Ellen Terry famous actress Juliet's Act IV soliloquy in Romeo and Juliet vial scene Shakespeare

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• published: 03 Feb 2015
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Recorded in February 1911. SPECIAL NOTE: The reason I upload so many voices from the past is that I find such voices to be charming, captivating, and special. But Ellen Terry is dreadful here. Juliet is age 13 in the play, but the problem is not simply that Ellen Terry sounds like an old lady (she should have tackled the Nurse's early monologue). Worse, she expresses no understanding of details in the lines she roars. I suppose we can come up with reasons why she delivers the way she does here (voices had to be "big" to be heard in large theaters), but the bottom line is that this is an unpleasant performance. I uploaded this for historic purposes (she was extremely famous), not because this is impressive. I've heard many actresses deliver these lines, and I can think of modern voices that are far more interesting and expressive doing these lines than Ellen Terry's delivery. If we wish to understand why Ellen Terry was famous, we must turn to other sources, probably not recordings. I don't wish to be too unfair, and I will assume that a younger Ellen Terry was magnificent. I can think of other celebrities who should not be judged by performances given in their final decades of life. Groucho Marx, for example, was dreadful in the 1970s. I would not sit through three hours of any production if this is the voice I had to listen to. SCENE III. Juliet's chamber. LADY CAPULET Good night: Get thee to bed, and rest; for thou hast need. Exit LADY CAPULET and Nurse JULIET Farewell! God knows when we shall meet again. I have a faint cold fear thrills through my veins, That almost freezes up the heat of life: I'll call them back again to comfort me: Nurse! What should she do here? My dismal scene I needs must act alone. Come, vial. What if this mixture do not work at all? Shall I be married then to-morrow morning? No, no: this shall forbid it: lie thou there. What if it be a poison, which the friar Subtly hath minister'd to have me dead, Lest in this marriage he should be dishonour'd, Because he married me before to Romeo? I fear it is: and yet, methinks, it should not, For he hath still been tried a holy man. How if, when I am laid into the tomb, I wake before the time that Romeo Come to redeem me? there's a fearful point! Shall I not, then, be stifled in the vault, To whose foul mouth no healthsome air breathes in, And there die strangled ere my Romeo comes? Or, if I live, is it not very like, The horrible conceit of death and night, Together with the terror of the place,-- As in a vault, an ancient receptacle, Where, for these many hundred years, the bones Of all my buried ancestors are packed: Where bloody Tybalt, yet but green in earth, Lies festering in his shroud; where, as they say, At some hours in the night spirits resort;-- Alack, alack, is it not like that I, So early waking, what with loathsome smells, And shrieks like mandrakes' torn out of the earth, That living mortals, hearing them, run mad:-- O, if I wake, shall I not be distraught, Environed with all these hideous fears? And madly play with my forefather's joints? And pluck the mangled Tybalt from his shroud? And, in this rage, with some great kinsman's bone, As with a club, dash out my desperate brains? O, look! methinks I see my cousin's ghost Seeking out Romeo, that did spit his body Upon a rapier's point: stay, Tybalt, stay! Romeo, I come! this do I drink to thee. Dame Ellen Terry, GBE, lived from February 27, 1847, to July 21, 1928. This English stage actress became the leading Shakespearean actress in Britain. In 1903 Terry took over management of London's Imperial Theatre, focusing on the plays of George Bernard Shaw and Henrik Ibsen.