know when. I think I should find such
an exhibition extremely curious as well as entertaining._"

Now, shall I put on record what Henry Irving thought of Fanny Kemble! If
there is a touch of malice in my doing so, surely the passage that I
have quoted gives me leave.

Having lived with Hamlet nearly all his life, studied the part when he
was a clerk, dreamed of a day when he might play it, the young Henry
Irving saw that Mrs. Butler, the famous Fanny Kemble, was going to give
a reading of the play. His heart throbbed high with anticipation, for in
those days TRADITION was everything--the name of Kemble a beacon and a
star.

The studious young clerk went to the reading.

An attendant came on to the platform, first, and made trivial and
apparently unnecessary alterations in the position of the reading desk.
A glass of water and a book were placed on it.

After a portentous wait, on swept a lady with an extraordinary flashing
eye, a masculine and muscular outside. Pounding the book with terrific
energy, as if she wished to knock the stuffing out of it, she announced
in thrilling tones:

"'HAM--A--LETTE.'

By

Will--y--am Shak--es--peare."

"I suppose this is all right," thought the young clerk, a little
dismayed at the fierce and sectional enunciation.

Then the reader came to Act I, Sc. 2, which the old actor (to leave the
Kemble reading for a minute), with but a hazy notion of the text, used
to begin:

"Although of Hamlet, our dear brother's death,
The memory be--memory be--(What _is_ the color?) _green_"....

When Fanny Kemble came to this scene the future Hamlet began to listen
more intently.

_Gertrude_: Let not thy mother lose _her_ prayers, _Ham--a--lette_.

_Hamlet_: I shall in all respects obey _you_, madam (obviously with
a fiery flashing eye of hate upon the King).

When he heard this and more like it, Henry Irving exercised his
independence of opinion and refused to accept Fanny Kemble's view of the
gentle, melancholy, and well-bred Prince of Denmark.

He was a stickler for tradition, and always studied it, followed it,
sometimes to his own detriment, but he was not influenced by the Kemble
Hamlet, except that for some time he wore the absurd John Philip
feather, which he would have been much better without!

Let me pray that I, representing the old school, may never look on the
new school with the patronizing airs of "Old Fitz"[1] and Fanny Kembl