Contents

THE ESSAYS OF VIRGINIA WOOLF

Volume I: 1904–1912

Volume II: 1912–1918

Volume III: 1919–1924

Volume IV: 1925–1928

Volume V: 1929–1932

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Text by Virginia Woolf copyright © Anne Olivier Bell and Angelica Garnett 1906, 1907, 1908, 1909, 1910, 1913, 1916, 1918, 1919, 1921, 1922, 1923, 1924, 1929, 1933, 1934, 1935, 1936, 1937, 1938, 1939, 1940, 1941, 1942, 1947, 1950, 1972, 1979, 2006, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011
Introduction and editorial notes copyright © Stuart N. Clarke 2011

Stuart N. Clarke has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

First published in Great Britain in 2011 by The Hogarth Press

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9780701206710

Introduction

On 14 February 1934 Virginia Woolf recorded that she had gone ‘out to buy ink for my new Waterman, with which I am to take notes for a new Common Reader’, but by November she would tell her American publisher, Donald Brace: ‘I dont suppose that I shall have enough essays for a book for some time to come.’^fn1 During the last eight years of her life, Woolf published fewer essays on an annual count compared with the previous sixteen years. We can, however, perceive a reduction from 1929 onwards, although this is partially obscured by the publication of The Common Reader: Second Series in 1932. If we accept that Woolf ‘wrote essays primarily as a relief from fiction and as a means of making money’,^fn2 we may deduce that neither motive was as strong as formerly.

Taking the latter point first, we note that, while the Woolfs jointly spent just over £1000 annually (or £500 a year each – admittedly after tax) in the years 1927–39, their joint net income annually was significantly more from 1928; the highest was £4053 in 1932. According to Leonard Woolf, the ‘turning point in Virginia’s career as a successful novelist came in 1928 with the publication of Orlando’, and she earned over £1000 p.a. from her books from then on, with the exception of 1935, 1936 and 1939. As well as the income from their writings, the Woolfs also received profits from the operation of the Hogarth Press, and these were significant in 1930–3 and 1937. Leonard stated that consequent on their increased income: ‘Within the material framework which we had chosen for our existence … we did … less in the occupations which we did not want to do, for instance journalism.’^fn3

To some extent Virginia Woolf’s attitude changed with the advent of the Second World War. Three-quarters of an hour before war was declared on 3 September 1939, she noted her reactions: ‘Its the unreality of force that muffles every thing. Its now about 10.33. Not to attitudinise is one reflection. Nice to be entirely genuine & obscure. Then of course I shall have to work to make money. Thats a comfort. Write articles for America. I suppose take on some writing for some society. Keep the Press going.’^fn4 American newspapers and periodicals generally paid better than British ones.^fn5 In any case, Woolf’s stock in the United States had been particularly high since the publication of The Years: when Time magazine reviewed it on 12 April 1937, its front cover was adorned with a photograph of her by Man Ray; and the novel became a best-seller, with 38,900 copies printed between April and October.^fn6

Although the only article that Woolf would write for America was ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’, on 7 September 1939 she replied to Raymond Mortimer, the Literary Editor of the New Statesman and Nation who had asked her for contributions, that she had ‘an idea or two at the back of my mind for a possible article – perhaps Gilbert White into whom I’ve plunged by way of a respite, or … theres an account of a party at Abbotsford that might be made amusing. I’m horribly rusty and distracted, so you must be severe and reject.’^fn7 On 11 September she noted: ‘I’ve offered to write for the NS. I dont know if wisely: but it’s best to have a job, & I dont think I can stand aloof with comfort at the moment. So my reasons are half in half.’^fn8 She was also willing in theory to write for the Listener, but in practice the constraints of space were a problem in peacetime: ‘Joe [Ackerley, the Literary Editor] will only allow me 800 words of unsigned; 1500 of signed. An amusing illustration of the virtues of capitalism. Its the advertisement, not the article, they want. And its the advertisement I dont want.’^fn9 In wartime the constraints were worse: ‘The Dream’ and ‘Georgiana and Florence’ were both signed and fewer than 1500 words each. Leonard recalled: ‘The war years were a publishing nightmare for The Hogarth Press, as indeed they were, I suppose, for all publishers. The blackest spot in the nightmare, perpetually preying on our minds, was the shortage and rationing of paper.’^fn10

Following the completion of The Waves (1931), Woolf embarked on Flush: A Biography (1933), a fictionalised biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog. Critics tend to include it among her novels, but it does not fit neatly into any genre. It presents ‘that perpetual marriage of granite and rainbow’^fn11 more completely than the fictional Orlando: A Biography (1928) and the factual Roger Fry: A Biography (1940). However, to the extent that Flush is based on fact, there was less need for Woolf to turn to writing essays ‘as a relief from fiction’. With The Years, the situation was similar although more complex. Initially conceived in 1932 as ‘an Essay-Novel, called the Pargiters – & its to take in everything, sex, education, life &c’,^fn12 it soon became unmanageable. The essays were broken off and eventually redrafted in a very different form as Three Guineas (1938), while Woolf struggled with increasing desperation to complete the novel. Dorothy Wellesley reported to W. B. Yeats on 6 July 1936 that she had received a letter from Woolf: ‘She has been ill for months, and writes for the first time I have known a dispirited letter; she says she cannot write; but of course this will be only temporary.’^fn13 When Three Guineas was published Woolf called it ‘the end of six years floundering, striving, much agony, some ecstasy: lumping the Years and 3Gs together as one book – as indeed they are’.^fn14

Owing mainly to the indefatigable researches of the late Brownlee Kirkpatrick, over fifty additional essays dating from 1906 to 1924 have been discovered subsequent to the publication of the first three volumes of this edition.^fn15 They are included in this volume and, incidentally, allow us here to compare Virginia Stephen’s early reviews with Virginia Woolf’s last essays. Virginia Stephen served a long apprenticeship, but even the most practised reviewer would be hard put to strike sparks of inspiration from the series of trashy novels that Bruce Richmond, the editor of the Times Literary Supplement, saw fit to set before his tyro reviewer.

An egregious example was The Desert Venture (1907), which its (and E. M. Forster’s) publisher Edward Arnold described as:

With its ‘English county family’,^fn17 the novel is set clearly within ‘that school of Snobbery with Violence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature’.^fn18 Racism also runs through The Desert Venture as a matter of course, from the ‘fair-haired, blue-eyed, British’^fn19 hero down to a hierarchy among slaves:

The novel’s crude scenes would pass before any modern-day reader like a series of oleographs faded with the years. Stephen is more generous than she would have been thirty years later, when she might well have dismissed it as ‘a very exciting yet infinitely childish book’.^fn21

With the publication of The Years in March 1937, Woolf turned again to writing a few essays: ‘I don’t want to write more fiction. I want to explore a new criticism’.^fn22 She was dissatisfied with the form of her Common Reader essays, but had difficulty in March 1939 finding an alternative: ‘I’m thinking of a critical book. Suppose I used the diary form? Would this make one free to go from book to book – or wd it be too personal?’^fn23 On 22 June 1940 she wrote: ‘I wish I cd invent a new critical method – something swifter & lighter & more colloquial & yet intense: more to the point & less composed; more fluid & following the flight, than my C.R. essays. The old problem: how to keep the flight of the mind, yet be exact.’^fn24 A month later she noted: ‘I can write entirely to please myself: first a C.R’;^fn25 while on 22 October she appears to have accepted the old format: ‘I will write supports & additions for my old TLS articles’.^fn26 On 1 March 1941 she told her friend, the composer Ethel Smyth: ‘I am at the moment trying, without the least success, to write an article or two for a new Common Reader. I am stuck in Elizabethan plays. I cant move back or forwards. I’ve read too much, but not enough.’^fn27 According to Leonard: ‘At the time of her death she was already engaged in getting together essays for a further volume, which she proposed to publish in the autumn of 1941 or the spring of 1942.’^fn28 While his first posthumous collection of her essays, The Death of the Moth (1942), is comparable in length with the two Common Readers, it is unlikely that she would have chosen the same essays, and of course ‘there is no doubt that she would have made large alterations and revisions in nearly all’^fn29 of them. The Death of the Moth contains only eleven from 1933 to 1941, ten from 1917 to 1932, and seven which had never previously been published. Woolf herself would probably have included more of her published essays from 1933 to 1941, and would certainly have included ‘Walter Sickert: A Conversation’ (1934).^fn30

Nevertheless, Woolf remained worried by the formal literary manner of her ‘old Literary Supplement articles’ with ‘their suavity, their politeness, their sidelong approach’.^fn31 She continued to identify herself as a ‘common reader’.^fn32 While she had tried in such books as ‘the Common Reader, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas’ to ‘reach a far wider circle than a little private circle of cultivated people’, she still felt that she ‘ought to have been able to make not merely thousands of people interested in literature; but millions’.^fn33

And in September 1940 she began to write a book that was to be called ‘Reading at Random’ or ‘Turning the Page’.^fn34 In her notes for the book, she wrote: ‘The idea of the book is to find the end of a ball of string & wind out. Let one book suggest another.’^fn35 In October she noted:

We have the first chapter, ‘Anon’, and a fragment of the second, ‘The Reader’. How the book would have continued, evolved and been completed in its final form, we shall never know, yet these two extant draft chapters about ‘Anon’, ‘the common voice singing out of doors’, and his or her^fn37 successor ‘The Reader’, whose ‘life history could we discover it would be worth writing, for the effect it had upon literature’, seem to be at the very heart of Woolf’s literary concerns. On the one hand, it is only the ‘song’ that is important. She was pleased by how little was known about Shakespeare’s life. On a visit to Stratford-upon-Avon in 1934, she reflected:

This goes a long way to explain Woolf’s extreme distaste for self-advertisement, personal publicity and the cult of the celebrity.^fn39 The words she put into Christina Rossetti’s mouth applied to her too: ‘Here you are rambling among unimportant trifles, rattling my writing-table drawers … when all I care for you to know is here. Behold this green volume. It is a copy of my collected works. It costs four shillings and sixpence. Read that.’^fn40

As indicated below, for Woolf reading is a supreme pleasure, but she is also aware of the effect that the reader has on the writer: ‘a book is always written for somebody to read, and, since the patron is not merely the paymaster, but also in a very subtle and insidious way the instigator and inspirer of what is written, it is of the utmost importance that he should be a desirable man’.^fn41 Not only that, but she also sees that the book is only completed by the reader’s contribution – what the reader brings to the book – and, as long as there are readers of the book, ‘We are in a world where nothing is concluded.’^fn42 Maria DiBattista argues that ‘The Common Reader may be regarded as the first volume of that life history’ of ‘The Reader’ and ‘how the English reader developed habits in response to the customs of the playhouse’.^fn43 Actually, it is worth reading both ‘Anon’ and ‘The Reader’ in conjunction with the first six essays of The Common Reader (1925): ‘The Common Reader’, ‘The Pastons and Chaucer’, ‘On Not Knowing Greek’, ‘The Elizabethan Lumber Room’, ‘Notes on an Elizabethan Play’ and ‘Montaigne’.

In this final volume of The Essays of Virginia Woolf, there are more overtly political and socio-political essays than in the previous volumes, notably ‘Why?’, ‘Royalty’, ‘Why Art To-day Follows Politics’, ‘Women Must Weep’, ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’, ‘The Leaning Tower’ and the version of ‘Royalty’ that was rejected by Picture Post in 1939 ‘as an attack on the Royal family, and on the institution of kingship in this country’.^fn44 Even in ‘America, which I Have Never Seen …’, we find that:

It is, however, ‘The Leaning Tower’, which was based on a talk given to the Workers’ Educational Association in 1940 – and which can be seen as a successor to ‘A Letter to a Young Poet’ (1932) – that is Woolf’s most sustained vision of the future. In discussing the political young writers of the 1930s, she points out that they sit ‘upon a tower raised above the rest of us’ – ‘the tower of middle-class birth and expensive education’:

Surprisingly perhaps, the views of Woolf, with her belief in ‘educated men’s daughters working in their own class – how, indeed, can they work in any other?’,^fn45 are close to those of George Orwell:

Woolf tried to distinguish herself from the ‘leaning-tower writers’ and ally herself with her audience: ‘are we not commoners, outsiders?’ It was this that Desmond MacCarthy particularly objected to in his ‘World of Books’ column when he wrote that ‘she ought not to have used the pronoun “we” in addressing an audience of working-men’.^fn47 Woolf responded to him the very same day:

In perusing Woolf’s literary and literary-biographical essays, one can almost forget that she was also a creative writer, for her concern for reading seems overriding: her ‘essays are a celebration of reading, as a pleasure and as a challenge’.^fn49 Here is Woolf’s apotheosis of reading:

As Melba Cuddy-Keane points out:

However, Woolf did not model a future world: ‘Of course, the ideological impact of her writing is undeniable, especially in such polemical works as Three Guineas. But Woolf never forges manifestoes, issues guidelines, or gives instructions that must be followed to the letter.’^fn52 She wanted her readers to think for themselves. This is why she was unsympathetic to the academic approach to teaching English Literature that was coming to the forefront in her time, and even more to the Scrutiny–Leavisite approach that ‘habitually use[d] the language of intimidation, the language which brooks no opposition’.^fn53 Thus we can also see that Woolf’s strong opposition to ‘the vain and vicious system of lecturing’^fn54 is based on a democratic approach to education. In addition, ‘Woolf developed a reader-oriented approach that affirms a plurality of views … marked by another feature virtually absent in the emerging academic criticism: a self-reflexive questioning of her own approach.’^fn55

It is not too much to say that Woolf saw reading as a birthright. She knew that some sections of society were too uneducated to read or to want to read. She knew that some people were unable to acquire books because they were too expensive to buy or public libraries were too difficult to access. Agnes Smith, a Yorkshire millworker, wrote to her: ‘Yes, I can get books, the trouble is the shortage of time, when one is working, the shortage of money when one is not … I could use Huddersfield [Library] for 5/- yearly, but it costs me eighteen-pence return and takes twenty minutes each way to get there.’^fn56 And she knew that some people worked so hard that they were too tired to read – here she would have included not only the working classes who worked a twelve-hour day but many professionals also: ‘most successful barristers are hardly worth sitting next at dinner – they yawn so’.^fn57

Increasingly, in Woolf’s diary we read of repeated criticisms of the ‘system’.^fn58 Her attitudes are a long way from Harold Nicolson’s lament on the outbreak of the Second World War that ‘the world as I know it has only a few more hours to run’.^fn59 They are even further from Vita Sackville-West’s ‘manifesto’ of 7 February 1945:

Instead, in 1940 Virginia Woolf could welcome signs of change: ‘The income tax is saying to middle-class parents: You cannot afford to send your sons to public schools any longer; you must send them to the elementary schools.’ This is not levelling down: it is about mixing with the living, not with the dead. And she could look forward positively to a more democratic age:

Editorial Note

The present volume is compiled upon the principles already established for the edition. Of the thirty-five pieces it includes from 1933 to 1941, four are reprinted for the first time. As in the previous volumes the contents follow the listing in Section C of the late B. J. Kirkpatrick’s bibliography (4th ed., 1997), with the insertion of the following: ‘Foreword to Catalogue of Recent Paintings by Vanessa Bell’ (p. 29), ‘The Roger Fry Memorial Exhibition’ (p. 59) and ‘Reviewing’ (p. 195).

Of the fifty-five additional essays from 1906 to 1924, thirty-five are reprinted for the first time. The contents follow the listing in Section C of the Kirkpatrick bibliography, with the insertion of the following: ‘Some Poetic Plays’ (p. 318), ‘The Call of the East’ (p. 323), ‘Maud-Evelyn, &c. [and] The Sacred Fount’ (p. 395), ‘The Art of Thomas Hardy’ (p. 396), ‘Strangely enough, that engaging acrobat …’ (p. 399) and ‘The Faithful Shepherdess …’ (p. 399). All of the essays in the appendices have been published before.

Every effort has been made, using manuscript reading notes, to trace references to sources in the editions Woolf used, or at the very least in the editions the Woolfs owned. A great deal is known thanks to the labours of Brenda Silver, Elizabeth Steele and Andrew McNeillie, but a number of mysteries remain. In a very few cases it has been impossible to discover the work from which a quotation derives, let alone the relevant edition, and these failures are acknowledged in the notes.

Manuscript drafts of a number of articles survive and where these have been identified they have been listed under the essays to which they refer.

The following general changes to the text have usually been made throughout: double quotation marks have been changed to single, and vice versa; the full stops after Dr, Messrs, Mr, Mrs, and St have been omitted, except in quotations; M-dashes have been changed to spaced N-dashes; American spellings changed to British; book-titles have been italicised; and words ending in –ize changed to –ise. However, the question of regularising quotations inside or outside punctuation has not been addressed. In dealing with quotations made by Woolf, significant discrepancies are drawn attention to in the notes, but errors of punctuation have usually been ignored.

Acknowledgements

Once again, I wish to thank Andrew McNeillie for passing over to me Volumes V and VI of The Essays of Virginia Woolf, together with photocopies of Virginia Woolf’s articles. Secondly, I thank Anne Olivier Bell, the Society of Authors (Jeremy Crow) as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Virginia Woolf, and The Hogarth Press (Random House UK: Alison Samuel, Poppy Hampson) for entrusting me with this task. Copy-editor Lindeth Vasey has again improved my draft. I also thank the University of Sussex and the Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Leonard Woolf for permission to reprint his contributions to ‘Reviewing’ and ‘Are Too Many Books Written and Published?’ in Appendix IV. I am grateful to the BBC Written Archives Centre (Jeff Walden) regarding the publication of the scripts of ‘Are Too Many Books Written and Published?’ and ‘Craftsmanship’ and for my transcription of the partial recording of the latter. The passage in my introduction from The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell (copyright © George Orwell, 1937) is reprinted by permission of Bill Hamilton as the Literary Executor of the late Sonia Brownell Orwell and Secker & Warburg Ltd.

Once again, no one has spent more time helping me than my partner, Brian Evans, who read almost every article aloud to me as I checked Woolf’s texts. I recorded The Common Reader onto cassette tapes, so that I could check the various editions and reprints of the book (see Appendix VI).

Stephen Barkway read the computer printout of the whole book, and made a number of helpful suggestions and criticisms for which I am extremely grateful.

The late David Philps conscientiously helped track down quotations in about fifteen of the essays.

Karen V. Kukil of the Mortimer Rare Book Room, William Allan Neilson Library, Smith College, generously provided me with photocopies of articles and manuscripts.

I also owe thanks to Anthea Ballam, John Beaumont, David Bradshaw, Michael Bundock (Johnson Society of London), Vanessa Curtis, Beth Rigel Daugherty, Eamon Dyas (Archives and Records Office, News International Limited), Steve Ellis, Isabelle Epps, Mary Ellen Foley, Sylvain Louis (and, through him, to François Bessire), John Montgomery (Librarian, Royal United Services Institute), Ursula Narr-Heeb, Gisela Philippi, S. P. Rosenbaum, Roberta Rubenstein, Brenda Silver, Michael Whitworth and Sheila M. Wilkinson.

I wish to acknowledge the resources of the British Library (especially at St Pancras but also the Newspaper Reading Room at Colindale), the periodicals department at London University Library, Special Collections at Sussex University Library, the Library Archives (Archives of The Hogarth Press, MS 2750) at Reading University, The Women’s Library at London Metropolitan University, and the London Borough of Camden’s Virtual Library (which enabled me to access from home the DNB, ODNB, OED, The Times Digital Archive and, for some of the time, the TLS Centenary Archive).

Other debts will be found listed in the Abbreviations and the Bibliography.

Abbreviations

London Squares

Some fortunate people during this hot summer have found a moment’s respite under the shade of the trees in one of the London squares. Many of them will leave town in August and September; but the gates will remain locked and the gardens unused. The sensible and humane suggestion is now made that the squares should be opened during August, and perhaps part of July and September, to some of those who would otherwise have no place to walk or sit in but the streets. The Square Committees have, of course, to give their consent, but it is hard to believe that this will be withheld. And there must be many who would be willing, if the squares were thrown open as suggested, to contribute towards the sum needed for their upkeep. In this belief, at least, may I draw your readers’ attention to the scheme and add that further details can be had from The London Council of Social Service,^fn2 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, W.C.2?

‘Twelfth Night’ at the Old Vic

Shakespearians are divided, it is well known, into three classes; those who prefer to read Shakespeare in the book; those who prefer to see him acted on the stage; and those who run perpetually from book to stage gathering plunder. Certainly there is a good deal to be said for reading Twelfth Night in the book if the book can be read in a garden, with no sound but the thud of an apple falling to the earth, or of the wind ruffling the branches of the trees. For one thing there is time – time not only to hear ‘the sweet sound that breathes upon a bank of violets’^fn2 but to unfold the implications of that very subtle speech as the Duke winds into the nature of love. There is time, too, to make a note in the margin; time to wonder at queer jingles like ‘that live in her; when liver, brain, and heart’^fn3 … ‘and of a foolish knight that you brought in one night’^fn4 and to ask oneself whether it was from them that was born the lovely, ‘And what should I do in Illyria? My brother he is in Elysium.’^fn5 For Shakespeare is writing, it seems, not with the whole of his mind mobilised and under control but with feelers left flying that sport and play with words so that the trail of a chance word is caught and followed recklessly. From the echo of one word is born another word, for which reason, perhaps, the play seems as we read it to tremble perpetually on the brink of music. They are always calling for songs in Twelfth Night, ‘O fellow come, the song we had last night.’^fn6 Yet Shakespeare was not so deeply in love with words but that he could turn and laugh at them. ‘They that do dally with words do quickly make them wanton.’^fn7 There is a roar of laughter and out burst Sir Toby, Sir Andrew, Maria. Words on their lips are things that have meaning; that rush and leap out with a whole character packed in a little phrase. When Sir Andrew says ‘I was adored once,’^fn8 we feel that we hold him in the hollow of our hands; a novelist would have taken three volumes to bring us to that pitch of intimacy. And Viola, Malvolio, Olivia, the Duke – the mind so brims and spills over with all that we know and guess about them as they move in and out among the lights and shadows of the mind’s stage that we ask why should we imprison them within the bodies of real men and women? Why exchange this garden for the theatre? The answer is that Shakespeare wrote for the stage and presumably with reason. Since they are acting Twelfth Night at the Old Vic, let us compare the two versions.

Many apples might fall without being heard in the Waterloo Road, and as for the shadows, the electric light has consumed them all. The first impression upon entering the Old Vic is overwhelmingly positive and definite. We seem to have issued out from the shadows of the garden upon the bridge of the Parthenon. The metaphor is mixed, but then so is the scenery. The columns of the bridge somehow suggest an Atlantic liner and the austere splendours of a classical temple in combination. But the body is almost as upsetting as the scenery. The actual persons of Malvolio, Sir Toby, Olivia and the rest expand our visionary characters out of all recognition. At first we are inclined to resent it. You are not Malvolio; or Sir Toby either, we want to tell them; but merely impostors. We sit gaping at the ruins of the play, at the travesty of the play. And then by degrees this same body or rather all these bodies together, take our play and remodel it between them. The play gains immensely in robustness, in solidity. The printed word is changed out of all recognition when it is heard by other people. We watch it strike upon this man or woman; we see them laugh or shrug their shoulders, or turn aside to hide their faces. The word is given a body as well as a soul. Then again as the actors pause, or topple over a barrel, or stretch their hands out, the flatness of the print is broken up as by crevasses or precipices; all the proportions are changed. Perhaps the most impressive effect in the play is achieved by the long pause which Sebastian and Viola make as they stand looking at each other in a silent ecstasy of recognition. The reader’s eye may have slipped over that moment entirely. Here we are made to pause and think about it; and are reminded that Shakespeare wrote for the body and for the mind simultaneously.

But now that the actors have done their proper work of solidifying and intensifying our impressions, we begin to criticise them more minutely and to compare their version with our own. We make Mr Quartermaine’s Malvolio stand beside our Malvolio. And to tell the truth, wherever the fault may lie, they have very little in common. Mr Quartermaine’s Malvolio is a splendid gentleman, courteous, considerate, well bred; a man of parts and humour who has no quarrel with the world. He has never felt a twinge of vanity or a moment’s envy in his life. If Sir Toby and Maria fool him he sees through it we may be sure, and only suffers it as a fine gentleman puts up with the games of foolish children. Our Malvolio, on the other hand, was a fantastic complex creature, twitching with vanity, tortured by ambition. There was cruelty in his teasing, and a hint of tragedy in his defeat; his final threat had a momentary terror in it. But when Mr Quartermaine says ‘I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you,’ we feel merely that the powers of the law will be soon and effectively invoked. What, then, becomes of Olivia’s ‘He hath been most notoriously abused’?^fn9 Then there is Olivia. Madame Lopokova has by nature that rare quality which is neither to be had for the asking nor to be subdued by the will – the genius of personality. She has only to float on to the stage and everything round her suffers, not a sea change,^fn10 but a change into light, into gaiety; the birds sing, the sheep are garlanded, the air rings with melody and human beings dance towards each other on the tips of their toes possessed of an exquisite friendliness, sympathy and delight. But our Olivia was a stately lady; of sombre complexion, slow moving, and of few sympathies. She could not love the Duke nor change her feeling. Madame Lopokova loves everybody. She is always changing. Her hands, her face, her feet, the whole of her body, are always quivering in sympathy with the moment. She could make the moment, as she proved when she walked down the stairs with Sebastian, one of intense and moving beauty; but she was not our Olivia. Compared with her the comic group, Sir Toby, Sir Andrew, Maria, the fool were more than ordinarily English. Coarse, humorous, robust, they trolled out their words, they rolled over their barrels; they acted magnificently. No reader, one may make bold to say, could outpace Miss Seyler’s Maria, with its quickness, its inventiveness, its merriment; nor add anything to the humours of Mr Livesey’s Sir Toby. And Miss Jeans as Viola was satisfactory; and Mr Hare as Antonio was admirable; and Mr Morland’s clown^fn11Twelfth NightCherry OrchardMeasure for MeasureHenry the Eighth^fn12