Merchant of Venice, 1908: Alexandra Carlisle as Portia in disguise as the lawyer Balthazar.

In 1903 Alexandra Carlisle (1886-1936) played Audrey in As You Like It and Maria in Twelfth Night. For Herbert Beerbohm in 1908, she played Olivia and Portia. In 1935 she acted Emilia and Lady MacDuff. John Ripley observed in "Sociology and Soundscape: Herbert Beerbohm Tree's 1908 Merchant of Venice" that Tree’s 1908 production “although censured in its own time and after for its histrionic and scenic excess” it now seems “a daring and inventive exercise in political Shakespeare, a well-meaning, if ill-fated, attempt to influence public opinion at a time of acute Jewish-Christian hostility.” (Shakespeare Quarterly, 56.4.385)