eat a triumph as her Juliet, and
merely for the reason that there is little in Ophelia but an image of
some beautiful bright thing broken. Yet the mad scene will be remembered
among all other renderings for its edged lightness, the quite simple
poetry it makes of madness; above all, the natural pity which comes into
it from a complete abandonment to what is essence, and not mere
decoration, in the spoiled brain of this kind, loving and will-less
woman. She suffers, and is pitifully unaware of it, there before you,
the very soul naked and shameless with an innocence beyond innocence.
She makes the rage and tenderness of Hamlet towards her a credible
thing.

In Juliet Miss Marlowe is ripe humanity, in Ophelia that same humanity
broken down from within. As Viola, in "Twelfth Night" she is the woman
let loose, to be bewitching in spite of herself; and here again her art
is tested, and triumphs, for she is bewitching, and never trespasses
into jauntiness on the one hand, or, on the other, into that modern
sentiment which the theatre has accustomed itself to under the name of
romance. She is serious, with a calm and even simplicity, to which
everything is a kind of child's play, putting no unnecessary pathos into
a matter destined to come right in the end. And so her delicate and
restrained gaiety in masquerade interprets perfectly, satisfies every
requirement, of what for the moment is whimsical in Shakespeare's art.

Now turn from Shakespeare, and see what can be done with the modern
make-believe. Here, in "Jeanne d'Arc," is a recent American melodrama,
written ambitiously, in verse which labours to be poetry. The subject
was made for Miss Marlowe, but the play was made for effect, and it is
lamentable to see her, in scenes made up of false sentiment and
theatrical situations, trying to do what she is ready and able to do;
what, indeed, some of the scenes give her the chance to be: the little
peasant girl, perplexed by visions and possessed by them, and also the
peasant saint, too simple to know that she is heroic. Out of a play of
shreds and patches one remembers only something which has given it its
whole value: the vital image of a divine child, a thing of peace and
love, who makes war angelically.

Yet even in this play there was ambition and an aim. Turn, last of all,
to a piece which succeeded with London audiences better than
Shakespeare, a burlesque of American origin, called "When Knighthood was
in Flower." Here