Page:Richard Cumberland (1919).djvu/27

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Richard Cumberland

roles. It is interesting here to mention that in Leman Rede’s “The Skeleton Witness,” the Jew, Simeon Levi, is presented as being duped and nearly ruined by the Christian villain. We find oftentimes a reversion to the anti-Jewish sentiment on the stage, both English and American; thus, Sir Henry Taylor in a “Sicilian Summer” makes the Jews brigands and desperadoes; Potter’s dramatization of Du Maurier’s “Trilby” makes Svengali a charlatan and a scoundrel. Knoblauch, now Knoblock, portrays in “The Faun”, a distasteful Jewish moneylender, and many less-known plays introduce Jews in unfavorable situations. Yet Henry A. Jones presents a fine Jewish character in “Judah Llewellyn”, “a dreamer-preacher, of honorable and heroic mould’; and Augustus Thomas in “As a Man Thinks” has created a Jewish doctor of great force and personal appeal. Thus on the English stage, the Jew has fared variously, portrayed now as a villain, now as a saint, now in neutral colors. To Richard Cumberland,

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