An attendant came on to the platform, first, and made trivial and apparently unnecessary alterations in the position of the reading desk.  A glass of water and a book were placed on it.

After a portentous wait, on swept a lady with an extraordinary flashing eye, a masculine and muscular outside.  Pounding the book with terrific energy, as if she wished to knock the stuffing out of it, she announced in thrilling tones: 

     “‘HAM—­A—­LETTE.’

     By

     Will—­y—­am Shak—­es—­peare.”

“I suppose this is all right,” thought the young clerk, a little dismayed at the fierce and sectional enunciation.

Then the reader came to Act I, Sc. 2, which the old actor (to leave the Kemble reading for a minute), with but a hazy notion of the text, used to begin: 

    “Although of Hamlet, our dear brother’s death,
    The memory be—­memory be—­(What is the color?) green"....

When Fanny Kemble came to this scene the future Hamlet began to listen more intently.

     Gertrude:  Let not thy mother lose her prayers, Ham—­a—­lette.

     Hamlet:  I shall in all respects obey you, madam (obviously with
     a fiery flashing eye of hate upon the King).

When he heard this and more like it, Henry Irving exercised his independence of opinion and refused to accept Fanny Kemble’s view of the gentle, melancholy, and well-bred Prince of Denmark.

He was a stickler for tradition, and always studied it, followed it, sometimes to his own detriment, but he was not influenced by the Kemble Hamlet, except that for some time he wore the absurd John Philip feather, which he would have been much better without!

Let me pray that I, representing the old school, may never look on the new school with the patronizing airs of “Old Fitz"[1] and Fanny Kemble.  I wish that I could see the new school of acting in Shakespeare.  Shakespeare must be kept up, or we shall become a third-rate nation!

[Footnote 1:  Edward FitzGerald.]

Henry told me this story of Fanny Kemble’s reading without a spark of ill-nature, but with many a gleam of humor.  He told me at the same time of the wonderful effect that Adelaide Kemble (Mrs. Sartoris) used to make when she recited Shelley’s lines, beginning: 

    “Good-night—­Ah, no, the hour is ill
      Which severs those it should unite. 
    Let us remain together still—­
      Then it will be good-night!”

I have already said that I never could cope with Pauline Deschapelles, and why Henry wanted to play Melnotte was a mystery.  Claude Melnotte after Hamlet!  Oddly enough, Henry was always attracted by fustian.  He simply reveled in the big speeches.  The play was beautifully staged; the garden scene alone probably cost as much as the whole of “Hamlet.”  The march past the window of the apparently unending army—­that good old trick which sends the supers flying round the back-cloth to cross the stage again and again—­created a superb effect.  The curtain used to go up and down as often as we liked and chose to keep the army marching!  The play ran some time, I suppose because even at our worst the public found something in our acting to like.