As he was an artist in construction, an expert in stage-craft as this had been conditioned by the circumstances of the Tudor playhouse, he could not very well fail to be annoyed by the curtailing of his plays to adjust themselves to the circumstances of our superbly equipt theaters; and he would resent the chopping and the changing, the modification and the mangling to which his plays are subjected so that their swift succession of situations could each of them be localized by appropriate and complicated scenery. But because he was a modest man and because he had composed his tragedies and his comedies to please his audiences, he would probably soon be reconciled to all these transmogrifications when he saw that his pieces had none the less retained their power to attract spectators and to delight their ears and their eyes. If the house was crowded night after night, then he would feel that he had no call to protest, since other times bring other manners. II If Shakspere would be surprized to see Ophelia performed by a girl, he would be still more surprized, not to say shocked, to see Hamlet performed by a woman. And yet this is a spectacle that he might have beheld again and again in the nineteenth century, if he had been permitted to visit the theaters of New York at irregular intervals. In that hundred years he could have seen not one female Hamlet or two or three but at least a score of them. The complete list is given in Laurence Hutton’s ‘Curiosities of the American Stage’; it begins with Mrs. Bartley; it includes Clara Fisher, Charlotte Cushman and Anne Dickinson; and it was drawn up too early to include Sarah Bernhardt, whose unfortunate experiment belongs to the very last year of the last century. George Henry Lewes asserted that ‘Hamlet’ itself is so broad in its appeal, so interesting in its story, so moving in its episodes, that no actor had ever made a total failure in the part. It might be asserted with equal truth that no actress had ever succeeded in it, because Hamlet is essentially masculine and therefore impossible to a woman, however lofty her ambition or however abundant her histrionic faculty. It is not a disparagement of the versatility and dexterity of Sarah Bernhardt to record that the details of her impersonation of the melancholy Prince have wholly faded from the memory of one spectator who yet retains an unforgettable impression of Coquelin’s beautifully humorous embodiment of the First Gravedigger.