Rural Scenes on Both Sides of the Atlantic—First Impressions of Railway Travel—The Cars—One of the Largest Theatres in America—The Drama in Boston—Early Struggles to represent Plays in Public—“Moral Lectures”—Boston Criticisms—Shylock, Portia, Hamlet, and Ophelia—Different Readings of Shylock—Dressing-Room Criticism—Shylock considered—A Reminiscence of Tunis—How Shakespeare should be interpreted on the Stage—Two Methods illustrated—Shylock before the Court of Venice—How Actors should be judged.

I.

Nothing in America is so unlike England as the desolate appearance of the meadows in the fall and early winter months. From New York to Boston, a journey of six hours, in the second week of December, not a blade of green grass was to be seen. The train ran through a wilderness of brown, burnt-up meadows. With a tinge of yellow in the color of them, they would have resembled the late corn-stubbles of an English landscape. But all were a dead, sombre brown, except once in a way, where a clump of oaks still waved their russet leaves. Another noticeable contrast to England is the wooden houses, that look so temporary as compared with the brick and stone of the old country. The absence of the trim gardens of English rural districts also strikes a stranger, as do the curious and ragged fences that take the place of the English hedge-rows. The New England homesteads are, however, more like those of old England than are the farms of other States in the Union.

The habit of letting out walls and buildings, roofs of barns, and sides of houses, for the black and white advertisements of quack-medicine venders and others, is a disfigurement of the land which every English visitor notices with regret; and lovers of the picturesque, Americans and English, grow positively angry over the disfigurement of the Hudson by these money-making Goths and vandals.

A change of scene was promised for the Irving travellers on their return to New York, over the same line. A cold wave from the West was predicted. “We shall have snow before long,” said an American friend, “and not unlikely a hard winter. I judge so from the fact that all the great weather prophets say it will be a mild one. Your Canadian seer, for instance, is dead on an exceptionally calm and warm winter. So let us look out.”

Boston delighted the members of Irving’s company; all of them, except Loveday, who contracted, on the way thither, an attack of malarial fever. With true British pluck he fought his assailant until his first spell of important work was over, and then he retreated. Medical assistance, rest, and plenty of quinine, pulled him through. But the company were destined later to sustain other climatic shocks; and they all, more or less, had a dread of the threatened winter. Until Loveday broke down everybody had stood the change of climate well. Reports came from England that Miss Ellen Terry was ill in New York. On the contrary, she had never been better than during these first weeks of the tour. She suffered, as all English women do, from heated rooms. “That is my only fear,” she said to me. “The climate!—I don’t object to it. If they would only be content with it, I would. Some of the days are gorgeous. The snap of cold, as they call it, was delightful to me. But when I would be driving out in open carriages New York ladies would be muffled up in close broughams. And, oh, the getting home again!—to the hotel, I mean. An English hot-house, where they grow pine-apples,—that is the only comparison I can think of. And their private houses! How the dear people can stand the overwhelming heat of them, I don’t know!”

The railway journey from Philadelphia to Boston was Irving’s first experience of American travel.

“It is splendid,” he said, when I met him at his hotel, on the night of his arrival. “Am I not tired? Not a bit. It has been a delightful rest. I slept nearly the whole way, except once when going to the platform and looking out. At a station a man asked me which was Irving, and I pointed to Mead, who had been walking along the track, and was just then getting into his car. No; I enjoyed the ride all the way; never slept better; feel quite refreshed.”

Said Miss Terry, the next morning, when I saw her at the Tremont House, “Oh, yes, I like the travelling! It did not tire me. Then we had such lovely cars! But how different the stations are compared with ours! No platforms!—you get down really upon the line. And how unfinished it all looks,—except the cars, and they are perfect. Oh, yes! the parlor-car beats our first-class carriage. I shall like Boston very much,—though I never expect to like any place as well as New York.”

II.

The Boston Theatre is the largest of the houses in which Irving has played on this side of the Atlantic. It is claimed that it is the largest in the Union, though many persons say that the Opera House at the Rocky Mountain city of Denver is the handsomest of all the American theatres. The main entrance to the Boston house is on Washington street. It has not an imposing exterior. The front entrance is all that is visible, the rest being filled up with stores; but the hall is very spacious, and the vestibule, foyer, lobbies, and grand staircase beyond, are worthy of the broad and well-appointed auditorium. The promenade saloon is paved with marble, and is forty-six feet by twenty-six feet, and proportionately high. Upon the walls, and here and there on easels, are portraits of Irving, Booth, McCullough, Salvini, and other notable persons. The promenade and entrance hall cover one hundred feet from the doors to the auditorium, which, in its turn, is ninety feet from the back row to the foot-lights. The stage is one hundred feet wide and ninety feet deep; and the interior of the house from front to back covers three hundred feet, the average width being about one hundred feet. In addition to the parquette, which occupies the entire floor (as the stalls do at the English Opera Comique, and, by a recent change, also at the Haymarket), there are three balconies, severally known as the dress circle, the family circle, and the gallery. The house will seat three thousand people. It is built on a series of arches, or supporting columns, leaving the basement quite open, giving, so far as the stage is concerned, great facilities for the manipulation of scenery and for storage, and allowing space for offices, drill-rooms for supers, and other purposes.

“It is a magnificent theatre,” said Irving; “the auditorium superb, the stage fine; the pitch of the auditorium in harmony with the stage, by which I mean there is an artistic view of the stage from every seat; the gas managements are perfect, and the system of general ventilation unique; but the dressing-rooms are small and inconvenient. For anything like quiet acting, for work in which detail of facial expression, significant gesture, or delicate asides, are important, the theatre is too large.”

“Are you acquainted with the history of the stage in Boston?” I asked him, “or of this theatre in particular?”

“Only from what I have read or heard in a cursory way,” he said; “but one can readily understand that our Puritan ancestors would bring with them to these shores their hatred of plays and players. The actors persevered in their terrible occupation in New England, notwithstanding a local ordinance to prevent stage plays and other theatrical entertainments, passed in 1750. Otway’s ‘Orphan’ was, I am told, the first piece done in Boston. It was played at the British Coffee-house, ‘by a company of gentlemen,’ and this gave rise to the passing of the act in question. Some five or ten years later a number of Tories got up an association to promote acting and defy this statute. They revolted in favor of art; and in these days of political tolerance that is a good thing to remember. The members of this society were chiefly British officers, who, with their subalterns and private soldiers, formed the acting company. I believe one of them wrote the first piece they attempted to give in public. It was called ‘The Blockade of Boston’; but the entertainment was stopped by a ruse,—a sudden report that fighting had begun at Charlestown; a call to arms, in fact. For many years no more efforts were made to amuse or instruct the people with semi-theatrical entertainments or stage plays. The next attempt was a theatre, or, more properly speaking, a variety show, in disguise. The house was called ‘The New Exhibition Room,’ and the entertainment was announced as ‘a moral lecture.’ One Joseph Harper was the manager. The programme of the first night included tight-rope dancing, and various other athletic feats; ‘an introductory address’; singing, by a Mr. Woods; tumbling, by Mr. Placide; and, in the course of the evening, ‘will be delivered the Gallery of Portraits; or, the World as it Goes, by Mr. Harper. Later, ‘Venice Preserved’ was announced as a moral lecture, ‘in which the dreadful effects of conspiracy will be exemplified.’ Mr. Clapp’s book on Boston contains several curious instances of this kind. Shakespeare, it seems, filled the stage as ‘a moral lecturer’; and a familiar old English drama was played as ‘a moral lecture, in five parts, wherein the pernicious tendency of libertinism will be exemplified in the tragical history of George Barnwell; or, the London Merchant.’ Eventually, in the year 1793, I think, or thereabouts, Harper was arrested on the stage while playing Richard in one of Shakespeare’s moral illustrations of the bane of ambition and the triumph of virtue over vice. The audience protested, and destroyed a portrait of the governor of the city, which hung over the stage-box. They also tore down the State arms, and trampled upon them. At the hearing of the charge against Harper a technical flaw in the indictment procured his discharge. After this, however, the ‘Exhibition Room’ did not flourish; but a bold and earnest movement, a year or two later, resulted in the building of the Federal Street Theatre, sometimes also called the Boston, and sometimes Old Drury, after the London house. From this time the stage in Boston is a fact; and one feels at home in reading over the names of the actors who have been well known here,—Macready, Charles Kemble and Fanny Kemble, Charlotte Cushman, Ellen Tree, John Vandenhoff, Sheridan Knowles, John Gilbert, Fanny Ellsler, the Booths, our friend Warren, and others. The present theatre, the Boston,[26] in which we are acting, has been built about thirty years. The grand ball given to the Prince of Wales when he visited this country took place here, the auditorium being boarded for the occasion.”

III.

“The audience” on the first night of Irving’s appearance in Boston, said the “Post,” on the following morning, “was not made up of average theatre-goers; many regular ‘first-nighters’ were there, but a very large majority of those present were people of wealth, who go to the theatre comparatively little.”[27] The play was “Louis XI.” It excited expressions of admiration in the audience, and was as warmly praised in the press as at New York and Philadelphia. A fine theatre, the scenery appeared almost to greater advantage than in the Lyceum itself; and some of the readers of these pages will be surprised to learn that much of the original scenery was dispensed with. Portions of the sets, indeed, for all the pieces during the week, were painted on the spot by Mr. Hall (a clever young artist, who is devoted to the service of Mr. Irving), and Lyceum draperies, groupings, dresses, and stage manipulation, did the rest. The usual orchestra of the theatre was strengthened, as at New York and Philadelphia, and the conductor had the satisfaction of a call for the repetition of some of the entr’acte music.

Among the most remarkable tributes to Irving’s genius as an actor are the critical notices that appeared in the Boston newspapers the next day; and the people of Boston gave practical evidence of their satisfaction by attending the theatre in increasing numbers every night. The fortnight’s work included, besides the opening play, “The Merchant of Venice,” “The Lyons Mail,” “Charles I.,” “The Bells,” “The Belle’s Stratagem,” and “Hamlet.” The old controversies as to the characters of Hamlet and Shylock, and the interpretation of them, cropped up in the press, and, as before, were entirely absent from the audiences. They evidently had no doubts; they showed no desire to discount their pleasure; they found themselves wrapped up in the stage stories, rejoicing, sorrowing, weeping, laughing, with the varying moods of poet and actor. They did not stop to analyze the reasons for their motion; it was enough for them that they followed the fortunes of the hero and heroine with absorbing interest. They had no preconceived ideas to vindicate; they were happy in the enjoyment of the highest form of dramatic entertainment which even those critics, that are chary of their commendation of individual artists, say America has ever seen. Said “The Boston Herald,” in its notice of “Hamlet”:—

At the end of each act he received one or more calls before the curtain, and after the “play scene” the demonstrations were really enthusiastic; shouts of “Bravo!” mingling with the plaudits that summoned him to the foot-lights again and again. Miss Ellen Terry won all hearts by her exquisite embodiment of Ophelia. A better representative of this lovely character has not been, and is not likely to be, seen here by the present generation of play-goers. She received her full share of the honors of the evening, and her appearance before the curtain was often demanded, and hailed with delight, by the large audience present.

The “Advertiser,” “Traveller,” “Globe,” “Post,”—indeed all the Boston daily press,—were unanimous in recognizing the merits of Irving and his work. The “Transcript” was especially eulogistic in its treatment of Hamlet. As a rule the criticisms were written with excellent literary point. It will be interesting to give two brief examples of this; one from the “Traveller”:—

Of Mr. Irving’s performance of the part we can truthfully say that, while differing almost entirely from that of nearly every actor that we have seen in Hamlet, it abounded in beauties, in new conceptions of business, in new ideas of situation. It was scholarly and thoughtful, princely and dignified, tender yet passionate, revengeful yet human, filial yet manly. The Ophelia of Miss Ellen Terry was supremely delicious. In the early parts it was artless and girlish, yet womanly withal. It was sweet, tender, graceful, loving, and lovable. As a piece of acting, it was “stuff’d with all honorable virtues.” It was very powerful in the mad scene in the fourth act, and yet it was not more powerful than it was refined and intellectual; and while it may be looked upon in every respect as a perfect piece of dramatic art, it was yet faithful to life and true to the best instincts of womanly nature.

And another from the “Transcript”:—

Last evening we found ourselves uncontrollably forced to admiration and enthusiasm. He manages by some magic to get the full meaning of almost every sentence, and the emphasis always falls upon the right word; withal, he has this great and rare merit, that whatever he says does not sound like a speech committed to memory beforehand. He always seems to be talking, and not declaiming. He made Hamlet more of a convincing reality to us than any actor we can remember. The greatness, the intellectual and the ethical force, above all, the charm and lovableness of the man, were shown as we have never seen them before. Miss Terry’s Ophelia is a revelation of poetic beauty. Here one has nothing to criticise, no one trait to praise more than another. Such a wonderful embodiment of the poet’s conception is quickly praised, but never to be forgotten.

IV.

On the first night of the “Merchant of Venice” at Boston, Irving played Shylock, I think, with more than ordinary thoughtfulness in regard to his original treatment of the part. His New York method was, to me, a little more vigorous than his London rendering of the part. Considerations of the emphasis which actors have laid upon certain scenes that are considered as especially favorable to the declamatory methods possibly influenced him. His very marked success in Louis no doubt led some of his admirers in America to expect in his Shylock a very hard, grim, and cruel Jew. Many persons hinted as much to him before they saw his impersonation of this much-discussed character. At Boston I thought he was, if possible, over-conscientious in traversing the lines he laid down for himself when he first decided to produce the “Merchant” at the Lyceum. Singularly sensitive about the feelings of his audiences, and accustomed to judge them as keenly as they judge him, he fancied the Boston audience, which had been very enthusiastic in their applause on the previous nights, were not stirred as they had been by his other work in response to his efforts as Shylock. The play, nevertheless, was received with the utmost cordiality, and the general representation of it was admirable. I found a Londoner in front, who was in raptures with it. “I think the carnival, Belmont, and court scenes,” he said, “were never better done at the Lyceum.”

At the close of the piece, and after a double call for Irving and Miss Terry, I went to his dressing-room.

“Yes,” he said, “the play has gone well, very well, indeed; but the audience were not altogether with me. I always feel, in regard to this play, that they do not quite understand what I am doing. They only responded at all to-night where Shylock’s rage and mortification get the better of his dignity.”

“They are accustomed to have the part of Shylock strongly declaimed; indeed, all the English Shylocks, as well as American representatives of the part, are very demonstrative in it. Phelps was, so was Charles Kean; and I think American audiences look for the declamatory passages in Shylock, to compare your rendering of them with the readings they have previously heard. You omit much of what is considered great business in Shylock, and American audiences are probably a little disappointed that your view of the part forbids anything like what may be called the strident characteristics of most other Shylocks. Charles Kean ranted considerably in Shylock, and Phelps was decidedly noisy,—both fine, no doubt, in their way. Nevertheless they made the Jew a cruel butcher of a Jew. They filled the stage with his sordid greed and malignant desire for vengeance on the Christian, from his first entrance to his final exit.”

“I never saw Kean’s Shylock, nor Phelps’s, nor, indeed, any one’s. But I am sure Shylock was not a low person; a miser and usurer, certainly, but a very injured man,—at least he thought so. I felt that my audience to-night had quite a different opinion, and I once wished the house had been composed entirely of Jews. I would like to play Shylock to a Jewish audience.”

Mr. Warren,[28] the famous Boston comedian, came into the dressing-room while we were talking. He has been a favorite here for thirty-six years.

“Not so long in one place as Mr. Howe,” he says, with a smile, “who tells me he was a member of the Haymarket Company for forty years.”

“You know Mr. Toole well?” said Mr. Irving.

“Yes,” he replied; “it was a pleasure to meet him here.”

“He often talks of you.”

“I am glad to know it,” he replied; “I want to tell you how delighted I have been to-night. It is the “Merchant of Venice,” for the first time. I have never seen the casket scene played before, nor the last act for twenty years. A great audience, and how thoroughly they enjoyed the piece I need not tell you.”

“I don’t think they cared for me,” said Irving.

“Yes, yes, I am sure they did,” Mr. Warren replied, at which moment an usher brought Miss Terry, to be introduced to him, and the subject dropped, to be revived over a quiet cigar after supper.

“I look on Shylock,” says Irving, in response to an invitation to talk about his work in that direction, “as the type of a persecuted race; almost the only gentleman in the play, and most ill-used. He is a merchant, who trades in the Rialto, and Bassanio and Antonio are not ashamed to borrow money of him, nor to carry off his daughter. The position of his child is, more or less, a key to his own. She is the friend of Portia. Shylock was well-to-do—a Bible-read man, as his readiness at quotation shows; and there is nothing in his language, at any time, that indicates the snuffling usurer which some persons regard him, and certainly nothing to justify the use the early actors made of the part for the low comedian. He was a religious Jew; learned, for he conducted his case with masterly skillfulness, and his speech is always lofty, and full of dignity. Is there a finer language in Shakespeare than Shylock’s defence of his race? ‘Hath not a Jew eyes; hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food; hurt with the same weapons; subject to the same diseases; healed by the same means; warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is?’ As to the manner of representing Shylock, take the first part of the story; note his moods. He is, to begin with, quiet, dignified, diplomatic; then satirical; and next, somewhat light and airy in his manner, with a touch of hypocrisy in it. Shakespeare does not indicate at what precise moment Shylock conceives the idea of the bond; but he himself tells us of his anxiety to have Antonio on the hip.

“‘I will feed fat the ancient grudge I bear him.
He hates our sacred nation, and he rails,
Even there where merchants most do congregate,
On me, my bargains, and my well-won thrift,
Which he calls interest.’

“His first word is more or less fawning; but it breaks out into reproach and satire when he recalls the insults that have been heaped upon him. ‘Hath a dog money?’ and so on; still he is diplomatic, for he wants to make reprisals upon Antonio: ‘Cursed be my tribe if I forgive him!’ He is plausible, even jocular. He speaks of his bond of blood as a merry sport. Do you think if he were strident or spiteful in his manner here, loud of voice, bitter, they would consent to sign a bond having in it such fatal possibilities? One of the interesting things for an actor to do is to try to show when Shylock is inspired with the idea of this bargain, and to work out by impersonation the Jew’s thought in his actions. My view is, that from the moment Antonio turns upon him, declaring he is ‘like to spit upon him again,’ and invites him scornfully to lend the money, not as to his friend, but rather to his enemy, who, if he break, he may with better force exact the penalty,—from that moment I imagine Shylock resolving to propose his pound of flesh, perhaps without any hope of getting it. Then he puts on that hypocritical show of pleasantry which so far deceives them as to elicit from Antonio the remark that ‘the Hebrew will turn Christian; he grows kind.’ Well, the bond is to be sealed, and when next we meet the Jew he is still brooding over his wrongs, and there is in his words a constant, though vague, suggestion of a desire for revenge, nothing definite or planned, but a continual sense of undeserved humiliation and persecution:—

“‘I am bid forth to supper, Jessica.
There are my keys. But why should I go?
I am not bid for love. They flatter me;
But yet I’ll go in hate, to feed upon
The prodigal Christian.’

“But one would have to write a book to go into these details, and tell an actor’s story of Shylock.”

“We are not writing a book of Shylock now, but only chatting about your purpose and intention generally in presenting to the public what is literally to them a new Shylock, and answering, perhaps, a few points of that conservative kind of criticism which preaches tradition and custom. Come to the next phase of Shylock’s character, or, let us say, his next dramatic mood.”

“Well, we get at it in the street scene: rage,—a confused passion; a passion of rage and disappointment, never so confused and mixed; a man beside himself with vexation and chagrin.

“‘My daughter! Oh, my ducats! Oh, my daughter!
Fled with a Christian! Oh, my Christian ducats!
Justice! the law! my ducats and my daughter!’

“I saw a Jew once, in Tunis, tear his hair, his raiment, fling himself in the sand, and writhe in a rage, about a question of money,—beside himself with passion. I saw him again, self-possessed and fawning; and again, expressing real gratitude for a trifling money courtesy. He was never undignified until he tore at his hair and flung himself down, and then he was picturesque; he was old, but erect, even stately, and full of resource, and as he walked behind his team of mules he carried himself with the lofty air of a king. He was a Spanish Jew,—Shylock probably was of Frankfort; but Shakespeare’s Jew was a type, not a mere individual: he was a type of the great, grand race,—not a mere Hounsditch usurer. He was a man famous on the Rialto; probably a foremost man in his synagogue; proud of his descent; conscious of his moral superiority to many of the Christians who scoffed at him, and fanatic enough, as a religionist, to believe that his vengeance had in it the element of a godlike justice. Now, you say that some of my critics evidently look for more fire in the delivery of the speeches to Solanio, and I have heard friends say, that John Kemble and the Keans brought down the house for the way they thundered out the threats against Antonio, and the defence of the Jewish race. It is in this scene that we realize, for the first time, that Shylock has resolved to enforce his bond. Three times, during a very short speech, he says, ‘Let him look to his bond!’ ‘A beggar that was used to come so smug upon the mart; let him look to his bond; he was wont to call me usurer; let him look to his bond; he was wont to lend money for a Christian courtesy; let him look to his bond.’ Now, even an ordinary man, who had made up his mind to ‘have the heart of him if he forfeit,’ would not shout and rave and storm. My friend at Tunis tore his hair at a trifling disappointment; if he had resolved to stab his rival he would have muttered his intention between his teeth, not have screeched it. How much less likely still would this bitterly persecuted Jew merchant of Venice have given his resolve a loud and noisy utterance! Would not his settled hate have been more likely to show itself in the clinched hand, the firmly planted foot, the flashing eye, and the deep undertones in which he would utter the closing threat: ’Let him look to his bond’? I think so.”

“And so do the most thoughtful among your audiences. Now and then, however, a critic shows himself so deeply concerned for what is called tradition that he feels it incumbent upon him to protest against a Shylock who is not, from first to last, a transparent and noisy ruffian.”

“Tradition! One day we will talk of that. In Davenant’s time,—and some dare to say he got his tradition from Shakespeare himself—they played Shylock as a comic character, in a red wig; and to make it, as they thought, consistent, they cut out the noblest lines the author had put into his mouth, and added some of their own. We have no tradition in the sense that those who would insist upon our observance of it means; what we have is bad,—Garrick played Othello in a red coat and epaulettes; and if we are to go back to Shakespeare’s days, some of these sticklers for so-called tradition forget that the women were played by boys. Shakespeare did the best he could in his day, and he would do the best he could if he were living now. Tradition! It is enough to make one sick to hear the pretentious nonsense that is talked about the stage in the name of tradition. It seems to me that there are two ways of representing Shakespeare. You have seen David’s picture of Napoleon and that by Delaroche. The first is a heroic figure,—head thrown back, arm extended, cloak flying,—on a white horse of the most powerful, but unreal, character, which is rearing up almost upon its haunches, its forelegs pawing the air. That is Napoleon crossing the Alps. I think there is lightning in the clouds. It is a picture calculated to terrify; a something so unearthly in its suggestion of physical power as to cut it off from human comprehension. Now, this represents to me one way of playing Shakespeare. The other picture is still the same subject, ‘Napoleon crossing the Alps’; but in this one we see a reflective, deep-browed man, enveloped in his cloak, and sitting upon a sturdy mule, which, with a sure and steady foot, is climbing the mountain, led by a peasant guide. This picture represents to me the other way of playing Shakespeare. The question is, which is right? I think the truer picture is the right cue to the poet who himself described the actor’s art as to hold, as it were, the mirror up to nature.”

“Which should bring us very naturally back to Shylock. Let us return to your brief dissertation at the point where he is meditating vengeance in case of forfeiture of the bond.”

“Well, the latest mood of Shylock dates from this time,—it is one of implacable revenge. Nothing shakes him. He thanks God for Antonio’s ill-luck. There is in this darkness of his mind a tender recollection of Leah. And then the calm command to Tubal, ‘Bespeak me an officer.’ What is a little odd is his request that Tubal shall meet him at the synagogue. It might be that Shakespeare suggested here the idea of a certain sacredness of justice in Shylock’s view of vengeance on Antonio. Or it might be to accentuate the religious character of the Jew’s habits; for Shylock was assuredly a religious Jew, strict in his worship, and deeply read in his Bible,—no small thing, this latter knowledge, in those days. I think this idea of something divine in his act of vengeance is the key-note to the trial-scene, coupled, of course, with the intense provocation he has received.

“‘Thou calledst me dog before thou hadst a cause;
But since I am a dog, beware my fangs!
The duke shall grant me justice.
... Follow not,
I’ll have no speaking; I will have my bond.’

“These are the words of a man of fixed, implacable purpose, and his skilful defence of it shows him to be wise and capable. He is the most self-possessed man in the court. Even the duke, in the judge’s seat, is moved by the situation. What does he say to Antonio?

“‘I am sorry for thee; thou art come to answer
A stony adversary.’

“Everything indicates a stern, firm, persistent, implacable purpose, which in all our experience of men is, as a rule, accompanied by an apparently calm manner. A man’s passion which unpacks itself in oaths and threats, which stamps and swears and shouts, may go out in tears, but not in vengeance. On the other hand, there are those who argue that Antonio’s reference to his own patience and to Shylock’s fury implies a noisy passion on the part of the Jew; but, without taking advantage of any question as to the meaning of ‘fury’ in this connection, it seems to me that Shylock’s contempt for his enemies, his sneer at Gratiano:—

“‘Till thou canst rail the seal from off my bond,
Thou but offend’st thy lungs to speak so loud’—

and his action throughout the court scene, quite outweigh any argument in favor of a very demonstrative and furious representation of the part. ‘I stand here for law!’ Then note when he realizes the force of the technical flaws in his bond,—and there are lawyers who contend the law was severely and unconstitutionally strained in this decision of the court,—he is willing to take his bond paid thrice; he cannot get that, he asks for the principal; when that is refused he loses his temper, as it occurs to me, for the first time during the trial, and in a rage exclaims, ‘Why, then, the devil give him good of it!’ There is a peculiar and special touch at the end of that scene which, I think, is intended to mark and accentuate the crushing nature of the blow which has fallen upon him. When Antonio stipulates that Shylock shall become a Christian, and record a deed of gift to Lorenzo, the Jew cannot speak. ‘He shall do this,’ says the duke, ‘or else I do recant the pardon.’ Portia turns and questions him. He is hardly able to utter a word. ‘I am content,’ is all he says; and what follows is as plain an instruction as was ever written in regard to the conduct and manner of the Jew. ‘Clerk, draw a deed of gift,’ says Portia. Note Shylock’s reply, his last words, the answer of the defeated litigant, who is utterly crushed and borne down:—

“‘I pray you give me leave to go from hence;
I am not well; send the deed after me,
And I will sign it.’

“Is it possible to imagine anything more helpless than this final condition of the Jew? ‘I am not well; give me leave to go from hence!’ How interesting it is to think this out! and how much we all learn from the actors when, to the best of their ability, they give the characters they assume as if they were really present, working out their studies, in their own way, and endowing them with the characterization of their own individuality! It is cruel to insist that one actor shall simply follow in the footsteps of another; and it is unfair to judge an actor’s interpretation of a character from the stand-point of another actor; his intention should be considered, and he should be judged from the point of how he succeeds or fails in carrying it out.”