Until I saw this performance
of "Romeo and Juliet" I thought there was rhetoric in the play, as well
as the natural poetry of drama. But I see that it only needs to be
acted with genius and intelligence, and the poetry consumes the
rhetoric. I never knew before that this play was so near to life, or
that every beauty in it could be made so inevitably human. And this is
because no one else has rendered, with so deep a truth, with so
beautiful a fidelity, all that is passionate and desperate and an
ecstatic agony in this tragic love which glorifies and destroys Juliet.
The decorative Juliet of the stage we know, the lovely picture, the
_ingenue_, the prattler of pretty phrases; but this mysterious, tragic
child, whom love has made wise in making her a woman, is unknown to us
outside Shakespeare, and perhaps even there. Mr. Sothern's Romeo has an
exquisite passion, young and extravagant as a lover's, and is alive. But
Miss Marlowe is not only lovely and pathetic as Juliet; she is Juliet. I
would not say that Mr. Sothern's Hamlet is the only Hamlet, for there
are still, no doubt, "points in Hamlet's soul unseized by the Germans
yet.
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