Actor's Equity Association, SAG, AFTRA
 

A Glimpse of Theater History

  

CLARA MORRIS (1848-1925)

Called a genius and the greatest "emotional actress" of her age, Clara Morris (seen to the left in an 1870 portrait) had a relatively brief but very memorable career as a star. Frequently dismissed as unschooled and wild because of her "bad" pronunciation, which included a "burr" that annoyed many critics, she was in fact a very careful and skilled craftsman who found ways to "feel what her characters feel." And when that failed, she was able to substitute emotions that created the illusion that her characters felt genuine emotions by creating real tears. In her later years, she wrote a number of charming books of memoirs (Life on the Stage, Life As a Star, Stage Confidences), a novel (and even a history of Thomas D. "Jim Crow" Rice.

Born in Toronto in 1848, young Clara Proctor and her baby brother and her mother Sarah moved to Cleveland, Ohio when it was discovered that Clara's father had another wife. Changing her name to Morrison and giving up Clara's sister for adoption, the single parent moved her household into a boarding house not far from Cleveland's leading theater, John Ellsler's Academy of Music. To augment her mother's meager income obtained from helping run the boarding house, Clara was hired as a member of the "ballet" in Ellsler's company for the astonishing sum of fifty cents a performance and took the name Morris. She remained in Mr. Ellsler's stock company for nearly seven years. During these years, Miss Morris supported the greatest touring stars of the day including E. L. Davenport, Lawrence Barrett, Edwin Booth, Joseph Jefferson III and many others. She worked her way up from the corps de ballet to the juvenile leads de jure. The position of leading lady would naturally remain in the line of Mrs. Ellsler. So, in 1861, at the age of 21, Miss Morris tried her wings with a stint at Woods Theatre in Cincinnati, where she was offered (according to her) a contract of $100 a week. It was at this time that Augustin Daly needed a replacement actress. He had heard of the exotic Western actress, Miss Morris, and when he asked John Ellsler if she could handle a role he had in mind, he got the curt reply, "Try her." She traveled to New York for a meeting with Daly and was offered $35 a week with the possibility of $70 if she proved a success. Which she quickly did. When she reported for work for the fall season, she was cast as Blanche, the comedy part, in Wilkie Collins' Man and Wife. The plum part of Anne Sylvester was to go to Agnes Ethel. She and the manager apparently had a disagreement--some claimed she objected to the role on moral grounds--, for the role was given to Clara Morris before the play went into rehearsal. The reviewer for the New York Herald said of her debut performance at the Fifth Avenue Theatre:

Miss Clara Morris, a young actress from the West, made her first appearance at this theatre and achieved a success of the most unqualified kind. Her appearance is exceedingly engaging, her action evinces large experience in the stage, and she invested the character with rare delicacy, tenderness, dignity and all the varied qualities it demanded.

This notice, if anything understates the sensation she created, for the house rose as one and called her back again and again at the final curtain.

It is hardly surprising that, after playing supporting roles in the next couple of productions--Daly sought to create a company rather than rely on stars--Clara was given the leading role later in the season in Daly's own adaptation of Belot's L'Article 47. The role was Cora, a disfigured Creole woman who goes mad. Clara went about preparing for her role by studying not artists, but life. She copied a disfiguring scar of a mulatto woman she had seen on the Broadway streetcar. The woman had had her throat cut and the had not been cared for. Clara's scar was covered by a veil until a crucial moment when the scar was revealed. Clara explained in her memoir Life on the Stage, "As the woman's beauty had been her letter of introduction to the gilded world, indeed had been her sole capital, that "scar" became of tremendous value in the make-up of the part, since it would explain, and in some scant measure excuse, her revengeful actions." The results were similarly electrifying. To prepare for the mad scene, Clara visited an insane asylum and studied firsthand the behavior of the patients just as Forrest had done for his mad scene in Lear. The results were electrifying. Said the New York Herald:

The first and most lasting impression made on the public was the magnificent acting of Miss Clara Morris, whose delineation of the character of Cora will be henceforth classed, in point of greatness, with the Leah of Miss Bateman and the Meg Merrilies of Miss Cushman. The mad scene in the fourth act was terribly real in its intensity, and no school, Delsarte or otherwise, could give such a startling naturalness to insanity as it received from Miss Morris. Her death scene was touching in the extreme.

Daly's next vehicle that advanced our Clara was his adaptation of Baroness de Prevois' La Comtesse de Somerive, which he called Alixe. To accommodate Daly's desire to have as many of his leading actors as possible in the production, Clara had agreed to play the part of the young Alixe even though the role was much younger than she was. William Winter raved:

....the presentation was one of the best pieces of nature, interpreted by art, that we have seen. The panther-like gleams with which Miss Morris likes to fleck her performances are not always to be approved, but they were in perfect keeping with the emotion of this character; and what we saw was--what we have not hitherto seen on the stage--an adequate and superb revelation of woman's passionate love.

Despite, or perhaps, because of these triumphs, Clara Morris would leave the Fifth Avenue Theatre in 1874 after playing a string of supporting roles in the remainder of 1873 (Lucy Carter in Saratogas, Magdalen in No Name, Oriana in The Inconstant, Magdalen in New Years Eve, and Pervenche in Madeleine Morel). It was rumored that she left Daly because of professional jealousy of the greater attention paid the comedy actors in Daly's troupe. Fanny Davenport was often named. If that were true (something Clara denied), apparently, jealousy was not the only motive. Already feuding with Daly over what she termed her "niggardly salary" of only $40 a week, she had signed a contract for certain months of the year with Daly, reserving the privilege of starring in Alixe and L'Article 47 during the other months unopposed. But no sooner had she announced Alixe in Philadelphia than Daly advertised the same play with Sarah Jewett and his company opposite her.

Clara was quickly welcomed into the rival company at the Union Square Theater headed by A. M. Palmer. Apparently to exploit the newfound reputation of his newest star, he staged an ill-advised production of W. S. Gilbert's fairy play The Wicked World. With no "emotional" fireworks available, Clara's "ineradicable 'burr'" nearly scuttled her rise to secure stardom. This "costume" piece was clearly ill suited to the very realistic style of Palmer's company.

As Julia in Sheridan Knowles' The Hunchback, she was received with marginally better notices. According to John Ranken Towse:

She had not the artistic training necessary to a really good performance of the part, but these traits [flighty, wilful, but pure and honorable womanhood] she did interpret, and in the more serious scenes with Clifford and Sir Walter she evinced such an apalling sincerity that minor artistic delinquencies were forgotten.

But the next effort, Camille, (seen on the left) was a triumph. In the still well known story taken from Dumas fils' La Dame aux Camelias was a vehicle that could have been tailor made for Miss Morris' gifts and personality. Nonetheless, according to her own account, she hated the play and did not want to play it for fear of unfavorable comparison with the Camilles who had gone before her. A.M. Palmer and what we would now call his creative team needed a vehicle for a benefit performance and when the rights could not be secured for Clara's choice, they hit on Camille. After considerable persuasion, she agreed to do the "hated" part since it would be for only a single performance. Her interpretation, not surprisingly, was her own. She chose to play not the wanton courtesan, but the wronged innocent too much in love. It was a triumph and was added to the regular bill at the Union Square.

Sarah Bernhardt (one is tempted to say Sarah Bernhardt herself) said of her performance in Camille, "My God, this woman is not acting; she is suffering." Clara fascinated the critics as well. Said the critic of The Spirit of the Times:

It was naturally thought that Miss Morris, who is more like Matilda Heron in her intense emotional strength than any actress we remember, would adopt her conception of Camille. She did not. Instead, she gave us a Camille that resembled an Ophelia who had lost her virtue because she could not resist the impetuosity of her lover--a winning, gentle girl, more pure than worldly, and infinitely more calculated to remain in the work-room than to ensnare the gallants of Bagueres. So guileless, in fact, does Miss Morris make her Camille, that we were shocked when we heard her ask De Varville to pay her debts.

Making her peace with Daly following the triumph of Camille, Clara performed L'Article 47 again, this time she was again seen by Sarah Bernhardt who said of her performance in an interview by William Ganson Rose in Cleveland in 1906, "So this is the city of Clara Morris. I saw her a very long time ago...She was great! Cleveland, her home should be proud of one of the finest of players."

In September and October of 1874, Clara pushed the envelope further.

Clara's Blanche de Chelles in The Sphinx (seen on the right) received mixed reviews. Another French melodrama, this one by Octave Feuillet and adapted by George Fawcett Rowe, was called "nasty rubbish" and "distressing." And in that somewhat more straight-laced age, one can see why. John Ranken Towse provided this precisof the plot:

 

Psychologically [Blanche de Chelles] was a bundle of the grossest inconsistencies, an early example, possibly, of divided and warring personalities. Dominated entirely by her passions, she plots to poison her dearest friend in order to run away with her husband. Then to prove her innocence, she agrees to marry another man whom she detests and, as a climax, swallows the poison which she had prepared for her rival.

But of her performance, Towse said:

Miss Morris not only triumphed in it, but actually made the creature she impersonated plausible if not credible. Her acting was extraordinarily specious and subtle, full of fascination, venom, and passion, andm at the last, of a stony-eyed despair which carried the house by storm. It was an ignoble but thrilling achievement.

The New York Times however was less impressed saying of her death scene, "with eyes upturned, pallid face, foaming mouth, and hands clutching at her bosom--the waist of her dress being torn open in the agony of the moment--is simple disgusting, and not impresssive."

Clara married Frederick C. Harriott November 30, 1874. Harriott was an earnest amateur from a wealthy and politically powerful Long Island family. He remained her agent and constant companion until his death in 1914.

When Clara returned to the stage in the spring of 1875, it was as a star. Abandoning her stock in trade, the French melodrama, she attempted Evadne, Lady Macbeth and a condensed version of Rowe's Jane Shore. Her peculiar naturalism was ill suited to the critical tastes of the day, and perhaps to the material as well. Said the New York Herald of her Lady Macbeth:

The performance was exceedingly bad. Physical defects of voice not to be overcome by any amount of dramatic genius must place the interpretation of Lady Macbeth forever beyond Miss Morris' reach. Her elocution is very defective.

Henry James (despite his protestation to the contrary) was even harsher in his criticism:

It is to be supposed that there are some things that Miss Clara Morris can ...do well; but the utterance of the trmendous speeches of Lady Macbeth is not one of them; to speak frankly..., the disparity between the actress and the part was simply ludicrous. Miss Morris's meagre voice, her vulgar intonation, her trivial conception of her opportunities, are all fatal disqualifications. Every speech seemed to us distinctly missed, and the actress's facial play and the introduced business of her own invention struck us as insufficient compensation. This is not harsh criticism. Miss Morris, it seems to us, has a large reserve of good fortune to draw upon in finding it so easy to display her incompetence on an eminent stage.

Still that original "introduced business" lent her Lady Macbeth some measure of success. She herself tells of seven curtain calls following the sleepwalking scene as well as the approbation of Charlotte Cushman, probably the dominant Lady M of her day, and Mary Ann Farren, another old hand.

In November of 1875, Clara returned to the Fifth Avenue Theater, and took the role of Esther in The New Leah, Daly's adaptation of Mosenthal's Deborah. The role was a Jewish girl in love with a young Christian man who loves her in return. Both are willing to leave family, friends and religion for the sake of their love. They plan to marry and run off to a foreign country, but the young man is persuaded by "an apostate Jew" that Esther was false to him and had betrayed him for money. He breaks off the engagement and marries another girl. On the wedding day, Esther confronts him in the churchyard and curses him. Then she wanders off destitute and homeless. Years later, she returns, meets him and changes her curse to a blessing. William Winter remembered her performance twenty years later:

The heroine Esther was personated in a powerful, passionate manner by Clara Morris. Her Jewish maiden was not dazzling in ripe, dusky beauty, nor fervid and ominous in Oriental, intense self-poise; but she was mourfully lovely to the eye and her pecturesque loveliness was surcharged with passionate tenderness. She did not stir the imagination, but she appealed directly to the heart; and, in the quality of sympathy--the power to captivate the feelings, apart from the satisfaction of the sense of the ideal--she was the best representative of the part that has been seen. Miss Bateman was austere, intellectual, and fierce, and at the same time she was cold. Ristori was mature, artificial, melo-dramatic. Marie Seebach was over-spiritual. Janauschek, fiery and superb in action, was cumbrous, and over physical. Clara Morris, though she did not lift the ideal to Seebach's height, was excellent in the youth, grace, softness, and fire of the tender woman; and those attributes she welded into a form at once picturesque, mournful, and weird. She made a good effect in the defiance of the mob. She greatly excited her listeners in the curse scene--the religious element commingling with the human. In the lover's meeting, the scene of the repulse, and the tender passages at the close, she surpassed all previous representatives of the part and entirely satisfied all of its requirements. Her conquest was through the emotions. Her method was controlled by taste and made symmetrical by repose. Her best moments were those of frenzy, as when love struggles in the heart with knowledge that it is wasted and in vain, made unworthy and pitiable by the unworthiness of its idol. But even in the wildest of those moments she displayed an artist's control of herself and her resources.

But during this initial run, Clara played only a week. Ill health kept her from the stage for a full year. It was the beginning of a series of illnesses that would plague her for the remainder of her life.

A full year later, in November of 1876, Clara returned to A.M Palmer's management at the Union Square taking the title role in Miss Multon, Nus and Belot's adaptation of East Lynne. This was what one observer called a "Frenchified" adaptation by A. R. Cazauran of the popular novel by Mrs. Henry Wood. East Lynne was to hold the stage for another thirty or forty years in various incarnations, but Clara Morris' Miss Multon was yet another triumph for her. In the role of a disgraced wife who returned to care for her own children unrecognized by any in the household, implausible as such a scenario seems today, Clara found the opportunity to explore the woman's torture at hearing her unsuspecting children at play. Said Towse, "...as the broken-hearted woman, desperately seeking reinstatement, fleeing in shame from the home she had polluted and abandoned, and in the closing death scene, she sounded all the depths of poignant pathos." Said Odell:

The Weight of the piece rests upon Miss Morris' shoulders, and never have we seen her display such mingled force and tenderness as in her almost tragic presentation of a mother's sufferings and troubles. She sweeps the whole gamut of human feeling, and every chord finds an echo in the hearts of her audience.

But, Clara's increasingly fragile health kept her from performing all eight performances. Still, over the next two years, she continued to perform in New York and, with the aid of her husband, formed her own company and toured as well. In 1878, she added a new version of Jane Eyre called The Governess (seen on the right). In 1881, she added Conscience. In 1882, she returned to the Union Square Theatre to play Mercy Merrick in The New Magdalen. Towse enthused: "... [Miss Morris] simply obliterated Ada Cavendish, the English actress, who was supposed to have made the part her own." Oscar Wilde saw her performance and declared, "Miss Morris is the greatest actress I ever saw, if it be fair to form an opinion of her from her rendition of this one role. ... We have no such powerfully intense actress in England. She is a great artist, in my sense of the word, because all she does, all she says, in the manner of the doing and of the saying constantly evokes the imagination to supplement it. That is what I mean by genius. We have no one like her."

Later in 1882, she played opposite Salvini's son in L'Article 47, and soon after played opposite the great Tommaso Salvini himself in The Outlaw. Odell, who witness this historic pairing said of the experience:

No one could stand successfully against the Titanic force of Salvini, but Miss Morris came, perhaps, as near to sustaining her reputation in that comparison as any woman then living could do. ...I remember Miss Morris more vividly than Salvini.

Clara's career continued until her "retirement" in 1890. By that time, her star had dimmed to the point that she no longer played in the "first class" theatres. The methods of production and the business of the theatre too had changed with business men replacing actors in the role of manager. The Syndicate was soon to loom on the horizon. By the turn of the century, Miss Morris turned to writing her memoirs, a novel etc. and began or at least accelerated the vogue for theatrical memoirs that continues to this day.

Clara Morris remains an all but forgotten major force in the theatre.

CLARA MORRIS' TECHNIQUE IN HER OWN WORDS

So many "critics" saw in Clara Morris' distinctive acting style an unshcooled, undisciplined and intuitive actress. Intuitive she was. Undisciplined or unschooled she was not. Here are a few glimpses of her methods of taming the wild bells in Emilia's big scene in Othello. In her own words:

...I trailed about after Desdemona--picked up the fatal handkerchief--spoke a line here and there as Shakespeare wills she should, and bided my time as all Emilias must. Now I had noticed that many Emilias when they gave the alarm--cried out their "Murder! Murder!" against all the noise of the tolling bells, and came back upon the stage spent, and without voice or breath to finish their big scene with, and people thought them weak in consequence. A long hanging bar of steel is generally used for the alarm, and blows struck upon it send forth a vibrating clangor that completely fills a theatre. I made an agreement with the prompter that he was not to strike the bar until I held up my hand to him. Then he was to strike one blow each time I raised my hand, and when I threw up both hands he was to raise Cain, until I was on the stage again. So with throat trained by much shouting, when in the last act I cried: "I care not for thy sword; I'll make thee known,/Though I lost twenty lives." I turned, and crying "Help! help, ho! help!" ran off shouting, "The Moor has killed my mistress!" then, taking breath, gave the long-sustained, ever-rising, blood-curdling cry: "Murder! Murder! Murder!" One hand up, and one long clanging peal of a bell. "Murder! Murder! Murder!" One hand up and bell. "Murder! Murder! Murder!" Both hands up, and pandemonium broken loose--and, oh, joy! the audience applauding furiously.

"One--two--three--four," I counted with closed lips, then with a fresh breath I burst upon the stage, followed by armed men, and with one last long full-throated cry of "Murder! the Moor has killed my mistress!" stood waiting for the applause to let me go on. A trick? yes, a small trick--a mere pretence to more breath than I really had, but it aroused the audience, it touched their imagination. They saw the horror-stricken woman racing through the night--waking the empty streets to life by that ever-thrilling cry of "Murder!" A trick if you like, but on the stage "success" justifies the means, and that night under cover of the applause of the house, there came to me a soft clapping of hands and in muffled tones the words: "Bravo--bravo!" from Othello. (Mr. E. L. Davenport)

Here again in her own words, her pioneering take on what Stanislavski would have called "emotional memory," a technique well known to contemporary players as a rehearsal technique and it's application to the long run:

The people who have known happiness without the alloying if or but are few and far between. "Yes, of course we are happy--but," "I should be perfectly and completely happy--if," you hear people saying every day: and so in my case, having been admitted into the fellowship with the men and women of the company (Daly's), who were a gracious and charming crowd. Public, by whose favor I and mine existed, I was grateful and would have been quite happy--but for a brand-new difficulty that suddenly loomed up, large, and wide, and solid before me.

Never in my life had I been in a play of a longer run than one week. Imagine, then, my misery when I found this play, that was already old to me at the end of the first week, was likely to go on for a long time to come. It was not mere ennui over the repetition of the same lines, night after night, that troubled me, it was something far more serious. I had made my hit with the public by moving the people's feelings to the point of tears; but to do that I had first to move my own heart, for, try as I would, no amount of careful acting had the desired effect. I had to shed tears or they would not. Now that is not an easy thing to do to order, in cold blood. While the play is new one's nerves are strained almost to the breaking point--one is over-sensitive and the feelings are easily moved; then the pathetic words I am speaking touch my heart, tears rush to my eyes, tears are heard in my voice, and other hearts respond swiftly; but when you have calmed down, when you have repeated the lines so often that they no lopnger mean anything to you, what are you to do then?

Really and truly there were days when I was nearly out of my mind with terror lest I should not be able to cry that night; for those tears of mine had a commercial value as well as an artistic, and Mr. Daly was swift to reproach me if the handkerchief display in front was not as great as usual. This sounds absurd perhaps to a reader, but heaven knows it was tragic enough to me. I used to agonize all day over the question of tears for the night, and I have seen the time when even my own imaginary tomb failed to move me.

ONe night, when my eyes were dry as bones, and my; voice as hard as stone, and Mr. Daly was glaring at me from the entrance, I had suddenly a sort of vision of that dethroned actress whom, back, in Cleveland, I had seen uncrowned. I saw her quivering face, her stricken eyes, and a sudden rush of tears blinded me. Later, Mr. Daly said: "What a tricky little wretch you are. I thought you were going to throw that scene away, without a single tear to-night. I suppose you were doing it to aggravate me, though?"

Goodness knows I was grateful enought myself for the tears when they did come, and I got an idea from that experience that has served me all the years since. Everything else--love, hate, dignity, passion, vulgarity, delicacy, duplicity, all, everything can be assumed to order; but, for myself, tears are not mechanical, they will not come at will. The heart must be moved, and if the part has lost its power then I must turn to some outside incident that has power. It may be from a book, it may be from real life--no matter, if only its recalling starts tears to weary eyes.

Thus in Alixe it was not for my lost lover I oftenest wept such racing tears, but for old Tennessee's partner as he buried his worthless dead, with his honest old heart breaking before our eyes. While in Camille many and many a night her tears fell fast over the memory of a certain m other's face as she told me of the moment when returning from the burial of her only child, the first snowflakes began to whirl through the still, cold air, and she went mad with the anguish of leaving the little tendcer body there in the cold and dark, and flung herself from the moving carriage and ran, screaming, back to the small rough pile of earth to shelter it with her wown living body.

So there is my receipt for sudden tears. I being--thank heaven--a cheerful body, and given to frequent laughter, may laugh in peace up to the last moment, if I have only stowed away some heart-breaking incident that I can recall at the proper moment. It seems like taking a mean advantage of a tender heart, I know--what Bret Harte would call "playhing it low down" on it; but what else could I do? I leave it to you. What could you do to make yourself cry seven times a week, for nine or ten months a year?

Or this as quoted by Lewis Strang:

The same words, of course, become mechanical so far as mere speech goes. I open my mouth and they naturally troop forth; yet I feel the part, and, if I did not, my audience would not, either. There must seem to be tears, not only in my eyes but inmy voice. In order to obtain the right mood, after the part has becmoe so familiar that the woes of the personage cease to affect me, I am obliged to resort to outside influences; that is, I indulge in the luxury of grief by thinking over somebody else's woes, and, when everything else fails, I think that I am dead, and then I cry for myself! There are, when I am on the stage, three separate currents of thought in my mind: one in which I am keenly alive to Clara Morris, to all the details of the play, to the aother actors and how they act, and to the audience; another about the play and the character I represent; and, finally, the thought that really gives me the stimulus for acting. Fopr instance, when I repeat such and such a line, it fits like words to music to this under thought, which may be of some dead friend, of a story of Bret Harte's, of a poem, or maybe even some pathetic scrap from a newspapaer. As to really losing one's self in a part, that will not do; it is worse to be too sympathetic than to have too much art. I must cry in my emotional roles, and feel enough to cry, but I must not allow myself to become so affected as to mumble my words, to redden my nose, or to become hysterical.

Here are her original thoughts on Lady Macbeth's "business" and their sometimes thoughtful, sometimes accidental genesis. She begins with the hope that her star's entrance hand will not mar Lady Macbeth's entrance reading the letter:

Those joyous, long-sustained receptions that had been so sweet to me, the artist in me suddenly realised would be simply ruinous in the case of Lady Macbeth. Just think of it. The play is already running at high tide, and at her very first step she is up to her lips in tragedy: "They met me in the day of success; and I have learned by the perfectest report they have more in them than mortal knowledge," she reads with eager intensity of interest as she enters. And there are but thiry-six brief words between that entrance and one of the greatest moments in the entire part: "They made themselves air into which they vanished!" How impossible, then, would be the recognition of a receptioin. B-r-r-r! one's teeth were on edge at the thought! And yet the public, it is sensitive--it is quick to take offence at times, and the actress who does not quail at the thought of vexing her public may exist, but certainly I have not met her yet.

So on that night I was bracing my courage up to the point of calmly ignoring the reception, that I knew would be not only a greeting but an assurance of a fair field and no favour, and their hearty good wishes for my success, and what would they think if their courtesy were not acknowledged even by a glance--I asked myself one moment, while in the nexgt I was recalling a dozen proofs of the extraordinary quickness of perception shown by the American public, and--and, well I resolved I must take the risk--anything rather than see Lady Macbeth smiling and bowing and perhaps kissing hands, and then trying to get back into the wrapt eagerness of the letter-reader. One other thing, a trifle, yet part of the whole, I decided to keep by me a great circular cloak of grey material, to wrap about me in going before the curtain--for no actor or actress can be denied the honor of curtain calls, yet they do break the illusion of the play; and I meant to hid Lady MAcbeth by at least the size of the thickness of a cloack, and let Miss MOrriss go before the curtain, leaving the great Thane's wife in the play, if possible.

...I had come upon the stage swiftly, scroll open, lips moving, eyes racing eagerly from line to line. The applause broke out. I stood and read. It increased in volume--my heart-beats cholked me, but I read on. Would it go on forever? My knees trembled--my courage was failing me--the applause began tothin--the heart went out of it. I felt disapproval distinctly--obstinacy only was keep8ng the reception up. I was just going to raise my eyes, when someone understood, and said clearly, loudly: :S-s-h--S-s-h!" then swiftly added, "brava" and again "sh-sh! and like lightning the house caught the idea. There was a quick, sharp round of applause, approving, comprehending, then perfect silence fell, and in a voice choked by rapid breathing, I read: "They met me in the day of success."

Another happy accident came to me later on. I could ill support the dragging weight of the royal robes, while the crown was so cruelly heavy that the pain from it became at last almost unbearable, while in the banquet scene the tense watchfulness, the swift changes rung upon the emotions, the royal dignity, queenly hospitality, the fine self-restraint and calm assurance had all been in vain, when the woman's whole splendid line of defence had broken down under Macbeth's second outburst of mad, all-revealing terror, the player was physically as shattered, shaken, spent as was ever Lady Macbeth spiritually. It was in the mopmentary pause that followed the exit of all the guests that I realised in addition to the weight, the unpadded edge of the metal cown was actually cutting my brow. Lady Macbeth's last line had been spoken, Macbeth had turned and walked with sombare mien to the R. I entrance, repeating his exit speech. As he reached the line: "...My strange and self abuse/Is the initiate fear, that wants hard use:" the Queen unable to longer endure her suffering, raised both hands and lifted the crown up from her head and in the same instant, the KIng turning, noted the action with such a surprised frown, that quick as a flash the Queen dropped it to its place again and bravely smiled into his face; while aboth were startled by the swift-following applause of sympathetic comprehension. He added his suggestive: "We are yet both young in deed." and so made exit, and Lady Macbeth kept her forced smile till he was quite gone. The it faded. Slowly she removed the crown, and stood looking at it, calculating all its cost, until tears trickled down her wan cheeks, when hearing a sound outside she hastily resumed it, and with listless, hanging arms and drooping shoulders, feebly dragged her royal trappings, her misery and her self out of sight as the curtain fell. That had not been the "business" I had prepared, but it was better, as warm impromptu action is apt to be superior to coldly thought out effects; and I find that I, who almost never keep a clipping, have kept one criticism of that night;s work,m because of the appearance in it of the quite unusual word "apocalypse." "At the fading of that bravely forced smile, the woman's face became a very apocalypse of woe," it reads--where isPOlonius, with his "mobled queen," would he say "apocalypse is good," or would he not?