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Actorviexvs
reader, it is with trepidation that I begin to punctuate this report with inverted commas ; for I am no stenographer, my more or less trained memory has its limitations, and my small gifts for composition could not hope to make me write as Oxfordly as Pr — as Mr. Arliss talks.
“Nothing could induce me to wear a clean collar on a first night,” he was amazingly saying — for no man’s linen looks purer than Arliss’. “On a first night I take no chances on anything,” he went on, explaining “The shirt, the studs, even the collar I wear must have been rehearsed.
“If the collar balked at being buttoned” — I am not positive that he said balked, but that was the sense and it will serve — “I might be thrown into a state of disastrous nervousness. On a first night a faulty buttonhole is enough to unsettle one’s nerves. My man, who has been with me twenty years, knows that it would be more than his life is worth to give me fresh linen for an opening.”
But we had not met to talk about his buttonholes, nor did we do so in more than passing.
I had said, in a notice of his new play at the Great Northern, that it doesn’t seem within the possibilities for Mr. Arliss to give a richer characterization until he acts I ago, adding (in a year in which everybody is doing or threatening to do Shakespeare), “And why shouldn’t he act Iago?”
And now I said: “Have you ever tried Iago?”
“No ; in fact, I’ve never played Shakespeare,” was the astonishing answer of an actor whose suggested background would imply many a bout with the Bard. “Somehow I always just missed Shakespeare.” And then we spoke of Warfield and his Shylock, and I told