danger of
catching its legs and my legs, and throwing it down and me down, and
the whole thing was absolutely ruinous to the proper performance of
my share of the scene. If such a table had been in any such place in
Glamis Castle on that occasion, when Macbeth was seized with his
remorseful frenzies, his wife would have jumped over or overturned
it to get at him.

All my remonstrances, however, were in vain. Mr. Macready persisted
in his determination to have the stage arranged solely with
reference to himself, and I was obliged to satisfy myself with a
woman's vengeance, a snappish speech, by at last saying that, since
it was evident Mr. Macready's Macbeth depended upon where a table
stood, I must contrive that my Lady Macbeth should not do so. But in
that scene it undoubtedly did.

As I had been prepared for this sort of thing in Macready, it didn't
surprise me; but what did was a conversation I had with him about
"Othello," when he expressed his astonishment at my being willing to
play Desdemona; "For," said he, "there is absolutely nothing to be
done with it, nothing: nobody can produce any effect in it; and
really, Emilia's last scene can be made a great deal more of. I
could understand your playing that, but not Desdemona, out of which
nothing really can be made." "But," said I, "Mr. Macready, it is
Shakespeare, and no character of Shakespeare's is beneath my
acceptance. I would play Maria in 'Twelfth Night' to-morrow, if I
were asked to do so." Whereupon he shrugged his shoulders, and
muttered something about "all that being very fine, no doubt," but
evidently didn't believe me; and as I should have given him credit
for my own feeling with regard to any character in Shakespeare's
plays, I was as much surprised at his thinking I should refuse to
act any one of them as I was at his coarse and merely technical
acting estimate of that exquisite Desdemona, of which, according to
him, "nothing could be made;" _i.e._, no violent stage effect could
be produced. Is not Shakespeare's refusing to let Desdemona sully
her lips with the coarse epithet of reproach with which her husband
brands her, and which no lady in England of his day would have
hesitated a moment to use, a wonderful touch of delicacy?

Macready certainly was aware of the feeling of his fellow-actors
about hi