Page:Henry IV Part 1 (1917) Yale.djvu/154

140 very polite.' An entirely unique performance must have been that of 1786 when Mrs. Webb appeared as Falstaff in a 'benefit' for herself.

In the 1824 production at Covent Garden, Charles Kemble appeared as Falstaff. 'He endeavored to rescue the part from coarseness. In the presence of the King and in the conversation with Westmoreland, he invested it with gentility and courtly bearing.' The Drury Lane production two years later was made notable by the appearance of Macready as Hotspur.

A popular Falstaff of the early nineteenth century was Bartley, who made his first appearance in the rôle in 1815. 'His success was equal to his most sanguine expectations, and richly merited.' Bartley made a triumphal tour of America in 1818-1819, and gave instruction in reading and elocution in many American colleges. In 'Hertford,' the capital of Connecticut, he and his accomplished wife were arrested for indulging in dramatic readings, one Ebenezer Huntington, a Puritanical Attorney General, having resurrected one of Connecticut's famous blue laws for this purpose.

Since Bartley's farewell performance in 1852, there have been few revivals of Henry IV. For two centuries the play was revived in almost every decade; since 1850 it has been practically ignored. In recent years it has formed part of the repertoire of Sir Herbert Tree and of Sir Francis Benson's company at the Stratford Memorial Theatre. Miss Julia Marlowe appeared as Prince Hal in an abridgement of the two parts of the play in New York in 1895-1896, with William F. Owen as Falstaff. Professor Brander Matthews has recorded some excellent stage business of Owen's in an essay on Stage Traditions, published in Shakespearean Studies, Columbia University Press, 1916. The play has been revived in England and America by University Dramatic Associations, at Cambridge in 1886 and at Yale in 1906.