Henry once said to me:  “‘Hamlet’ could be played anywhere on its acting merits.  It marches from situation to situation.  But ‘Romeo and Juliet’ proceeds from picture to picture.  Every line suggests a picture.  It is a dramatic poem rather than a drama, and I mean to treat it from that point of view.”

While he was preparing the production he revived “The Two Roses,” a company in which as Digby Grant he had made a great success years before.  I rehearsed the part of Lottie two or three times, but Henry released me because I was studying Juliet; and as he said, “You’ve got to do all you know with it.”

Perhaps the sense of this responsibility weighed on me.  Perhaps I was neither young enough nor old enough to play Juliet.  I read everything that had ever been written about her before I had myself decided what she was.  It was a dreadful mistake.  That was the first thing wrong with my Juliet—­lack of original impulse.

As for the second and the third and the fourth—­well, I am not more than common vain, I trust, but I see no occasion to write them all down.

It was perhaps the greatest opportunity that I had yet had at the Lyceum.  I studied the part at my cottage at Hampton Court in a bedroom looking out over the park.  There was nothing wrong with that.  By the way, how important it is to be careful about environment and everything else when one is studying.  One ought to be in the country, but not all the time....  It is good to go about and see pictures, hear music, and watch everything.  One should be very much alone, and should study early and late—­all night, if need be, even at the cost of sleep.  Everything that one does or thinks or sees will have an effect upon the part, precisely as on an unborn child.

I wish now that instead of reading how this and that actress had played Juliet, and cracking my brain over the different readings of her lines and making myself familiar with the different opinions of philosophers and critics, I had gone to Verona, and just imagined.  Perhaps the most wonderful description of Juliet, as she should be acted, occurs in Gabriele d’Annunzio’s “Il Fuoco.”  In the book an Italian actress tells her friend how she played the part when she was a girl of fourteen in an open-air theater near Verona.  Could a girl of fourteen play such a part?  Yes, if she were not youthful, only young with the youth of the poet, tragically old as some youth is.

Now I understand Juliet better.  Now I know how she should be played.  But time is inexorable.  At sixty, know what one may, one cannot play Juliet.

I know that Henry Irving’s production of “Romeo and Juliet” has been attributed to my ambition.  What nonsense!  Henry Irving now had in view the production of all Shakespeare’s actable plays, and naturally “Romeo and Juliet” would come as early as possible in the programme.

The music was composed by Sir Julius Benedict, and was exactly right.  There was no leit-motiv, no attempt to reflect the passionate emotion of the drama, but a great deal of Southern joy, of flutes and wood and wind.  At a rehearsal which had lasted far into the night I asked Sir Julius, who was very old, if he wasn’t sleepy.