When several actresses come forward in swift succession to speak the lovely lines of Juliet our interest is interrupted by every change; and the attention we are forced to pay to the appearance and the personality of each of the successive performers is necessarily subtracted from that which we ought to be giving to the character these actresses are pretending to impersonate. But when an actress appears in the beginning of the play as a mother, to reappear at the end of the piece as a daughter, there is only a single adjustment of our attention to be made; and this is easily achieved. In some cases, or at least with some spectators, there would be no need of any adjustment, since these spectators might not become aware that the same performer had been entrusted with the part of the daughter as well as that of the mother. When she revived ‘A Winter’s Tale,’ Mary Anderson so arranged the play that she could appear as Hermione in the earlier acts and as Perdita in the later acts, resuming the character of the mother only at the very end when the supposed statue of Hermione starts to life and descends from the pedestal. Of course, there had to be a few excisions from the text of the fifth act so that the actress could be seen first as the lovely maiden and second as the stately matron, beautiful mother of a more beautiful daughter. The lines cut out were only a slight loss to the play, whereas the doubling up which these omissions made possible was a great gain for the spectators. I feel assured that if Shakspere could have been one of these spectators he would have been as delighted and as fascinated as I was. He would have pardoned without a word of protest the violence done to the construction of his story. Nor am I any the less convinced that if Shakspere had been present at one of the memorable representations of his greatest tragedy when Salvini was Othello and Edwin Booth Iago, he would have smiled reproachfully at those who were harsh in denouncing the performance as a profanation of his play on the pretext that Salvini spoke Italian while Booth and the rest of the cast spoke English. It would so greatly gratify a playwright to have two of his superbest parts sustained by the two foremost tragedians of the time that he would be willing enough to overlook the apparent incongruity of their using two different tongues. Perhaps the author might have been inspired to point out to the cavillers that Salvini’s retention of his mother-tongue resulted in restoring to Othello the language which the Moor of Venice would actually have spoken. It is, of course, a flagrant falsification of the fact for Othello and Iago, Hamlet and Ophelia, Brutus and Cassius to speak English instead of Italian or Danish or Latin. But this is necessary if an English-speaking audience is to enjoy ‘Othello’ and ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Julius Cæsar’; and as it is necessary, the spectators are rarely conscious that it is, strictly speaking, “unnatural.”