Roderigo.—“Tush! never tell me; I take it much unkindly
That thou, Iago, who hast had my purse
As if the strings were thine, shouldst know of this.”
“Who plays Iago?” demanded a young lady in the box, addressing the gentleman behind her.
“Only one of our ordinary Americans,” answered he. “We have not had a decent Iago since Kemble left us.”
“I thought Kemble made an excellent Cassio,” observed the lady.
“That he made indeed,” replied the gentleman. “I never saw an actor perform the part of a tippler better than he did. It was perfectly natural to him.”
“Yes,” rejoined the lady; “he could admirably perform the part of a tipsy gentleman, while our actors only play the part of a drunken blackguard. I think it ridiculous to go and see one of Shakspeare’s plays performed on one of our stages. But they say Forest has much improved while in England, and that the first nobility went to see him.”
“That’s a fact,” ejaculated the gentleman; “I have seen it in the papers, or I should not be here this evening.”
Iago.—“And I, of whom his eyes had seen the proof,
At Rhodes, at Cyprus, and on other grounds,
Christian and heathen, must be be-lee’d and calm’d
By debitor and creditor. This counter-caster,
He, in good time must his lieutenant be;
And I (God bless the mark!) his moorship’s ancient!”
“Is it not singular,” observed a gentleman right before us to his neighbour, “that Shakspeare, who with the English passes for the arch-inspector of human nature, should have had so poor and erroneous an estimate of the character of a merchant? If an American author were to bestow the opprobrious epithet of ‘counter-caster’ on a member of that most respectable part of our community, nothing could save him from being Lynched.”
“The character of a merchant,” replied his neighbour, “is decidedly one in which Shakspeare was altogether unsuccessful. Take, for instance, his ‘Merchant of Venice.’ What a ludicrous caricature his Antonio is! On the one hand, the very paragon of prudence,—a man who in ‘riskiness’ would be outdone by the veriest Yankee shopkeeper; while, on the other, he stakes his whole credit to aid the foolish adventures of a lover! His merchant has no notion of banking; for