A Letter to Her Parents on Drama and Music

To Her Parents                                                                                               School House

22 October 1911

My dears, …

Look here! We are going to do The Merchant of Venice for a house-play … and I am to play Shylock (!!!)—will you please send me Daddy’s beard [the false beard her father used to wear in his role as Louis XIII in the Musketeers game] and 3 pairs of breeches and your little old brown cloak and a false nose some time before the end of the month—and bag Auntie’s Shakespeare with the pictures of Irving and E. Terry [Sir Henry Irving (1838-1905) and Dame Ellen Terry (1847-1928)] and send it at once, please—I must have a nose—and I can’t get one here, but if you, either of you happen to be in Cambridge or London—oh! I beg and beseech that you will step into a make-up shop and ask for a Jewish (not a comic red) nose, and instructions how to put it on—I’m simply distracted about my wretched nose—is there anything helpful about Shylock in that Life of Edmund Kean [(1787-1833), reputed one of the greatest English actors, famous for his Shakespearean roles, among them that of Shylock.]. Darlings, I’m so sorry to bother you, but I really must—and oh! could you step into the toyshop—Hill’s—in St Ives and get me three-penny worth of grey jute for a moustache?...

The French players are coming on Saturday. They are going to do Les Précieuses Ridicules [The Pretentious Young Ladies by Molière] and La Poudre aux Yeux [Dust in One’s Eyes by Eugène Marin Labiche]—I don’t suppose I shall be able to speak to M. Roubaud this time, as they are coming to a hall in the town. I do hope Rollan will come his time. I shall weep if he doesn’t—he is so ripping!...

Mr George gave me a song last week “Four by the Clock” [Words by Longellow, set to music by James Albert Mallinson, who composed over 400 songs.]. He stopped me after I had sung him the first verse, and said: “I see you are going to be my prize dictionist—you sing with real musical feeling—you are the only girl I’ve had who sings ‘Four by the Clock’—They all say, ‘Four by the Clock’—even the composer’s wife does it.” The rest of his lesson was not so complimentary—except that I sang him an exercise, all full of runs, and he said I had such a splendid sense of rhythm—I wish I wasn’t so fond of being praised. I won’t work for people who don’t encourage me!

Miss Eglinger gave a ripping concert yesterday—she sang some topping songs, among others “Who is Sylvia?” and “Cupid and my Campaspe” [A lyric from Alexander and Campaspe, a comedy by John Lyly.]—afterwards somebody asked me “And what is a Campaspe?”

I must stop now, as I’ve a lot of letters to write—give my love to the GYM [Good Young Man—her father’s pupil who was boarding at the rectory.]—I want to come home more than ever—I am dying to break his celibate heart with a hopeless passion. How lucky I wasn’t born beautiful—I should have been an awful flirt.

Ever your devoted

    Shylock

Don’t forget my nose!

*Letter from The Letters of Dorothy Sayers: 1899 to 1936 – The Making of a Detective Novelist, chosen and edited by Barbara Reynolds (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), pp. 58-59.