ut by declamatory boys and men, and torn so inhumanly from
its living place and principle of continuity in the play, till it is
become to me a perfect dead member.

It may seem a paradox, but I cannot help being of opinion that the
plays of Shakspeare are less calculated for performance on a stage,
than those of almost any other dramatist whatever. Their
distinguishing excellence is a reason that they should be so. There
is so much in them, which comes not under the province of acting,
with which eye, and tone, and gesture, have nothing to do.

The glory of the scenic art is to personate passion, and the turns of
passion; and the more coarse and palpable the passion is, the more
hold upon the eyes and ears of the spectators the performer obviously
possesses. For this reason, scolding scenes, scenes where two persons
talk themselves into a fit of fury, and then in a surprising manner
talk themselves out of it again, have always been the most popular
upon our stage. And the reason is plain, because the spectators are
here most palpably appealed to, they are the proper judges in this
war of words, they are the legitimate ring that should be formed
round such "intellectual prize-fighters." Talking is the direct
object of the imitation here. But in all the best dramas, and in
Shakspeare above all, how obvious it is, that the form of _speaking_,
whether it be in soliloquy or dialogue, is only a medium, and often a
highly artificial one, for putting the reader or spectator into
possession of that knowledge of the inner structure and workings of
mind in a character, which he could otherwise never have arrived at
_in that form of composition_ by any gift short of intuition. We do
here as we do with novels written in the _epistolary form_. How many
improprieties, perfect solecisms in letter-writing, do we put up with
in Clarissa and other books, for the sake of the delight which that
form upon the whole gives us!

But the practice of stage-representation reduces everything to a
controversy of elocution. Every character, from the boisterous
blasphemings of Bajazet to the shrinking timidity of womanhood, must
play the orator. The love dialogues of Romeo and Juliet, those
silver-sweet sounds of lovers' tongues by night! the more intimate
and sacred sweetness of nuptial colloquy between an Othello or a
Posthumus with their married wives, all those delicacies which are so
delightful in the reading, as when we read of those youthful