All this playing in popular pieces of the day involved a certain amount of additional training for the work that was to come,—the third and last period of Marlowe’s work,—the ten years during which she and Edward Sothern were “joint stars.” She brought to her new work a variously experienced, thoroughly disciplined art.
It sent something like a thrill through that large part of the public interested in the theatre, when it was announced, in the summer of 1904, that Julia Marlowe and E. H. Sothern were to act together in Shakespeare. It was felt that the actress was again coming into her own.[192]
Some of her parts with Mr. Sothern were but revivifications of heroines of her early career: Juliet, Viola, Beatrice, Rosalind; others she attempted for the first time during one or another of these years from 1904 to 1914: Ophelia, Katherine the Shrew, Lady Macbeth, and, at the inauguration of the ill-fated New Theatre in New York, Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra.
The American public, whatever its expectations in 1904, has since come to take a rather complacent view of its privilege in seeing Miss Marlowe and Mr. Sothern act Shakespeare together. They have been financially extremely successful. Several other attempts during this period to popularize Shakespeare in America (and some of them were “produced” and acted in a manner to make them fit rivals) have struggled through brief and only moderately well supported existences; while Sothern and Marlowe have gone on for the best part of ten years, drawing crowded houses. Yet many an old time playgoer, who has followed Julia Marlowe’s career since its beginnings, will tell you that nothing she has done since has quite equaled, in the combined appeal of its fresh youth, its varied beauty, and its unforced poetic moods, the acting of the Julia Marlowe of early days.
The summer of 1906 Miss Marlowe spent—as she has many others—in Europe. One of the places she visited was the birthplace of Jeanne d’Arc, for she was contemplating the production of Percy MacKaye’s play concerning the Maid. When she returned to America, she and Mr. Sothern dissolved their association with the Frohman side of the theatrical house, and went over to the Shuberts. There followed the production of a group of plays new to her experience, John the Baptist, by Sudermann, in which she played Salome, The Sunken Bell, by Hauptmann, a piece retained from Mr. Sothern’s earlier repertoire, and Jeanne d’Arc.
It was with the last two plays, and with Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, As You Like It, When Knighthood Was in Flower, and Twelfth Night, that Miss Marlowe ventured for the first time to appear in London, in the spring of 1907. The success of the Sothern and Marlowe engagement at the Waldorf Theatre hung at first in the balance, for the first play presented was The Sunken Bell, which failed to appeal to London. As for Miss Marlowe as Rautendelein, she was dismissed by Mr. Walkley in The Times as showing the grace and elfishness and charm of the character; “but she was not,” he continued, “exactly a frisky fairy.”
The tide turned with Miss Marlowe’s Viola, and, somewhat to the surprise of his followers at home, with Mr. Sothern’s Hamlet, which was hailed as a distinguished achievement.
One English writer, Arthur Symons, quite lost his head in admiration of the American visitors. “We have not in our whole island,” he wrote, “two actors capable of giving so serious, so intelligent, so carefully finished, so vital an interpretation of Shakespeare, or indeed of rendering any form of poetic drama on the stage.” Beerbohm Tree gave them a supper at His Majesty’s; Mr. Asquith was there, a prince or two, and, more to the point, a representative group of England’s stage workers. “There is danger,” said The Evening Standard when she played Viola, “of our all becoming Marlowe worshipers if she goes on like this.”[193]
Though the London critics appraised Mr. Sothern’s Hamlet higher than American reviewers ever did, and though the newspaper comment on each play was favorable, except on The Sunken Bell and When Knighthood Was in Flower, the London public did not attend in great numbers.
Still, the English tour may be said to mark the apex of the career of both artists. When they returned home each was for a time again an independent “star.” When the ambitiously planned New Theatre, in New York, opened its doors for what was fondly hoped would be the dawn of a new era in the American theatre, Miss Marlowe and Mr. Sothern were the leading members of a cast assembled to perform Antony and Cleopatra. The production pleased neither public nor critics, and it cannot be said that Miss Marlowe will be remembered chiefly for her Cleopatra. Since then “Sothern and Marlowe” have again carried Shakespeare up and down the country.