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144 of the fact that Titus Andronicus is not generally believed to be written by him, and omit that play from your repertory. Pericles, too, is certainly not by Shakespeare, and that you will probably omit. Another thing: The National Theatre will not be confined entirely to the acting of Shakespeare. You will seek among his contemporaries, if the pedagogues will allow you to, and find a pleasant change of diet in Jonson, whose plots, unfortunately, are not always very explicit, and there's nothing more wearisome than a play one cannot follow. I doubt very much if there are many people who can follow the story of Every Man in His Humour, but the first three acts of Volpone are admirable. You'll have to decide if the last two might not be shortened. Ford's play, 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, was received with enthusiasm when the Phoenix Society produced it. Your productions will be finer than anything the Phoenix, with little time and money at its disposal, can do. I am sorry that you are not to be the first to show the Elizabethans on the modern stage—Marlowe, Jonson, Fletcher—for he who has tasted of the Elizabethans eschews modern drama, and it would have been a fine sport to astonish London, weary of small adulteries, with Elizabethan stories of murder and incest, written when the language was sappy. But no man gets all that he asks for, and you would not cherish jealousy of a gallant little society whose ambition it is to serve as a stopgap till some Conservative or Liberal Government grants a site and a subvention. If you had been able to hold out any hope to us of a National Theatre, Lady Cunard would not have hesitated to propose a dissolution of the Society.

Lady Cunard takes an important part in your deliberations.

She is our President. The Phoenix owed three hundred pounds, but at one of the last performances the announcement was made that a benefactor or a benefactress, who did not wish his or her name to be known, had paid the debt. I hasten to say that I do not attribute the paying of the debt to Lady Cunard; I know no more than any other member of the Phoenix Society. I am not of the inner circle; only this I can say, that there are few of the Phoenix who have not heard it reported that her influence counted for much in getting the money that saved the Old Vic. Among much that is uncertain it seems certain that without Lady Cunard we should not have had a London opera season in 1921. Does our last opera season go back to 1920? I do not know. My admiration for