Page:Once a Clown, Always a Clown.djvu/74

ONCE A CLOWN, ALWAYS A CLOWN So only once in my life have I had the gratification of playing the heroic. At the Lambs' Gambol in 1909 I played Mark Antony in the funeral-oration scene from "Julius Cæsar", seriously intended and seriously performed.

The Lambs in their annual Gambols seek a fare not to be had in the theater at large. From the Lambs' point of view it would have been pointless to have heard Robert Mantell, Louis James, Frederick B. Warde or William Farnum, all actors associated with the rôle, deliver Antony's oration. Such actors were put in the mob and the major rôles given to men identified with the frivolous in the theater. In the mob of fifty-three that listened to my guarded eulogy of the murdered Cæsar were sixteen actors who had played Antony themselves.

As Shakespeare wrote it, Antony enters in advance of Cæsar's body, but even before an audience largely composed of fellow professionals I was fearful of the effect my reputation as a comedian might have upon their risibilities, and I insisted upon entering behind the bearers carrying the body.

"They won't laugh at a corpse at any rate," I grimly told Gus Thomas.