It is
now quite unlike, and frankly so. The spoilt tradition of vitality has
been explicitly abandoned. The interrupted one waits, no longer with a
roving eye, but with something almost of dignity, as though he were
fulfilling ritual.
Benvolio and Mercutio outlag one another in hunting after the leaping
Romeo. They call without the slightest impetus. One can imagine how the
true Mercutio called--certainly not by rote. There must have been pauses
indeed, brief and short-breath'd pauses of listening for an answer,
between every nickname. But the nicknames were quick work. At the
Lyceum they were quite an effort of memory: "Romeo! Humours! Madman!
Passion! Lover!"
The actress of Juliet, speaking the words of haste, makes her audience
wait to hear them. Nothing more incongruous than Juliet's harry of
phrase and the actress's leisure of phrasing. None act, none speak, as
though there were such a thing as impulse in a play. To drop behind is
the only idea of arriving. The nurse ceases to be absurd, for there is
no one readier with a reply than she. Or, rather, her delays are so
altered by exaggeration as to lose touch with Nature.
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