is unknown to us outside Shakespeare, and perhaps even there.  Mr. Sothern’s Romeo has an exquisite passion, young and extravagant as a lover’s, and is alive.  But Miss Marlowe is not only lovely and pathetic as Juliet; she is Juliet.  I would not say that Mr. Sothern’s Hamlet is the only Hamlet, for there are still, no doubt, “points in Hamlet’s soul unseized by the Germans yet.”  Yet what a Hamlet!  How majestical, how simple, how much a poet and a gentleman!  To what depth he suffers!  How magnificently he interprets, in the crucifixion of his own soul, the main riddles of the universe!  In “Hamlet,” too, I saw deeper meanings than I had ever seen in the play when it was acted.  Mr. Sothern was the only quite sane Hamlet; his madness is all the outer coverings of wisdom; there was nothing fantastic in his grave, subdued, powerful, and piteous representation, in which no symbol, no metaphysical Faust, no figment of a German brain, loomed before us, but a man, more to be pitied and not less to be honoured than any man in Elsinore.  I have seen romantic, tragic, exceptional Hamlets, the very bells on the cap of “Fortune’s fool.”  But at last I have seen the man himself, as Shakespeare saw him living, a gentleman, as well as a philosopher, a nature of fundamental sincerity; no melancholy clown, but the greatest of all critics of life.  And the play, with its melodrama and its lyrical ecstasy, moved before one’s eyes like a religious service.  How is it that we get from the acting and management of these two actors a result which no one in England has ever been able to get?  Well, in the first place, as I have said, they have the odd caprice of preferring Shakespeare to themselves; the odd conviction that fidelity to Shakespeare will give them the best chance of doing great things themselves.  Nothing is accidental, everything obeys a single intention; and what, above all, obeys that intention is the quality of inspiration, which is never absent and never uncontrolled.  Intention without the power of achievement is almost as lamentable a thing as achievement not directed by intention.  Now here are two players in whom technique has been carried to a supreme point.  There is no actor on our stage who can speak either English or verse as these two American actors can.  It is on this preliminary technique, this power of using speech as one uses the notes of a musical instrument, that all possibility of great acting depends.  Who is there that can give us, not the external gesture, but the inner meaning, of some beautiful and subtle passage in Shakespeare?  One of our actors will give it sonorously, as rhetoric, and another eagerly, as passionate speech, but no one with the precise accent of a man who is speaking his thoughts, which is what Shakespeare makes his characters do when he puts his loveliest poetry into their mouths.  Look at Mr. Sothern when he gives the soliloquy “To be or not to be,” which we are accustomed to hear spoken to the public in one or another of many