had earlier set operatic adaptations of Shakespeare's Macbeth (in 1847) and Othello (in 1887) and had considered King Lear as a subject; Boito had suggested Antony and Cleopatra. Verdi still had doubts, and on the next day sent another letter to Boito expressing his concerns. He wrote of "the large number of years" in his age, his health (which he admitted was still good) and his ability to complete the project: "if I were not to finish the music?" He said that the project could all be a waste of the younger man's time and distract Boito from completing his own new opera (which became Nerone). Yet, as his biographer Mary Jane Phillips-Matz notes, "Verdi could not hide his delight at the idea of writing another opera". On 10 July 1889 he wrote again: Composition Boito's original sketch is lost, but surviving correspondence shows that the finished opera is not greatly different from his first thoughts. The major differences were that an act 2 monologue for Ford was moved from scene 2 to scene 1, and that the last act originally ended with the marriage of the lovers rather than with the lively vocal and orchestral fugue, which was Verdi's idea. He wrote to Boito in August 1889 telling him that he was writing a fugue: "Yes, Sir! A fugue... and a buffa fugue", which "could probably be fitted in". Verdi accepted the need to trim Shakespeare's plot to keep the opera within an acceptable length. He was sorry, nonetheless, to see the loss of Falstaff's second humiliation, dressed up as the Wise Woman of Brentford to escape from Ford. He wrote of his desire to do justice to Shakespeare: "To sketch the characters in a few strokes, to weave the plot, to extract all the juice from that enormous Shakespearian orange". Shortly after the premiere an English critic, R A Streatfeild, remarked on how Verdi succeeded: In November Boito took the completed first act to Verdi at Sant'Agata, along with the second act, which was still under construction: "That act has the devil on its back; and when you touch it, it burns", Boito complained. They worked on the opera for a week, then Verdi and his wife Giuseppina Strepponi went to Genoa. No more work was done for some time. The writer Russ McDonald observes that a letter from Boito to Verdi touches on the musical techniques used