t, if need be, even at the cost of sleep. Everything
that one does or thinks or sees will have an effect upon the part,
precisely as on an unborn child.

I wish now that instead of reading how this and that actress had played
Juliet, and cracking my brain over the different readings of her lines
and making myself familiar with the different opinions of philosophers
and critics, I had gone to Verona, and just _imagined_. Perhaps the most
wonderful description of Juliet, as she should be acted, occurs in
Gabriele d'Annunzio's "Il Fuoco." In the book an Italian actress tells
her friend how she played the part when she was a girl of fourteen in an
open-air theater near Verona. Could a girl of fourteen play such a part?
Yes, if she were not youthful, only young with the youth of the poet,
tragically old as some youth is.

Now I understand Juliet better. Now I know how she should be played. But
time is inexorable. At sixty, know what one may, one cannot play Juliet.

I know that Henry Irving's production of "Romeo and Juliet" has been
attributed to my ambition. What nonsense! Henry Irving now had in view
the production of all Shakespeare's actable plays, and naturally "Romeo
and Juliet" would come as early as possible in the programme.

The music was composed by Sir Julius Benedict, and was exactly right.
There was no _leit-motiv_, no attempt to reflect the passionate emotion
of the drama, but a great deal of Southern joy, of flutes and wood and
wind. At a rehearsal which had lasted far into the night I asked Sir
Julius, who was very old, if he wasn't sleepy.

"Sleepy! Good heavens, no! I never sleep more than two hours. It's the
end of my life, and I don't want to waste it in sleep!"

There is generally some "old 'un" in a company now who complains of
insufficient rehearsals, and says, perhaps, "Think of Irving's
rehearsals! They were the real thing." While we were rehearsing "Romeo
and Juliet" I remember that Mrs. Stirling, a charming and ripe old
actress whom Henry had engaged to play the nurse, was always groaning
out that she had not rehearsed enough.

"Oh, these modern ways!" she used to say. "We never have any rehearsals
at all. How am I going to play the Nurse?"

She played it splendidly--indeed, she as the Nurse and old Tom Mead as
the Apothecary--the two "old 'uns" romped away with chief honors, had
the play all to nothing.

I had one battle with Mrs. Stirling over "tradition." It was in the
scene beginnin