Before the members of the Union Church Literary and Social Guild on Wednesday Mr. E. P, Graham Barrow delivered a lecture upon "Notable Hamlets." Basing his opinions on the character to portrayed, he gave interesting impressions of three great impersonations-
At the outset Mr. Graham Bar row said that William Hazlitt was so much in love with Shakespeare's picture of Hamlet that he would not have the character acted. He said that there was no play that suffered so much in being transferred to the stage. He insisted that there should. be as much of the gentleman and scholar infused into the part, and as little of the actor.
was because Irving, Tree and Forbes Robertson had broken away from the conventional portrayal of Hamlet and made him the gentle man and scholar and not the actor that they formed the subject of this paper.
When Irving first appeared in London as Hamlet it was not till well through the third act that he convinced the audience that his reading was correct. It was freely sain in the intervals that ho could not read Shakespeare, and that he was missing his points. But Irving was not out to make points, he was going to be the Hamlet who thought aloud, and not the actor who protested' the soliloquies down at the footlights to an enthralled audience.
It was strange that the prevailing disappointment during the carly acts was not enough to keep the playgoers from being affected by Irving's incomparable express sion of moral poison-
Tue Sgnouar AND GENTLEMAN, In act three the actor triumphed. There were no more doubts, no more discussions. Here was the scholar and the gentleman and so little the player, and everyone was now convinced that it was the righ> reading. Irving scored his greatest success in his scenes with Ophelia. He was infinitely tender and show ed that 40,000 brothers could not express his overwhelming—passion. His speech to the players and the play scene were both daring in their originality, but the actor made the audience feel that he was correct. He threw away the old business, of two pictures on the arras when he would have his father's face appear to confront that of the uncle. He looked into space and saw the loved features in the mind's eye, and the tenseness of his lines made his mother see her iniquity more plainly than any painted gaud could picture it.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.