Excerpt from As You Like It: Shakespeare Each of the plays of Shakespeare is divided into five acts, and the acts into a variable number of scenes. This division was not made by Shakespeare himself, but by some of his editors. The division -into acts is merely mechanical, to allow the audience periods of rest, to give the actors time for change of costume, and to facilitate change of scenery and properties. The division into. Scenes, however, is more organic. According to the English custom, a scene ends whenever the stage is cleared of characters, and so marks a distinct unit of the action. 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.