haste might tell a hundred.”  Marcellus should add:  “Longer, longer.”  But the Marcellus of this special occasion was mute.  “Longer, longer,” whispered the prompter.  Then out spoke Marcellus, to the consternation of his associates:  “Well, say two hundred!” So prosaic a Marcellus is only to be matched by that literal Guildenstern who, when besought by Hamlet to “Play upon this pipe,” was so moved by the urgent manner of the tragedian, that he actually made the attempt, seizing the instrument, and evoking from it most eccentric sounds.

It is curious how many of the incidents and details of representation escape the notice of the audience.  And here we are referring less to merits than to mischances.  Good acting may not always obtain due recognition; but then how often bad acting and accidental deficiencies remain undetected!  “We were all terribly out, but the audience did not see it,” actors will often candidly admit.  Although we in front sometimes see and hear things we should not, some peculiarity of our position blinds and deafens us too much.  Our eyes are beguiled into accepting age for youth, shabbiness for finery, tinsel for splendour.  Garrick frankly owned that he had once appeared upon the stage so inebriated as to be scarcely able to articulate, but “his friends endeavoured to stifle or cover this trespass with loud applause,” and the majority of the audience did not perceive that anything extraordinary was the matter.  What happened to Garrick on that occasion has happened to others of his profession.  And our ears do not catch much of what is uttered on the stage.  Young, the actor, used to relate that on one occasion, when playing the hero of “The Gamester” to the Mrs. Beverley of Sarah Siddons, he was so overcome by the passion of her acting as to be quite unable to proceed with his part.  There was a long pause, during which the prompter several times repeated the words which Beverley should speak.  Then “Mrs. Siddons coming up to her fellow-actor, put the tips of her fingers upon his shoulders, and said, in a low voice, ‘Mr. Young, recollect yourself.’” Yet probably from the front of the house nothing was seen or heard of this.  In the same way the players will sometimes prompt each other through whole scenes, interchange remarks as to necessary adjustments of dress, or instructions as to “business” to be gone through, without exciting the attention of the audience.  Kean’s pathetic whisper, “I am dying, speak to them for me,” when, playing for the last time, he sank into the arms of his son, was probably not heard across the orchestra.

Mrs. Fanny Kemble, in her “Journal” of her Tour in America, gives an amusing account of a performance of the last scene of “Romeo and Juliet,” not as it seemed to the spectators, but as it really was, with the whispered communications of the actors.  Romeo, at the words “Quick, let me snatch thee to thy Romeo’s arms,” pounced upon his playfellow, plucked her up in his arms “like an uncomfortable bundle,” and staggered down the stage with her.  Juliet whispers; “Oh, you’ve got me up horridly!  That’ll never do; let me down!  Pray let me down!” But Romeo proceeds, from the acting version of the play, be it understood: