His Shylock was as fine as his Romeo, and King Lear as Benedict, Othello as Iago.
Down in rural little Abbot Mansfield his name of course was known, but as he was particularly averse to being interviewed and would not allow his photographs to be exhibited in any shop or photographer’s window, his face was totally unfamiliar to Muriel Winstanley.
Even Gray Leighton had no portrait amongst his large collection of celebrated members of the profession.
Her delight at being about to witness the finest play of the greatest dramatist the world has ever produced, and of seeing the great actor in his favourite part—many pronouncing him to be absolutely unrivalled in it—was so intense that she was strung up to the greatest pitch of excitement.
Mrs. Armstrong had been with her husband in the pit she told Muriel, and in her own language, “he looked that beautiful, miss, but so sad as made me quite miserable, I did want him to ’ave ’ad the poor young lady all comf’table at the end, and she so pretty, but it goes contrary all through.”
Muriel’s black evening gown would not attract much, if any, attention she hoped in their box on the second tier, and Mrs. Armstrong was, as she expressed it frequently, that flustered at being for the first time in such an exalted position, that she kept well backward from observation in the intervals between the acts.
It was a grand performance.
Keene’s theory was that Hamlet was a man about thirty years of age.
His eccentricity and madness merely assumed of course, and in the scene with Ophelia, his
“Get thee to a nunnery, go,”