Forbes -Robertson among
Princes, Presidents, Pre-Raphaelites
The Autobiography. Some English children are playing Hamlet as a drawing-room entertainment for Christmas, 1867. The melancholy Dane, a likely stripling of 14, wears a velvet tunic between the hem of which and a pair of his mother's black stockings there yawns "a sad hiatus" when he sits. Friends of the family swell the audience, including three painters—Ford Madox Brown, Laurence Alma-Tadema, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. A lissom youth with auburn hair and a weak but beautiful countenance stretches on the rug, slightly disconcerting the actors by chanting...