In preparing for a revival of one of the masterpieces of Shakspere, the accomplished stage-manager of to-day considers all these traditions inherited from the past, discarding some of them and selecting those which appear to him worthy of preservation, and which will accommodate themselves to the general scheme of the whole performance as he has conceived it in his mind’s eye.  He makes such arrangements as he deems necessary, devising wholly new effects to fit the more modern methods of presentation, which are less purely rhetorical than they were in the eighteenth century, and more pictorial.  When Herr Barnay impersonated Mark Antony in the Meiningen revival of ‘Julius Caesar,’ the novel stage-management gave freshness to the Forum scene and greatly increased its force.  As Mark Antony ascended the rostrum, after Brutus had asked the mob to listen to him, the crowd was too highly wrought up over the speech they had just heard to pay heed to the next speaker.  They gathered in knots praising Brutus; and the murmur of their chatter was all the greeting that Mark Antony received.  Herr Barnay stood for a moment silent and then he began his appeal for their attention:  “Friends—­Romans—­countrymen—!” but scarcely a citizen listened to him.

“Lend me your ears,” he begged, “I come to bury Caesar not to praise him!”

And then the nearest group or two grudgingly turned toward the rostrum; and to these the adroit speaker addrest himself, coaxing, cajoling, flattering,—­making frequent pauses, in every one of which the audience could see another band of citizens drawn under the spell of his eloquence.  When he had them all attentive, he played on their feelings and aroused their enthusiasm; then, after a swift and piercing glance around to see if they were ripe for it, he brought forth Caesar’s will; and after that Brutus was forgotten, and Mark Antony held the mob in the hollow of his hand to sway it at his will.  It matters little whether the credit of this most ingenious rearrangement was due to Herr Barnay himself, or to the unseen stage-manager; the spectator could not but recognize that a great play had received new illumination by it, and that a certain richness of texture had been disclosed which had hitherto lain concealed and unsuspected.

Sometimes, it must be confest, this craving after pictorial novelty overreaches itself.  Perhaps the allowable limit was not overstept when Sir Henry Irving gave Ophelia a fan of peacock-feathers, in order that Hamlet might play with it and have it in his hand when he has to say, “Ay, a very peacock!”

But it may be doubted whether the boundary of the justifiable was not crost, when the same stage-manager had the duel-scene of ’Romeo and Juliet’ take place in an open square, with its raised fountain not far from the porch of the cathedral, so that Mercutio might be able to point right and left when he declared that his wound would serve, altho it was not “as deep as a well or as wide as a church-door.”  Pretty as this is and clever, it seems a little petty.  To suggest that Mercutio was in need of visible promptings for his fancy, is to diminish the quick-wittedness of Shakspere’s wittiest character.