lantry of the thing is
indescribable.

I think his failure as Othello was one of the unspoken bitternesses of
Henry's life. When I say "failure" I am of course judging him by his own
standard, and using the word to describe what he was to himself, not
what he was to the public. On the last night, he rolled up the clothes
that he had worn as the Moor one by one, carefully laying one garment on
top of the other, and then, half-humorously and very deliberately said,
"_Never again_!" Then he stretched himself with his arms above his head
and gave a great sigh of relief.

Mr. Pinero was excellent as Roderigo in this production. He was always
good in the "silly ass" type of part, and no one could say of him that
he was playing himself!

Desdemona is not counted a big part by actresses, but I loved playing
it. Some nights I played it beautifully. My appearance was right--I was
such a poor wraith of a thing. But let there be no mistake--it took
strength to act this weakness and passiveness of Desdemona's. I soon
found that, like Cordelia, she has plenty of character.

Reading the play the other day, I studied the opening scene. It is the
finest opening to a play I know.

How many times Shakespeare draws fathers and daughters, and how little
stock he seems to take of _mothers_! Portia and Desdemona, Cordelia,
Rosalind and Miranda, Lady Macbeth, Queen Katherine and Hermione,
Ophelia, Jessica, Hero, and many more are daughters of _fathers_, but of
their mothers we hear nothing. My own daughter called my attention to
this fact quite recently, and it is really a singular fact. Of mothers
of sons there are plenty of examples: Constance, Volumnia, the Countess
Rousillon, Gertrude; but if there are mothers of daughters at all, they
are poor examples, like Juliet's mother and Mrs. Page. I wonder if in
all the many hundreds of books written on Shakespeare and his plays this
point has been taken up? I once wrote a paper on the "Letters in
Shakespeare's Plays," and congratulated myself that they had never been
made a separate study. The very day after I first read my paper before
the British Empire Shakespeare League, a lady wrote to me from Oxford
and said I was mistaken in thinking that there was no other contribution
to the subject. She enclosed an essay of her own which had either been
published or read before some society. Probably some one else has dealt
with Shakespeare's patronage of fathers and neglect of mothers! I often
wo