owing too plainly
that Portia loves Bassanio before he has actually won her. This seemed
to me unjust, if only because Shakespeare makes Portia say _before_
Bassanio chooses the right casket:

"One half of me is yours--the other half yours--_All yours!_"

Surely this suggests that she was not concealing her fondness like a
Victorian maiden, and that Bassanio had most surely won her love, though
not yet the right to be her husband.

"There is a soul of goodness in things evil," and the criticism made me
alter the setting of the scene, and so contrive it that Portia was
behind and out of sight of the men who made hazard for her love.

Dr. Furnivall, a great Shakespearean scholar, was so kind as to write me
the following letter about Portia:

"Being founder and director of the New Shakespeare Society, I
venture to thank you most heartily for your most charming and
admirable impersonation of our poet's Portia, which I witnessed
to-night with a real delight. You have given me a new light on the
character, and by your so pretty by-play in the Casket Scene have
made bright in my memory for ever the spot which almost all critics
have felt dull, and I hope to say this in a new edition of
'Shakespeare.'"

(He did say it, in "The Leopold" edition.)

"Again those touches of the wife's love in the advocate when
Bassanio says he'd give up his wife for Antonio, and when you
kissed your hand to him behind his back in the Ring bit--how pretty
and natural they were! Your whole conception and acting of the
character are so true to Shakespeare's lines that one longs he
could be here to see you. A lady gracious and graceful, handsome,
witty, loving and wise, you are his Portia to the life."

That's the best of Shakespeare, _I_ say. His characters can be
interpreted in at least eight different ways, and of each way some one
will say: "That is Shakespeare!" The German actress plays Portia as a
low comedy part. She wears an eighteenth-century law wig, horn
spectacles, a cravat (this last anachronism is not confined to Germans),
and often a mustache! There is something to be said for it all, though I
should not like to play the part that way myself.

Lady Pollock, who first brought me to Henry Irving's notice as a
possible leading lady, thought my Portia better at the Lyceum than it
had been at the Prince of Wales's.

"Thanks, my dear Valentine and