'"
(He did say it, in "The Leopold" edition.)
"Again those touches of the wife's love in the advocate when
Bassanio says he'd give up his wife for Antonio, and when you
kissed your hand to him behind his back in the Ring bit--how pretty
and natural they were! Your whole conception and acting of the
character are so true to Shakespeare's lines that one longs he
could be here to see you. A lady gracious and graceful, handsome,
witty, loving and wise, you are his Portia to the life."
That's the best of Shakespeare, _I_ say. His characters can be
interpreted in at least eight different ways, and of each way some one
will say: "That is Shakespeare!" The German actress plays Portia as a
low comedy part. She wears an eighteenth-century law wig, horn
spectacles, a cravat (this last anachronism is not confined to Germans),
and often a mustache! There is something to be said for it all, though I
should not like to play the part that way myself.
Lady Pollock, who first brought me to Henry Irving's notice as a
possible leading lady, thought my Portia better at the Lyceum than it
had been at the Prince of Wales's.
"Thanks, my dear Valentine and enchanting Portia," she writes to me
in response to a photograph that I had sent her, "but the
photographers don't see you as you are, and have not the poetry in
them to do you justice.
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