us to watch the struggle of such resolves. They had their
purpose in their grasp, their teeth were set, their will was iron. They
were foot to foot.

And next morning you saw by the papers that the secondary, but still
renowned, actor, had succeeded in sharing the principal honours of the
piece. So uncommonly well had he done, even for him. Then you
understood that, though you had not known it, the tragedian must have
been beaten in that dialogue. He had suffered himself in an instant of
weakness, to be stimulated; he had for a moment--only a moment--got on.

That night was influential. We may see its results everywhere, and
especially in Shakespeare. Our tragic stage was always--well, different,
let us say--different from the tragic stage of Italy and France. It is
now quite unlike, and frankly so. The spoilt tradition of vitality has
been explicitly abandoned. The interrupted one waits, no longer with a
roving eye, but with something almost of dignity, as though he were
fulfilling ritual.

Benvolio and Mercutio outlag one another in hunting after the leaping
Romeo. They call without the slightest impetus. One can imagine how the
true Mercutio called--certainly not by rote. There must have been pauses
indeed, brief and short-breath'd pauses of listening for an answer,
between every nickname. But the nicknames were quick work. At the
Lyceum they were quite an effort of memory: "Romeo! Humours! Madman!
Passion! Lover!"

The actress of Juliet, speaking the words of haste, makes her audience
wait to hear them. Nothing more incongruous than Juliet's harry of
phrase and the actress's leisure of phrasing. None act, none speak, as
though there were such a thing as impulse in a play. To drop behind is
the only idea of arriving. The nurse ceases to be absurd, for there is
no one readier with a reply than she. Or, rather, her delays are so
altered by exaggeration as to lose touch with Nature. If it is ill
enough to hear haste drawled out, it is ill, too, to hear slowness out-
tarried. The true nurse of Shakespeare lags with her news because her
ignorant wits are easily astray, as lightly caught as though they were
light, which they are not; but the nurse of the stage is never simply
astray: she knows beforehand how long she means to be, and never, never
forgets what kind of race is the race she is riding. The Juliet of the
stage seems to consider that there is plenty of time for her to discover
which