ent for the leading role"--what a pretty phrase!--"which requires
an emotional young actress, capable of portraying strong light and
shade." He received many offers from actresses, none of whom were
suitable.

These two complainants are making a mistake concerning the task of the
dramatist, who fails in his labours if his plays cannot adequately be
acted without the assistance of great actresses. They are foolishly
pandering to the vanity of the players, who as a rule have a tendency to
exaggerate their importance in relation to drama. The error is very
common, and the idea that plays should be written primarily to exhibit
the players and not the ideas of the author is the bane of our theatre.

Until our dramatists act firmly on the view that their duty is to write
plays interesting when rendered by a good, starless company, they will
only produce as a rule _bravura_ pieces of little artistic value. By all
means let them write strongly emotional parts, if they can; but they are
not worthy of their royalties if their characters do not generally lie
within the range of a fair number of actresses. There is a grotesque
mixture of vanity and modesty in the mind of an author who thinks his
work worthy of performance by an actress of genius and at the same time
believes it to be too weak to succeed without her help.

It will be answered, probably, that Shakespeare's plays demand players
of genius and yet certainly are not mere _bravura_ pieces. There is
truth und untruth in this--truth that our public will not patronize
Shakespeare when acted by average performers; untruth in the proposition
that they cannot adequately be represented by players without genius. We
have unfortunately got into the very bad habit of going to see his works
not for their intrinsic interest but for the sake of the acting and
mounting. It is not _Hamlet_ but Mr Smith as the Prince of Denmark; not
_Romeo and Juliet_ but Miss Brown and Mr Jones as the lovers of Verona,
and so on, which form the attraction; and the works are cut and played
out of balance in order to meet the demand.

The author would have resented a suggestion that his characters are so
superhuman as to need marvellous performance: these remarks are without
prejudice to the question whether even with the aid of great players
Shakespeare's dramas reveal a fair proportion of their merits on the
stage.

The outcry concerning the alleged dearth of good actresses is very
commonly uttered