In the case of music, fortunately, something more than custom forbids:  the nature of music forbids.  But the play is at the mercy of the actor-manager, and the actor-manager has no mercy.  In England a serious play, above all a poetic play, is not put on by any but small, unsuccessful, more or less private and unprofessional people with any sort of reverence for art, beauty, or, indeed, for the laws and conditions of the drama which is literature as well as drama.  Personal vanity and the pecuniary necessity of long runs are enough in themselves to account for the failure of most attempts to combine Shakespeare with show, poetry with the box-office.  Or is there in our actor-managers a lack of this very sense of what is required in the proper rendering of imaginative work on the stage?

It is in the staging and acting, the whole performance and management, of such typical plays of Shakespeare as “Hamlet,” “Romeo and Juliet,” and “Twelfth Night” that Mr. Sothern and Miss Marlowe have shown the whole extent of their powers, and have read us the lesson we most needed.  The mission of these two guests has been to show us what we have lost on our stage and what we have forgotten in our Shakespeare.  And first of all I would note the extraordinary novelty and life which they give to each play as a whole by their way of setting it in action.  I have always felt that a play of Shakespeare, seen on the stage, should give one the same kind of impression as when one is assisting at “a solemn music.”  The rhythm of Shakespeare’s art is not fundamentally different from that of Beethoven, and “Romeo and Juliet” is a suite, “Hamlet” a symphony.  To act either of these plays with whatever qualities of another kind, and to fail in producing this musical rhythm from beginning to end, is to fail in the very foundation.  Here the music was unflawed; there were no digressions, no eccentricities, no sacrifice to the actor.  This astonishing thing occurred:  that a play was presented for its own sake, with reverence, not with ostentation; for Shakespeare’s sake, not for the actor-manager’s.

And from this intelligent, unostentatious way of giving Shakespeare there come to us, naturally, many lessons.  Until I saw this performance of “Romeo and Juliet” I thought there was rhetoric in the play, as well as the natural poetry of drama.  But I see that it only needs to be acted with genius and intelligence, and the poetry consumes the rhetoric.  I never knew before that this play was so near to life, or that every beauty in it could be made so inevitably human.  And this is because no one else has rendered, with so deep a truth, with so beautiful a fidelity, all that is passionate and desperate and an ecstatic agony in this tragic love which glorifies and destroys Juliet.  The decorative Juliet of the stage we know, the lovely picture, the ingenue, the prattler of pretty phrases; but this mysterious, tragic child, whom love has made wise in making her a woman,