This is Shakespeare's message to the aristocracy to-day, and yet all this is cut out by the actor-manager who seems to imagine that these sentiments are barbaric, and only represent the opinions of men who lived some three thousand years ago. The omissions in this stage-version are in a great measure due to carelessness in the study of the play. The right point of view from which to present this colossal tragedy on the stage has been missed, and the stage-manager having allowed his actors to take up half the evening in drawling out the words of the first two acts, the blue pencil has been used for the remaining three with a freedom and ignorance which never should have been sanctioned. * * * * * "_Matinees_ every Wednesday and Saturday." These words appear on all printed bills announcing the performance of "King Lear." They go far to explain why the play fails to represent tragedy either in its emotion or terror, and why it sends playgoers back to their homes as cold and indifferent to human suffering as it left them. What is offered to the public is a kinematograph show; walking figures who gesticulate and utter human sounds; puppets who mechanically move through their parts conscious that the business must be done all over again within a few hours. Does an actor honestly think that he can impersonate Lear's hysterical passion, madness, and death, twice in a day, and day by day, and that he can do this efficiently together with all his other duties of management? That he may wish to do so is intelligible, but that the public should sanction it and the critics tolerate it is strange indeed. That the exigencies of modern theatrical management impose these conditions is beside the question. A less exacting play might have been chosen instead of distorting one of Shakespeare's masterpieces. Salvini, whose reputation as a tragedian is universally acknowledged, refused to act Othello more than three times in a week, and never on two consecutive days; and those who saw his moving performance must admit that it was a physical impossibility for him to do otherwise. A man does not suffer the tortures of jealousy without physical and mental prostration; and the actor endures a very heavy strain when he seeks to simulate an emotion which has not been aroused in a natural way.