und the plan quite incompatible with the
demand of the public, which was for a dramatic entertainment, and
not for a course of literary instruction.

My father had found it expedient, in this mode of illustrating
Shakespeare, to make one play the subject of each reading; taking
two hours for the performance, and dividing the piece as fairly as
possible in two parts; retaining the whole _story_ of the play, and
so much only of the wisdom and beauty bestowed on its development by
the author, as could be kept well within the two hours' delivery,
and make the reading resemble as nearly as possible, in dramatic
effect, the already garbled and coarsely mutilated stage plays the
general public are alone familiar with. I was grievously
disappointed, but could not help myself. In Germany I should have
had no such difficulty; but the German public is willing to take its
amusements in earnest.

The readings were to be my livelihood, and I had to adapt them to
the audiences who paid for them--

"For those who live to please, must please to live."

I gladly availed myself of my father's reading version of the
plays, and read those he had delivered, cut and prepared for the
purpose according to that. When I came to cut and prepare for
reading the much greater number which I read, and he did not, I
found the task a very difficult one; and was struck with the
judgment and taste with which my father had performed it. I do not
think it possible to have adapted these compositions better or more
successfully to the purposes for which he required them. But I was
determined, at least, not to limit my repertory to the few most
theatrically popular of Shakespeare's dramas, but to include in my
course _all_ Shakespeare's plays that it was possible to read with
any hope of attracting or interesting an audience. My father had
limited his range to a few of the most frequently acted plays. I
delivered the following twenty-four: King Lear, Macbeth, Cymbeline,
King John, Richard II., two parts of Henry IV., Henry V., Richard
III., Henry VIII., Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, Anthony and Cleopatra,
Hamlet, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, The
Winter's Tale, Measure for Measure, Much Ado about Nothing, As You
Like It, Midsummer Night's Dream, Merry Wives of Windsor, and The
Tempest.