they found,I amsure,their dresses extremely convenient.To every character inthe play was given a perfectly appropriate attire,and the brownand green of their costumes harmonised exquisitely with the fernsthrough which they wandered,the trees beneath which they lay,andthe lovely English landscape that surrounded the Pastoral Players.
The perfect naturalness of the scene was due to the absoluteaccuracy and appropriateness of everything that was worn.Norcould archaeology have been put to a severer test,or come out ofit more triumphantly.The whole production showed once for allthat,unless a dress is archaeologically correct,and artisticallyappropriate,it always looks unreal,unnatural,and theatrical inthe sense of artificial.
Nor,again,is it enough that there should be accurate andappropriate costumes of beautiful colours;there must be alsobeauty of colour on the stage as a whole,and as long as thebackground is painted by one artist,and the foreground figuresindependently designed by another,there is the danger of a want ofharmony in the scene as a picture.For each scene the colour-scheme should be settled as absolutely as for the decoration of aroom,and the textures which it is proposed to use should be mixedand re-mixed in every possible combination,and what is discordantremoved.Then,as regards the particular kinds of colours,thestage is often too glaring,partly through the excessive use ofhot,violent reds,and partly through the costumes looking too new.
Shabbiness,which in modern life is merely the tendency of thelower orders towards tone,is not without its artistic value,andmodern colours are often much improved by being a little faded.
