The so-called Elizabethan multiple stage is perhaps best illustrated in the reconstruction by John Cranford Adams. This consists of the following elements: an “outer stage,” an “inner stage” or “study,” obliquely set tiring-house doors (one on either side of the inner stage), obliquely set second-story “window-stages” (one above each of the tiring-house doors), an “upper stage” or “chamber” directly above the inner stage, a “tarras” or balcony running in front of the upper-stage curtains, a third-story musicroom directly above the upper stage, and a system of six traps set in the outer and inner stages. At one time or another (one supposes) most students of the Elizabethan stage have accepted this complex combination of separate playing-areas as more or less “Elizabethan“; and most of them have also, in time, come to be more or less disillusioned with the conception.

Until a few years ago, aestheticians, critics, and literary historians accorded sociology only marginal status. However, the availability of Georg Lukacs’ early work, the psychological and epistemological researches of Jean Piaget, and the acceptance of the dialectic as genetic structuralism has changed all that.

Traditional sociology —which still dominates university teaching — tried to relate the content of a literary work to the content of the collective unconscious: how men think and act in daily life. Such criticism becomes more effective the more mundane is the writer being studied, content merely to relate his experiences without imaginatively transposing them. Structural sociology begins from premises that exclude those of traditional sociology.

In the early fifties, Brecht wanted to change from “epic” theatre to “dialectical” theatre. The latter was to keep the “narrative element” of the former, but had a distinct aim: “ … deliberately to develop features —dialectical vestiges —from earlier forms of theatre and make them enjoyable” (Schriften zum Theatre, vol. 7, p. 316). “Developmental laws” were to be worked out by means of “the dialectic of the classical writers of socialism, so that we could perceive and enjoy the alterability of the world.” To this end, it would be necessary to make perceptible the “imperceptible contradictions” in all things, people, processes. Alienation techniques were to be used to depict the “contradictions and development of human co-existence,” and to make dialectic “a source of learning and enjoyment.”