Many good things have been destroyed in our time; the procedure ought not to feel surprising; and yet it seems gratuitous to have the standard techniques of propaganda used against the equipment of Shakespeare's theatre. The busy work has been going on for twenty or thirty years now, especially against the use of an upper and inner stage; and this offers a good occasion for the looney quality which seems essential to propaganda, because nobody could read the plays with the original stage directions without finding that they treat the “above” and the “within” as a matter of course. This indeed is how our standard views of the Elizabethan stage have been built up – they had to be, because we are extremely short of information otherwise; but the opponents, as I understand, maintain that such work (using insight and intuition and what not) does not count as evidence at all. What the authors say, and even what they can be felt to intend, is probably only medieval symbolism or something; the Devil alone knoweth the heart of man. But the impressions of a foreigner during a brief visit to London, as sketched by a friend who had never been there, and could not draw – that's real hard evidence; “we have no right” to belittle it, they say (but any stage with a back to it has a central aperture, the place for a grand entry).