The bilingual performance of ‘Othello’ in which Salvini and Booth nobly supported one another was not the first of those in which Booth had been engaged. When Emil Devrient came on a professional visit to the United States in the early sixties of the last century, Booth was producing a succession of Shaksperian tragedies at the Winter Garden theater; and he courteously invited the German actor to play Othello to his Iago. At these performances Devrient spoke German, Booth spoke English, and so did the rest of the supporting company, excepting only the Emilia, a part cast to Madam Methua-Schiller, a German actress who had migrated to America and learnt to speak English with only a slight trace of foreign accent. As she had not lost the use of her mother-tongue, she was allowed to alternate English and German, employing the former always, except in conversing with Devrient, when she dropt into the latter. Perhaps her chopping and changing from English to German and back again to English may have been somewhat disconcerting and distracting to the audience, who would more readily adjust themselves to Devrient’s constant use of his own tongue. And the moral of all this is? Well, you can find it very pleasantly expressed in a quotation from a letter which was written by the foremost of American Shaksperian scholars to Edith Wynne Matthison and which is preserved in the introduction to Theodora Ursula Irvine’s excellent ‘How to pronounce the Names in Shakspere.’ Apparently Mrs. Kennedy had consulted Dr. Furness as to the pronunciation of a heroine’s name: Continue to call her Rŏsalĭnd, altho I am much afraid that Shakspere pronounced it Rōsalīnd. Of all men I would take liberties with Shakspere sooner than anyone else. Was he so small-minded that he would care about trifles? Take my word for it, he would smile with exquisite benignity and say, “Pronounce the name, my child, exactly as you think it sounds the sweetest.” (1919) VIII THACKERAY AND THE THEATER VIII THACKERAY AND THE THEATER I