rhetorical manners.  Mr. Sothern’s Hamlet curls himself up in a chair, exactly as sensitive reflective people do when they want to make their bodies comfortable before setting their minds to work; and he lets you overhear his thoughts.  Every soliloquy of Shakespeare is meant to be overheard, and just so casually.  To render this on the stage requires, first, an understanding of what poetry is; next, a perfect capacity of producing by the sound and intonation of the voice the exact meaning of those words and cadences.  Who is there on our stage who has completely mastered those two first requirements of acting?  No one now acting in English, except Julia Marlowe and Edward Sothern.

What these two players do is to give us, not the impression which we get when we see and admire fine limitations, but the impression which we get from real people who, when they speak in verse, seem to be speaking merely the language of their own hearts.  They give us every character in the round, whereas with our actors we see no more than profiles.  Look, for contrast, at the Malvolio of Mr. Sothern.  It is an elaborate travesty, done in a disguise like the solemn dandy’s head of Disraeli.  He acts with his eyelids, which move while all the rest of the face is motionless; with his pursed, reticent mouth, with his prim and pompous gestures; with that self-consciousness which brings all Malvolio’s troubles upon him.  It is a fantastic, tragically comic thing, done with rare calculation, and it has its formal, almost cruel share in the immense gaiety of the piece.  The play is great and wild, a mockery and a happiness; and it is all seen and not interpreted, but the mystery of it deepened, in the clown’s song at the end, which, for once, has been allowed its full effect, not theatrical, but of pure imagination.

So far I have spoken only of those first requirements, those elementary principles of acting, which we ought to be able to take for granted; only in England, we cannot.  These once granted, the individual work of the actor begins, his power to create with the means at his disposal.  Let us look, then, a little more closely at Miss Marlowe.  I have spoken of her Juliet, which is no doubt her finest part.  But now look at her Ophelia.  It is not, perhaps, so great a triumph as her Juliet, and merely for the reason that there is little in Ophelia but an image of some beautiful bright thing broken.  Yet the mad scene will be remembered among all other renderings for its edged lightness, the quite simple poetry it makes of madness; above all, the natural pity which comes into it from a complete abandonment to what is essence, and not mere decoration, in the spoiled brain of this kind, loving and will-less woman.  She suffers, and is pitifully unaware of it, there before you, the very soul naked and shameless with an innocence beyond innocence.  She makes the rage and tenderness of Hamlet towards her a credible thing.