Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 146.djvu/34

 But him whom he could not hold by love, he would not hold by force. Willie Hughes became a member of Lord Pembroke's company, and, perhaps in the open yard of the Red Bull Tavern, played the part of King Edward's delicate minion. On Marlowe's death, he seems to have returned to Shakespeare, who, whatever his fellow-partners may have thought of the matter, was not slow to forgive the wilfulness and treachery of the young actor.

How well, too, had Shakespeare drawn the temperament of the stage-player! Willie Hughes was one of those

He could act love, but could not feel it, could mimic passion without realising it.

but with Willie Hughes it was not so. "Heaven," says Shakespeare, in a sonnet of mad idolatry—

In his "inconstant mind" and his "false heart," it was easy to recognise the insincerity and treachery that somehow seem inseparable from the artistic nature, as in his love of praise, that desire for immediate recognition that characterises all actors. And yet, more fortunate in this than other actors, Willie Hughes was to know something of immortality. Inseparably connected with Shakespeare's plays, he was to live in them.

There were endless allusions, also, to Willie Hughes's power over his audience,—the "gazers," as Shakespeare calls them; but perhaps the most perfect description of his wonderful mastery over dramatic art was in "The Lover's Complaint," where Shakespeare says of him:—

Once I thought that I had really found Willie Hughes in Eliza-