All this last scene is full of animation, and presents a fine opportunity for the _regisseur_. I am obliged to use the French word, for we have no similar functionary in this country. Our public is sufficiently indifferent to the welfare of dramatic art to allow its leading actors to be their own stage-managers and often their own authors. As a consequence the public gets no English plays worthy of being called plays, and no guarantee that a dead author's intentions shall be respected. Human nature has its prejudices, and the actor is seldom to be found who can look at a play from any other point of view than in relation to the prominence of his own part in it. It is owing to the despotism of the actor on the English stage, and consequently to the star system, that I attribute the mutilation of Shakespeare's plays in their representation. The closing scene of this play might be made very effective in action. The crowd hurrying with "bated breath" to the spot; its horror at the sight of the dead children, who for all it knows are murdered; its amazement at finding they are man and wife; the Prince's stern rebuke; the bowed grief and shame of Montague and Capulet; the reconciliation of the bereaved parents, and joining of hands across the dead bodies. The Irving-version omits all but the entrance of the citizens with Montague, Capulet, and the Prince, who at once ends the play with the couplet-- "For neuer was a Storie of more wo Than this of _Iuliet_ and her _Romeo_." But if the Prince hears no story, he and those who enter with him cannot be aware that Romeo and Juliet are man and wife, or that they died by their own hands, and are not victims to an act of treachery. Then why open your play with the quarrel of the two houses if you do not intend to show them reconciled? Why not follow the Cumberland acting-version, and take out the crowd scenes altogether? It is a more intelligible proceeding than this compromise of the Irving-version. Criticized as classical tragedy, the play of "Romeo and Juliet" is a veritable hotch-potch. It seems to defy the laws of criticism. The characters at one moment talk in the highest poetical language, and at another in the most commonplace colloquy. Nothing can well seem more inconsistent than to put into the mouth of Capulet these words-- "Death lies on her like an untimely frost, Upon the sweetest flower of all the field." Bombast goes side by side with poetry; passion with pantomime. Yet, as Lessing says, "Plays which do not observe the classical rules, must yet observe rules of some kind if they are to please;" and Shakespeare sought to establish rules in accordance with the national taste, his first aim being the combination of the serious and the ludicrous. Vigorous characterization, a vital and varied movement, and the skilful handling of scenes well calculated to stir the emotions of an audience, make "Romeo and Juliet" an acting play of enduring interest.