IV - JULIET

Summary

“So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows,

As yonder lady o'er her fellows shows.”

YOU ask me to write to you, dear friend, of Juliet, and of all my earliest dreams about her. Whose bidding should I heed, if not yours, my always loving, indulgent, constant friend? But indeed you hardly realise how difficult is the task you have set me. Of the characters about which I wrote to our dear Miss Jewsbury, I could speak as of beings outside, as it were, my own personality; but Juliet seems inwoven with my life. Of all characters, hers is the one which I have found the greatest difficulty, but also the greatest delight, in acting. My early girlhood's first step upon the stage was made as Juliet. To the last days of my artist life I never acted the character without finding fresh cause to marvel at the genius which created this child woman, raised by love to heroism of the highest type.

It was at the little theatre beside the Green at Richmond that I first played Juliet; and Richmond is therefore indelibly associated with the Juliet of my early youth. I will tell you why. My holidays were passed there, for there my family always spent some of the summer months. The small house on the Green, in which we were often left, with a kind old servant in charge, looks to me even now like a home.