To be or not to be,
but Mr. Booth does it better than any one I have ever heard. I once
heard an elocutionist--kind of a smart Alickutionist as my friend The
Hoosier Poet would say. This man recited "To be or not to be" in a
manner which, he said, had frequently brought tears to eyes unused to
weep. He recited it with his right hand socked into his bosom up to the
elbow and his fair hair tossed about over his brow. His teeming brain,
which claimed to be kind of a four-horse teaming brain, as it were,
seemed to be on fire, and to all appearances he was indeed mad. So were
the people who listened to him. He hissed it through his clinched teeth
and snorted it through his ripe, red nose, wailed it up into the
ceiling, and bleated it down the aisles, rolled it over and over against
the rafters of his reverberating mouth, handed it out in big capsules,
or hissed it through his puckered atomizer of a mouth, wailed and
bellowed like a wild and maddened tailless steer in fly-time, darted
across the stage like a headless hen, ripped the gentle atmosphere into
shreds with his guinea-hen voluntary, bowed to us, and teetered off the
stage.
Mr. Booth does not hoist his shoulders and settle back on his "pastern
jints" like a man who is about to set a refractory brake on a coal car,
neither does he immerse his right arm in his bosom up to the second
joint. He seems to have the idea that Hamlet spoke these lines mostly
because he felt like saying something instead of doing it to introduce a
set of health-lift gestures and a hoarse, baritone snort.
A head of dank hair, a low, mellow, union-depot tone of voice, and a
dark-blue, three sheet poster will not make a successful Hamlet, and
blessed be the man who knows this without experimenting on the people
till he has bunions on his immortal soul. I have sent a note to Mr.
Booth this morning asking him to call at my room, No. 6-5/8, and saying
that I would give him my idea about the drama from a purely unpartisan
standpoint, but it is raining so fast now that I fear he will not be
able to come.