It was selected six months before, and studied with the material
in mind, the students in the literature class, available for the
different parts. What is there, thought I, in Beatrice--sprightliness
covering intense womanly feeling--that our vivacious, healthful Ruth
Brown cannot master; and what in Benedick, her masculine counterpart,
beyond the power of Moore to conceive and render? It is chiefly
girlish beauty and simple sweetness that Hero requires, so she
shall be Edith Grey. Claudio, Leonato, Don John, Pedro,--we have
clean-limbed, presentable fellows that will look and speak them all
well; and as for lumbering Dogberry, Abbot, with his fine sense of the
ludicrous, will carry it out in the best manner. A dash of the pencil
here and there through the lines where Shakespeare was suiting his own
time, and not the world as it was to be after three hundred refining
years, and the marking out of a few scenes that could be spared from
the action, and the play was ready; trimmed a little, but with not
a whit taken from its sparkle or pathos, and all its lovelier poetry
untouched.

Then came long weeks of drill. In the passage,

"O my lord,
When you went onward to this ended action,
I looked upon her with a soldier's eye," etc.,

Claudio caught the fervour and softness at last, and seemed (it
would have pleased Queen Bess better than Madame de Main tenon) like
Palamon, in love indeed. Ursula and Hero rose easily to the delicate
poetry of the passages that begin,

"The pleasantest angling is to see the fish