LIBRARY
UNIVERSITY OF
CALIFORNIA
THE TRAGEDIAN
AN ESSAY ON
THOMAS
R.
GOULD.
NEW YORK:
PUBLISHED BY KURD AND HOUGHTON.
1868.
THOMAS R. GOULD,
In the Clerk
s Office
LOAN STACK
RIVERSIDE, CAMBRIDGE:
M Ac
To
EDWIN BOOTH,
WHOSE RARE GOOD GIFTS HAVE ALREADY WON FOR THE UNDIVIDED ADMIRATION AND RESPECT OF
HIS COUNTRYMEN,
HEVI
BY THE AUTHOR.
716
PUBLISHER S NOTE.
THE
the
faces
title-page, was taken by H. G. Smith from a marble bust of Mr. Booth, sculptured
CONTENTS.
PAGE
RICHARD
III
37 49
HAMLET
SHYLOCK
IAGO
73
81 92 118
.
.
OTHELLO
MACBETH
LEAR
CASSIUS
134
151
SIR GILES
OVERREACH
153 158
LUKE
SIR
EDWARD MORTIMER
160
166
BRUTUS
PESCARA
172
175
REUBEN GLENROT
OCTAVIAN
176
.
.
.
.
BERTRAM
PIERRE
177
179
.
180
181
182 184
188
DIALOGUE
THE TRAGEDIAN
THE TRAGEDIAN.
DECEMBER,
1852.
days ago a private letter from New Orleans assured us, that the great actor of
TEN
the
Golden had arrived from the Land," was then playing an engagement in that city, and appeared in remarkably good
"
age
health.
which Swiftly following this intelligence us hope soon again to have sight gave of the Proteus of Shakespearean character
"
"
"
the
coming from the sea," and hear once more strange inward music of his voice came last week, with spleen of speed," the telegram that he had died on the passage to
"
Cincinnati.
Our
sonal
first
feeling
friendship,
THE TRAGEDIAN.
finally, vivid
away; and
tions,
won from
character
came crowding into our memory. JUNIUS BRUTUS BOOTH was born
don,
the
Lon
May
1, 1796.
don stage
at
He
greater part of his dramatic career in He was of short stature, but this country.
and action were types of manli His face was cast originally ness and power. in the antique Roman mould ; and even many
his presence
untoward accident
which
on one
occasion,
when we were
sitting
by
his side,
No
those
who have
language can do more than recall, to seen him in his most vital
his look
moods, the terrible and beautiful meaning of and gesture ; or the charm of his
massive
and resonant voice. For voice, and every fibre of his wonderful gesture, organization, were subordinated to a genius, which laid hold of and expressed, with
absolute
sincerity, the
;
radical elements
to its
of
character
minor mani-
THE TRAGEDIAN.
festations,
with the spontaneous freedom and of nature. variety well remember how, in former times,
We
we hungered and
his personations.
beauty of
His great popularity, which time, accident, and eccentric habits seldom availed to di minish, seemed owing mainly to those fire
blasts of a volcanic energy, that
power of
instant
sion,
and tremendous concentration of pas which was one constituent of his genius. Yet it was curious to observe a crowded and tumultuous pit, with its new comers strug in the coigne of vantage gling for some
"
"
doorways, noisily careless of the sorrows of King Henry, but hushed in a moment,
"
Still
as night,
Or summer
as the grand, but
noontide
air,"
opening soliloquy
upon In the cumulative and energetic evolution of character, which forms the basis of his fame, the subtler traits of Mr. Booth s delin eations were often overlooked but, to our thinking, it was this marvelous delicacy
;
their ears.
8
especially
it was."
TEE TRAGEDIAN.
which made his acting the feast It was this rare power which ena
"
bled
him
imagination, in its
its
airiest flights,
Shakespeare s most secret windings and and found him the sole
our time, worthy to present in living form the characters of Hamlet, lago, Othello, and Lear.
artist of
of one from
light
whom we
;
and instruction
we
reserve, to
sftme future day, an ampler notice, worthy, we trust, in some measure, of his exalted
representative genius.
1868.
AN
The
lines
actor
nature of his
sculptor
art, visionary
s
is,
by the
him, in
;
traditional.
after
and masses of imperishable marble the sorcery of painter s in simulated forms and on his canvas and from the impish color
"
"
figures
of the composer
at
"
score, a cunning
hand may
The hidden
But when a great actor passes away, nothing remains excepting grand and delicate images, which in silent hours crowd the memory of
those
who have
which
in the
finds a fainter
this view, in grateful testimony to the rare delight his personations have afforded ;
In
and in the hope of giving body to the vision, and language to the common sentiment of his appreciators, we proceed to record our im pressions of Mr. Booth s genius for dramatic
impersonation.
10
THE TRAGEDIAN.
And
here
we
feel
steady step without first considering, and haply disposing of, Charles Lamb s thought
ful essay
On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, considered in their fitness for stage repre in which he evinces the most sentation";
"
penetrating
sentiment
s
of
the
quality
of
Shakespeare genius, and denies with equal emphasis, but less discretion, the power of the
The sophistry of his stage to reproduce it. argument, as we apprehend it, lies in his ap
plying to
Shakespeare
dramas the
most
subtle imaginative tests, and thereupon as suming the entire absence of the imaginative
on the
for
if
is
idle
to assign the quality of genius to any actor. Lamb tells us that, as he was taking a
turn in Westminster Abbey, he was struck by an affected figure of Garrick, the player, under writ by some fustian lines about the
equality
Garrick and need we affirm our Scarcely Shakespeare sympathy with Lamb s condemnation of their false thoughts and nonsense." They con
of
genius between
"
THE TRAGEDIAN.
can follow him in his lucid exposition of the inadequacy of the stage to represent supernatural scenery ; and the consequent
failure of all attempts to
We
creations of
"
A Midsummer Night
and
their
"
The
Tempest."
These require
for
due appreciation, an imagination sub tilized by quiet, and airily abstracted from
the presence of material objects.
to distinguish the
as
equally incapable
characters, in
human
by
or
who
are
possessed
let,
supernatural emotions, as
Ham
The
possibility
man
is
No
doubt,
Lamb
oped and nourished in the morning light and dew and fragrance of the English classics,
was often shocked by pretenders to the much-abused and misjudged fine art of acting Even that swarmed the London theatres.
12
THE TRAGEDIAN.
Edmund Kean, no pretender, but an original and genuine artist, may have swelled the
current of this feeling. Hazlitt cherished a passionate admiration for Kean ; but he was a jealous lover, and
Kean dis frequently chastised his favorite. him in Lear. The critic quotes appointed
the passage,
"
heavens,
you do love old men, if your sweet sway Hallow obedience, if yourselves are old, Make it your cause; send down, and take my Art not ashamed to look upon this beard?
If
part!
hand?"
and adds, One would think there are tones and looks and gestures answerable to these words, to thrill and harrow up the thoughts, to appall the guilty and make mad the free or that might create a soul under the ribs of
i
:
death
It
is
But we
crosses
and per
and
strokes."
Lamb
have looks
at the injustice of his children, he reminds ? them that they themselves are old
"
THE TRAGEDIAN.
13
Lamb
the
word
reader of the play will see that Lear, the grand old pagan king, uses this word inter
the gods were changeably with "gods" if the heavens are not. persons
The respective printed articles in which these opposing views occur, are the evident outcome of a foregone conversation.
.
We
can fancy Hazlitt coming, on a Wednesday evening, hot from the theatre, into that con
gress of wits and good fellows then assembled at Lamb s lodgings ; uttering and controvert
ing opinion, with fierce and fitful eloquence ; then disappearing, in order to write one of
those papers on
Kean
from
performances, which
"
was
to lighten
dull world
pertinency, to his question about looks and tones, what have words to do with that
sublime identification
signs.
Words
are arbitrary
Tone
is
Tone
is
heart and
the
We hold with Hazlitt. We imagination. have heard tones equal to the expression of
14
THE TRAGEDIAN.
We
They
have
seen faces, one face, at least, capable of pre senting the very look of Lear, as he stood with his lifted face, blanched and wasted by
looking through blue eyes, beyond the storm, towards the blue heavens, the abode of those
"
kind gods
for the
"
into
whose awful
transfigured.
likeness he
was
moment
We
we
its
judge of the capability of an art, had no better guide, by its best examples, not
average product : as in painting we take, not a tavern sign, being a portrait of the pro
prietor
but rather Raphael s picture in the Dresden Gallery of that Divine Child whose
;
name
is
Wonderful.
supposes that an actor must
Lamb
"
be
thinking only and always of his own appear On what compulsion must he ? tell ance. us
that."
A genuine actor,
as
it is
true, delights
;
in his
own product
an
artist
but
why
same time, the inspi may ration of his author, even to the point of selfBrooding study, and a mas forgetfulness ?
he not
feel, at the
tery over the business of his profession, may be the very means of his emancipation, and
THE TRAGEDIAN.
15
contribute to give free play to his genius ; even as the habit of virtue deepens the foun
tains of spontaneous goodness. Compare for a moment the histrionic with
and see what delight of liberty If the dull and the former may command. silent clay can be so manipulated by the hand
a
sister, art,
of genius as to insphere and express the rar est beauty of woman, as in that Neapolitan
colossal
Psyche, pure, proud, visionary ; or rise to the grandeur of the Phidian Jupiter,
big imagination glows in that lip why may not the actor, whose clay is a living organism of fearful and wonderful forces,
("how
!
")
make
an instant vehicle of the most glow He is statue, and picture, ing inspiration. and poem, and music, and informs them all
it
with
his
life
magnetic presence.
article is
Lamb
Let the
be
"
We hold
it
to
womanish and weak," compared with and intellectual delight, which a sense of distinctness comes with the
" "
great actor is capable of imparting to creations of human character whose form is genuine,
16
THE TRAGEDIAN.
and which can bear light and sound and mo The charm of Shakespeare s dramas is not a witch s spell, that an uttered word may
tion.
break.
like line of
graduation of the relative dignity of the arts. Their formula might be stated thus that is
:
the finest art which employs the most imma terial vehicle. But so long as the beauty of
the world depends on the law of gravitation, we dare maintain, that the finest art is that
solidest material is
spiritual thought.
true
"
sky."
Not with
germs and
processes of genius did Lamb write, that an actor is an imitator of the signs and turns of
passion.
sensible
An
an imaginative actor, never. One takes the words of the text (always premis
method
ing that he
empirical the
character.
infers
meaning, and
so
extracts
the
The
result of this
method, how-
THE TRAGEDIAN.
17
is
ever carefully and comprehensively employed, at best but an abstract induction, having
something of the aspect of reality, but auto matic, and without the breath of life.
The
Shakespeare
great
;
creations, as if passing
is filled
by
its
spirit
listens to its
living voice ; is brought into intimate rela tions with the springs of its being ; and conceives it in unity by the power of a
brooding and recreative imagination. And unto this power, because it cometh
"
not with
observation,"
understanding
it is vital and life; and elevates acting from a mimetic giving, into an imaginative art, subordinating the
because
comparative intellect to
justified laws,
its
higher and
self-
we
feel
a considerate and
of genius. is too often do profaned. not intend either to cumber or distract the
sacred
name
This word
We
reader
will
definition.
But
it
18
and joy.
THE TRAGEDIAN.
With
swiftness
a live quiet, a quality so profound in art and so misappreciated, sits at the farthest remove
from dullness, and necessitates a quick con Living" tinuity of harmonious conditions.
"
and
ease
"
"
quick
;
for,
when
With
mind
come by
mon
and
work
is
play.
The glow
of
this play
an actor be gifted
subtle
and
shifting inspiration,
we
call
him
by the noble name of artist. That Mr. Booth was a man of genius in the vital conception, and a consummate artist in the varied expression of dramatic, and es
pecially of Shakespearean character, amply to illustrate, by a review of his
we hope
more
important personations, defined and refreshed by memoranda made at the time of their
occurrence, during many years, for private reference and delight.
THE TRAGEDIAN.
19
In person Mr. Booth was short, spare and muscular with a head and face pf antique a neck and beauty dark -hair blue eyes
; ; ; ;
mould a
;
step
and movement
face
is
was
His which
Throughout Nature
forces
had planted or diffused her most vital organic and made it the capable servant of the commanding mind that descended into
;
and possessed
The
found
Sound
and capacious lungs, a vascular and fibrous throat, clearness and amplitude in the inte rior mouth and nasal passages, formed its
physical basis. truth of those
by by its living tones. Deep, massive, resonant, manystringed, changeful, vast in volume, of mar
thrilled
velous flexibility and range ; delivering with ease, and power of instant and total inter
change, trumpet-tones, bell-tones, tones like sound of many waters," like the muffled the
"
and confluent
"
roar of bleak-grown
pines."
20
THE TRAGEDIAN.
But no
analogies in art or nature, and espe its organic structure
conditions, could reveal the inner
cially
no indication of
its
and physical
secret of
charm.
mind, of which his voice was the organ: a 4t most miraculous organ," under the sway of
a thoroughly informing mind. The chest voice became a fountain of passion and emo tion. The head register gave the clear,
"
silver, icy,
"
of the
pure intellect. And as the imagination stands, with its beautiful and comforting face, between
heart and brain, and marries
them with a
benediction, giving glow to the thoughts, and form to the emotions, so there arose in this
intuitive actor a third
which we
the
full
may name
in
some
word,
now with
memorable sentence, and which distinguished him as an incomparable speaker of the Eng lish tongue. That voice was guided by a method which defied the set rules of elocution. It transcended music. It brought airs from heaven and blasts from hell." It struggled and smothered in the pent fires of passion, or
"
THE TRAGEDIAN.
21
darted from them as in tongues of flame. the earthquake voice of victory." It was
"
It was,
break.
on occasion, full of tears and heart Free as a fountain, it took the form
;
and and pressure of the conduit thought known parallel in voice of expressive beyond man, it suggested more than it expressed. But his voice was marked by one signifi There It had no mirth. cant limitation. were tones of light, but none of levity. No
laughter, but that terrific laughter in Shylock, which seemed torn from his malignant heart
at the
is
announcement of Antonio
s losses.
It
have true Mr. Booth played in farce. seen him repeatedly as Jerry Sneak, in
Foote
s
We
farce of the
"
Mayor
"
of Garratt
"
But
our
never
to
taste.
It
His farce was simply the negation of his tragedy. In it he took the one step from the
sublime.
smile, the pleasantry
social intercourse,
stage.
never appeared upon the His genius, and the voice it swayed,
as he was,
22
THE TRAGEDIAN.
And
Booth
lion s
"
the prowling
Here
I am,
"
into the
human
scale,
and with judicious reserve and translated meaning bade it "roar and thunder in the
index
"
Such
we
he
necessitates the
is
argument
absorbed in
according
the circumstance.
Without
it,
there would
have been no
exercise of his
peculiar powers. In him grand passions found play through the imagination, not only harm less, but fruitful and beautiful as art. Nay, it
would seem
man
lay,
a distinct personality, embryonic very mind of Shakespeare, whose grander charac ters awaited, as the centuries rolled by, their
destined and completed representative. he came, in the fullness of time, to give
living form,
in the
And
them
and
vital
THE TRAGEDIAN.
ant speech, and
23
endeared remembrance.
We
actors.
must regard him as the greatest of all Two names alone in the history of
Garrick
a tradition.
The
power is meagre. He seems to have been hampered by conventionalism, enacting Mac beth in a tie-wig and knee-breeches. His look is praised and the power of his voice is
;
by declamatory passages. No sat isfactory analysis of his method has reached us. The anecdote that Dr. Johnson was overwhelmed by the pathos of his perform
illustrated
ance in Lear, is the most noteworthy cir cumstance of his life upon the stage. But Garrick played Tate s perversion, not Shake
speare
s
drama
and Johnson
morbid sensi
bility is
well known.
Garrick was of French descent, and he seems to have inherited the vivacity, the point,
the versatility, of the Gallic branch of the
Celtic race. He was playwright, player, dancer, and a facile writer of epilogues and He adapted, that is, altered for epigrams.
Winter
Tale, Kath-
24
erine
"
THE TRAGEDIAN.
and Petruchio.
Dr. Johnson said that
He
far
gayety of nations." was best in comedy, and his comic parts outnumber the tragic. From all sources
of
knowledge on the
s
Fitzgerald
fascinating
in
of
Garrick,"
con recently published clude that his tragic acting, although a rare entertainment, did not touch the deepest
springs of feeling
;
London, we must
that
it
was rather a
s
skill
than an inspiration.
The inadequacy
ries,
of Johnson
all his
commenta
sense,
singularly
deficient
which made Shakespeare the great and which, whether in actor or critic, must be employed in interpret we mean the quality of im ing his pages
quality
est of all dramatists,
And we are without all evidence agination. that the player went beyond the critic. That
Garrick did not play up to the height of Shakespeare, is finally evident from the fact
that Shakespeare himself
till
Coleridge discovered him. Then Schlegel and other German thinkers (if indeed they did not .precede Coleridge),
a later day.
caught his
light,
THE TRAGEDIAN.
"
25
The light that never was on sea or lana, The consecration and the poet s dream,"
it
and reflected
About
this
back upon the English mind. time Booth appeared, at the age
of twenty, at Covent Garden Theatre, Lon don. At another theatre, another actor of
original force
full
and
fiery
temperament,
in the
maturity of his power and fame, the des pot of the stage, jealous of all rivalry, was enacting Shakespeare to the wonder and
admiration of the city; while such
Coleridge, and
Hazlitt,
men
as
Edmund Kean.
"
Two
stars
sphere."
It
is
keep not their motion in one from the purpose of this essay
war which
The players. of the reader may find satisfaction curiosity by looking into any authentic record of the
followed, between the
rival
have
to
do,
is,
forms of
;
histri
power
in
to trace
forms to their true sources in bodily and mental constitution, and to assign the
these
superiority to
whom
There was a
it
26
THE TRAGEDIAN.
these two actors, in height and figure. In there was a partial sim temperament, also,
ilarity
and by daring to displace the habits of the stage, by the action prescriptive and the tones of nature. To the English
ate energy,
den
that
likeness, coupled with the mere fact Booth was the younger and later prod uct, seems to have suggested that he formed his style upon the acting of Kean. Nothing could be farther from the truth. We pro
ficial
pose to state the points of difference between them, condensed from the widest range of
the most unimpeachable testimony. In Booth, the passionate energy,
to both,
common
was sustained and expanded by a certain ethereal quality, wanting in Kean. Kean was alert Booth, airy. Kean was black-eyed, like the children of Southern Europe. Booth had the blue eyes of the
;
North,
"
Whence those arts and races sprung Which light, and lift, and sway the world."
The
THE TRAGEDIAN.
litt
"
27
the eye of an speaks of him as having and the voice of a raven ; and else eagle,
"
fire,
the na
ture, the genius of his favorite, confesses to inharmonious voice." The voice obeys his
the emotion which dominates and employs it, and the pathos of Kean s utterance, partic
ularly
in
Acting
written
poet and imaginative critic of a high and del icate order of genius ; and which brief record
"
Othello,
first
when
the
in his
feeling
of jealousy
is
awakened
the
s
throat was a cave of magical whis But, whether owing or not to the national catarrh, which afflicts the majority
pers.
away Kean
listener
"
to carry
swell."
of Englishmen, and the influence of which upon the pronunciation of their native tongue
by some absurd Americans, his was equally deficient in the ringing head tones, and in that resonant bass, not
is
imitated
voice
28
THE TRAGEDIAN,
which Booth used
effect.
voice a pe a mannerism, in which the liquids culiarity, and n had no place, but which consisted
s
I
We
find accordingly in
Kean
and
r.
trrroop."
The most
lence,
cordial tribute to
Kean
excel
was given us by one who, by the law of retaliation, was under the least obligation to render it, namely, by Mr. Booth himself.
Similar magnanimity Kean never would have shown. But Mr. Booth, throughout a
human
infirm
ity, and running sometimes on the giddy verge of madness, was always a gentleman as well as a scholar while it must be owned that Kean, great as were his histrionic claims, was neither the one nor the other. There existed however a distinction, more
;
radical than temperament, or education, or manners, which separated these two actors, and lay in the very core of the mental life
of each. Look at the portraits of Kean. All concur (even that one with the Kemble eye brow, which Kean had not) in giving him a brain wide at the base, pinched at the tern-
THE TRAGEDIAN.
pies
;
29
winged and balanced brain of Booth. Correspond in ingly, all records and all reports agree,
in
marked
Kean s performances as fearfully intense, inevitable, aiming to express char acter by single strokes of overwhelming en
representing
ergy, or heart-broken pathos ; and leaving between the strokes wide intervals of dull
ness.
him
the
"
act,
was
reading Shakespeare by
flashes of light
little
ning."
John Kemble
earnest."
"
said,
fellow
is terribly in
all
but one.
England,"
episodes which beguile the progress of the story, traces the pedigree of Kean to the
Marquis of Halifax
through
how many
escapades of illegitimacy he does not confess. He says, the Marquis was the progenitor
of
"
that
in our
own
time, transformed himself so marvelously into Shylock, lago, and Othello." If this be
true,
to
any
idge,
por
traits,
servers
now
30
THE TRAGEDIAN.
think it will require something more than the dazzling dogmatism of the English
historian, to sustain his position.
We
We
think,
not that
into
Shy-
lock, lago,
transformed
into
characters
that
is,
Edmund Kean
just those words, and lines, and points, and passages, in the character he was to repre
sent, which he found suited to his genius, and gave them with electric force. His method was limitary. It was analytic and
passionate
lectual
and imaginative.
"
Our final authority is Hazlitt, who has given, in his work on the English Stage," by far the most thorough exposition of
Kean
He
"
s powers. Hazlitt learnt him by heart. delved him to the root, and let in on his
irradiating and the of a searching criticism. He light" says, with fine hyperbole, that to see Kean at his best/ in Othello, was one of the con
"
solations of the
human mind
"
yet
is
con
Kean lacked
imagination."
Now
this
THE TRAGEDIAN.
tile
31
and in magnificent measure. It weird expressiveness to his voice. It atmosphered his most terrific performances
kind,
lent
with beauty.
best,
Booth took up Kean at his and carried him further. Booth was
Kean, plus the higher imagination. Kean was the intense individual Booth, the type To see Booth in in the intense individual. like reading Shake his best mood was not speare by flashes of lightning," in which a
;
"
blinding glare alternates with the fearful sus pense of darkness ; but rather like reading
day, a
deep shadows, gives play to glorious harmonies of color, and shows all
casts
which
objects in vivid
life
and true
relation.
left
The recorded
impression
by Kean on
the minds of his reporters and biographers, is of a mighty grasp and overwhelming ener
gy
in partial scenes
while Booth
is
remem
which not only charmed the listener, but ac companied the scholar to his study, and shed a light on the subtlest and the profoundest
page of Shakespeare.
32
THE TRAGEDIAN.
was so opulent in Booth, that he multiplied himself into the scene, and abolished the
dullness of the other players. Filled with of the supernatural himself, he the conception
shook the superflux to them." In Hamlet, he made the tread and exit of the heaviest
" "
ghost,"
airier
by
old
his presence
women
In according to Booth the gift of supreme histrionic power, we do not imply that his
performances were faultless
;
is
We
wil
may
by
others,
ary qualities, excepting voice, which illumi nate the stage ; he holding, beyond rivalry,
the single controlling quality of a penetrating,
kindling, shaping imagination.
light its
Genius can
own
fire
and
it is
late,
erty of histrionic genius to cherish, manipu and apply the flame. Yet in the finest
is
something indepen
the
this
dent of the
will.
most unequal of
And
inequality was more sadly manifest towards His excellence the latter part of his career.
THE TRAGEDIAN.
was, however, throughout his
life,
33
so incal
greatest
gagement
Health, animal
that vigor
which
of voice in our trying climate, and general freshness of the physical man, may all con spire to serve the exacting hour, and yet the
spontaneous
vein."
"i
the
The
on which he
may
be either slug
Mr. Booth,
to the
performances, often failed to sustain his great reputation. Only to those who, like our
had waited on them through remuner ating years, did the full depth and refinement, the glow and sway of mind he showed,
selves,
entirely appear.
Many a
time,
when
passion
and imagination were comparatively wanting, have we admired the subtle intellect of his and were v on such occasions, interpretations
;
lifted
31
THE TRAGEDIAN.
Our
partially
good
men
minds, affixed a blot on his personal character. mean what has been called, with needless
We
We
omitwould gladly avoid this subject, but tance is no quittance/ and we proceed to
set the
charge in
its
true light.
During the
his
life,
forty years, save one, which bounded dramatic career, Mr. Booth s habit of
both on his farm and on the stage, was exemHis reverence for the plarily temperate.
sacredness of
stition.
all
life
amounted
to a super
He
abstained for
many
years
on
principle
*
An
extravagant and erring spirit," allied to madness, would sometimes take possession of
him, and hurry him away from the theatre at the moment the performance was to begin ; and to this cause, and not to intoxication,
should be attributed the not infrequent dis appointment of the audience. Still it must
pity,
that the
resort to
THE TRAGEDIAN.
stimulants
is
35
ever-present temptation
Booth
irresistible
was
it
to
him a
sacrifice to the
"
he staked soul and body on the action both," and the exhaustion sometimes attendant upon his performance of the fiery rite, was relieved by means questionable, pitiful, pardonable. The accident by which his nose was broken,
spoiling forever his noble profile, threatened for a time the more serious disaster of a per
manent injury
his recovery
to his voice.
Immediately on
he began
first
to play.
To
those
performances, recalled the perfect features and the resonant tones of former years, the sight and sound were
indeed
pitiful.
ly perceptible. vocal infirmity, he spoke with all the old mastery of motive, and let the result take
itself. By this persistent method, in than two years after the accident, his voice had completely recovered its original
care of
less
power
as
we can
attest
36
THE TRAGEDIAN.
close, solicitous,
and comparative observa added to the autumnal ripeness of his physical and mental powers, we owe the undiminished zest and
by
tion.
To
this
restoration,
life
of his impersonations.
the
"
pass on to examples, in the hope that reader will bring to our record that which alone can productive imagination
"
We
render
fire
fruitful the
of eye and action, to give form to air, to bring a voice out of the silent past, and to
conjure up before
presence.
inspiring
RICHARD
III.
do not quarrel with Colley Gibber, and playwright of the time of Garplayer rick, because he saw fit, for the convenience
of the stage, to compose, out of several his torical plays of Shakespeare, in which the
WE
entitled
"
Rich
for
audacious excision of the living limbs, his more audacious interpolations in the text,
and
his senseless
of that Richard, third of the name, whom Shakespeare delineated. He has obliterated
those
lights
of
human
feeling,
which the
great master touched in, and which alone redeem Richard from the condition of vulgar
villainy,
into
which Gibber
plunges him.
The buoyant, aspiring soul of the usurper, finding expression in such language as this
But I was born so high, aiery buildeth in the cedar s top And dallies with the wind, and scorns the
"
Our
sun,"
38
THE TRAGEDIAN.
In Shakespeare, the villainy
is
incidental
to the ambition
and is besides relieved by and vast and ready variety genius, energy,
;
of intellectual resources.
sion,
In Gibber
ver
villainy
;
is
acter
and
revels.
In Shakespeare, when multiplying dangers and ghostly visitation have com bined to open in Richard s soul the access
"
and passage
"
to
remorse,"
:
able utterance
There
is
And
if I
"
The
interpolated
scene
with
Lady
Anne, whom
cious
simply atro
and inhuman.
the play, such as it is, shining with Shakespeare s genius, blotted by Gibber s
folly,
But
less
and
it
is
its
defects,
masterly imper
is
identi
His per
formance of
it
was
certain, at
any period of
RICHARD
his life, to
III.
39
crowd the
excluded
theatre.
all
And
in truth,
opportunity for the of the finer traits of his genius, yet display the energy, subtlety, variety, he brought to
although
it
its
representation
voice,
and
look,
and
s
In Mr. Booth
not the crimes
conception the main im the ambition, and ; caused. There was a certain
at
a sombre and surrounding underlying his most brilliant action and giving place at last to a preternatural energy, and fiery ex
slow
movement
the opening
settled purpose,
pedition, only
when
attained, and all the resources of his fertile brain were drawn on and combined,
in the effort to retain the regal power he had usurped. With head bent in thought, arms folded, and slow long step, longer it would seem
was
than the height of his figure might warrant, yet perfectly natural to him, and so that his
emerged first into view, Booth appeared upon the scene, enveloped and ab
lifted
foot
him
40
THE TRAGEDIAN.
a momentary recognition of the audience, it was done with no suspension of the look and
action of the character.
tion
were profoundly
u
self-involved.
He
de
Now
is
discontent,"
in
tone, varied
mence, when descanting on his own de and reaching through murderous formity,"
intent after the glorious diadem. like a man thinking aloud, not as
He
if
spoke
reciting
from memory. Indeed, to speak with strict He possessed ness, he never re-cited at all. himself of the character, and its language, and then uttered it from inspiration, and according to the emergency of the scene and
the situation.
Memory,
his greatest dan a danger lurking always in repetitions ger ; of performance, but one into which our actor
an
actor, speedily
becomes
seldom
"
if
ever
fell.
He
carried distinctness
of articulation to
ocean,"
in this
syllables.
In the sequent scene where Gloster hav ing killed King Henry, exclaims with bitter scorn
RICHARD
u
I1L
41
What
thought
it
"
he
lifts his sword, and his eye following, catches sight of blood upon the blade, in a manner like the very truth of nature. He
adds
"
See How my sword weeps for the poor king s O may such purple tears be always shed,
!
!
death
By
those
who wish
house."
in that cold,
self-
poised recollection, contained in the words Indeed, tis true, that Henry told me
of,"
Henry lying then warm but dead by his hand, and alone with him in the kingly bed
chamber
!
Mr. Booth s performances was a necessity of his genius. His acting was a congeries of causes, coordinated with the main cause, the conception of the char acter. Kean s manner of acting, on the con trary, was a series of disconnected brilliant
Originality in
effects.
Gloster
smiling,
and saying
up
me."
again, or take
Hazlitt says,
ad-
42
THE TRAGEDIAN.
vil
Booth made no
such
exhibition.
He
The
question
;
with him was not, how is courtship done but how would Gloster do it. Nothing
would be more
woman
as
and humility of
of Richard. the soldier
flattery
"
than in the
Personal
was thrown
Was Was
I ll
ever ever
have her
keep her
long."
soliloquy was given with that massive, vivid, and varied intonation, which
The whole
might express the tumult of feelings awak ened by his almost incredible success. How
fine the
sudden
halt, in that
repeated descant
on
his
own
RICHARD
"
111.
48
My
I
dukedom
to a beggarly denier
do mistake
my
person
all this
while."
delivered
I salute
the
closing
my glass,
pass."
That
maj- see
my ehadow
at
his
as I
supposed shadow seem to see the shadow as we write) (we he looked with lingering step, and, with pauses between the words, annihilated the
looked
;
He
down
That
may
see
my shadow
as
pass."
The flexible grasp with which Mr. Booth laid hold of and personated the elements of
a character, permitted certain minor varia tions, both in by-play and intonation, in dif
ferent performances of the same part, with out injuring, but rather heightening, the This freshened the interest general effect.
in
successive exhibitions, and gave scope oftentimes to rare and vanishing delicacies of thought and feeling. An instance occurred
in the scene
between Gloster and the young prince Edward, sometimes given thus
:
Gloster (aside).
live
long,"
"
say), do ne er
44
THE TRAGEDIAN.
as if musing complacently on the proverb, yet scarcely harboring the purpose of making it true. And again thus
:
"
So wise,
so
young, they
say,
do ne er live
long."
as if the proverb was but the cloak of his full blown intent to u remove the prince.
"
From this point he developed the character with ever-increasing animation and momen tum. His change of manner when seated
on the throne was marked and majestic, and
in fine
contrast with the wily, plotting ap proaches to it. Buckingham, the agent of
his elevation, stands at
Booth s tone the shadow of his kingly will. and action acquired a combined solidity and
celerity,
We
his
may
manner of replying to Buckingham s urgent and reiterated demand for the prom
ised earldom.
"
He
says
me.
I
Thou
troublest
m not V
the
vein,"
in
The
passage
would seem rather to require a tone of cool and kingly slight. Shakespeare amplifies the retort, and has this line, left out in Gib
ber
s
version
RICHARD
"
III.
45
to-day."
am
In the scene where Richard pleads with Queen Elizabeth for her daughter s hand, and
says
"
When this warlike arm shall have chastised The audacious rebel, hot-brained Buckingham, Bound with triumphant garlands will I come,
And
lead your daughter to a conqueror s
bed,"
cannot express the splendor of his man ner better than by saying, that it suggested the majestic march, the mighty music, and the flower-like play of color of a Roman tri
we
umph. words
Lord Stanley
:
enters
with
these
Richmond
Richard.
seas on
"
him
"
is on the seas." There let him sink" (plummet), "and be the the lift, advance, and fall of one huge ( like
whelming wave),
"white-livered
runagate"
(between
set
In this dialogue with Stanley, Booth re stored a passage from Shakespeare, not in Gibber s play, but essential to the character
of Richard, who, fighting to maintain his throne, seems really to feel himself "the
Lord
anointed."
In
reply to
Stanley
suggestion that
Richmond came
Is the
to claim the
Is the chair
"
empty ?
sword unswayed ?
Is the
king dead?
46
THE TRAGEDIAN.
The solid, smiting questions, the momen tary pause between, as rendered by Booth, can never be forgotten by those who heard
them.
in that
"
The
memorable passage
i the North, they should serve their sovereign
i
What do they
When
the
West?
"
The
last line
was delivered
in
one continuous
in
tone of
commanding resonance,
which the
current
of his speech. In the concluding scenes of this play he seemed, when in his best mood, to be filled
with
"
strange
fire."
He
showed
infinite
vigilance of mind, relentless mastery of will. The tent scene, in which Richard starts out
of his remorseful dream, was one of terrific grandeur, and never failed of producing an After he had mastered the electrical effect.
Richard
himself again,"
and performing, and therefore here unnamed, could find no better gesture for Richard s
self-recovery than to strike a fencing attitude.
RICHARD
III.
47
inclusive,
But Booth
stood
still,
unanalysable motion of the hand, took limbs, body, heart, and brain, in its subtle and com manding sweep, while he delivered the pas
sage
expressing his
inward
victory
with
inward voice
"As
of himself
"
In
the
is
"
following scene,
when
s
head."
Stanley
defection
At
that
moment
sound of
distant music,
and
his
changes.
He
listens,
keen looks and parted lips, and an expression of eager and confident expectation.
"
Norfolk.
My
marsh;
die."
young Stanley
Richard
"
Why,
after be
it then."
He said this in a tone of the lightest and most careless readiness, still listening then resumed his energy of manner in the brief and stirring appeal to his soldiers, as he led
;
them
In the
ground.
Finally, gathering
48
THE TRAGEDIAN.
himself up with one mighty effort, he plunged headlong at his cool antagonist, was disarmed, and felled to the earth. Gibber has put in
to the
mouth of the dying Richard, some wretched and inhuman stuff, which, to the credit of Mr. Booth be it said, we could never
distinctly
lips.
It
sounded
only
like
HAMLET.
THE
character of
since the time of Shakespeare, the delight and the puzzle of scholars. The portrayal of it
The
drama emi
nently a tragedy of thought, and is apt to refine into abstraction the personality of the
actor, depending in his art on and speech, usually fails to sound presence
hero.
The
the depth of the character, to pluck out the heart of its mystery, and so gives its varied
incident,
action,
succession
effects.
In Mr. Booth s conception, Hamlet was a character, not of melancholy, but of a pre
dominant
choly.
sensibility,
Not
bound by strange
mastery of
between opposing
50
duties.
THE TRAGEDIAN.
In Hamlet,
filial
love
s
amounted
in
to a
passion.
And
his father
spirit,
arms,
manded him,
to
commit a deed abhorrent to his feelings as Booth s Hamlet was intensely per sonal. His brain was
"
The quick
forge
His heart was full of purpose, as of affection. His indecision was the result of circumstances, not a defect of will. But this positive and
personal
life
was
so
atmosphered by beauty,
very Hamlet of
Shakespeare.
That phase of this many-sided creation to which he gave least effect, was the princeliness. That pensive grace and high breeding which many regard as Hamlet s permanent
condition, ruffled only passion, illuminated by
by passing gusts of
fitful
lights of philoso
phy and fancy, and crazed by ghostly visita found in him an indifferent interpre tion,
ter.
"
He seemed
by
to
"
HAMLET.
;
51
mind the graces of the court and his manner was seldom gentle, but rather swift as medi Hamlet was Booth s favorite part. tation." Among unnumbered representations, we select for special comment one which took
"
place at the Howard Athenaeum, in Boston, on that very winter s night when the steamer Atlantic was lost upon Long Island Sound, in
a furious snow-storm
"
brave vessel
noble creatures in her,
all to
Owing
small.
to
was
at
were accidentally present, and looking the chilled and lonely sentinels, pacing the
ramparts of Elsinore castle. But the audi ence was fit though few. An eminent Shake spearean scholar* sat with us, and a knot of
literary friends.
It was a noteworthy fact, however it might be accounted for, that Mr. Booth seemed to play better to a thin house.
appeared on the stage with his features marred, with his natural hair turned irongray, and with no special help from costume,
or scenery, or the other actors.
He
But never
52
did the soul
clearly with
THE TRAGEDIAN.
of
Hamlet
shine
forth
more
its
own
peculiar,
fitful,
far-reach
and supernatural light. not merely sad, but stricken in grief, at the sudden and mysterious death of
ing, saddened,
He was
his father.
He
is
He
"
When
my
son,"
his
But now
my
he answers
"
aside, in bitter
murmur
less
little
more than
kin,
and
than
kind."
To his mother s vague generalization about the commonness of death, he answers with
restrained respect
"
Ay, madam,
it is
common."
he vindicates the profound sincerity of his grief, in that fine speech beginning
"
Seems,
madam!
nay,
it
is."
Hamlet
character,
the
depth
of
which
HAMLET.
neither
action
53
quent or effective, could ever fully reveal. He had that within which passeth show."
"
Hamlet
"
is left
alone,
Did Shakespeare intend the speech uttered aloud, or only mused upon ?
to
be
The
question becomes pertinent, in view of Lamb s objection to the stage representation of the
play, where he speaks of Hamlet s "lightthink and-noise-abhorring ruminations." the terse vigor of the language would find a
We
tongue.
It did find
an eloquent tongue in
our actor.
The
im
crowding for
Frailty, thy
name
is woman,"
as if
My
father s brother
(in low
and
slighting tones),
But no more
Hercules
."
like
my father
Than
I to
The
following scene
is
chiefly remarkable
54
TEE TRAGEDIAN.
for the report to Hamlet of the appearance of the ghost. How fit that this disclosure should be made by Horatio, whose gracious,
limited,
and
firm-seated
nature
to
becomes,
the
fever,
from
this
moment,
coolness
and counterpoise to the perturbation of his princely friend, even to the closing scene of the play, when Hamlet lies dead in his arms The spiritual tone Booth imparted to this
!
scene, weighted as it is by specific questions as to the time and aspect of the apparition, raised the listener at once into
and answers,
Hamlet
being, and
:
My father s spirit
I
in
Till
my
Though
all
the earth o
erwhelm them,
"
to
men
eyes."
Foul deeds
will
Then came
the
mighty parenthesis, Though all the earth o erwhelm them," which he gave with
a sweeping gesture, as if taking the solid earth, and lifting it as a wave of the sea is
lifted,
and
letting
it
fall.
He
then raised a
warning hand, with significant motion, before his face, and with changed voice, couching
HAMLET.
55
to
men
eyes."
In the platform scene, his adjuration of the Spirit reached a climax of feeling in the
word "father," into which he threw the agony of his grief, and the contending hope and fear born of this strange visitation.
After a momentary pause, the figure remain
ing silent,
delivers
me."
In
all
"
is
a colon
this
after
Royal
Dane."
Booth overruled
pause, with a more subtle perception of the meaning of the passage than has been shown
by any commentator.
of the sudden apparition passes rapidly off; and Hamlet soon finds himself in strange and calm accord with the
first
The
effect
silent
but beckoning
visitor.
:
To
the dissua
he says
Why, what
[
do not set
for
my life
soul,
at a pin s fee,
it
And
my
what can
do
to that,
"
as itself ?
Booth
manner here
is
hard to analyze.
It
56
THE TRAGEDIAN.
suffice to say, that
may
scaled the heights of spiritual thought. He seemed to have digested in his soul the very bitterness of death, to have passed beyond,
and
to
tality.
speak as one conscious of his immor In fine contrast came the passionate
outbreak
"
My fate
lion s
cries out
And makes
As hardy
this
body
as the
Nemean
nerve."
We
know
when
his friends
to
find him,
and he
swears them secrecy, Hamlet holds up the hilt of his sword, the cross, and not the
blade,
for
the
imposition
of
their
hands.
have seen, both in picture and on the stage, the hands of Horatio and Marcellus
laid
"
We
In
this
scene,
so
the
antic
which has
puzzled
In Booth s actor, begins to play. this was partly a reaction from conception,
critic
and
the pressure of supernatural emotion ; and Its fitful light partly assumed as a disguise.
seemed native to the genius of our actor. It gave variety and unexpectedness in look, and
HAMLET.
tone,
57
throughout the play. It shone above the melancholy, like phospho rescence on a midnight sea, with most inten
action,
and
sifying
effect.
The
where Hamlet plays upon him the scenes with his school-fellows, in which he shows he cannot be played upon and the scenes with
;
Hamlet.
A light scorn in
light
and
his
hand
and evanescent. Perhaps the most brilliant example of that unexpectedness which is genius in an actor, as if he indeed were the character assumed as if the thoughts were developed from
;
within, and the language occurred to him, might be found in the passage beginning
"
have of
late (but
wherefore I
know
not) lost
all
my
mirth."
the words, This most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o erhanging
"
"
At
"
firmament,"
as in the
folio),
with golden
58
fire,"
THE TRAGEDIAN.
his voice,
in the
preceding lines, suddenly darted upward like light ; seemed to penetrate the sky ; to run
to search out and ; back the remotest echoes of heaven. give The speaker was for the moment forgot,
all
"
Hidden
that plays the king shall be wel was uttered with eager emphasis, a momentary betrayal by Hamlet of his inner thought which however he masks immedi ately, by a running and cheery commentary on the other players. Hamlet has received,
"
He
come,"
seen through, talked with, and dismissed his school-mates ; puzzled Polonius by subtle reaches of wit ; welcomed the players with a
shown a com
in
all
this sur
"
and wind
of his
sad
most wonderful in Shakespeare, and reproduced by Booth as in a mirror until he finds himself alone, when he reveals his
;
which the
HAMLET.
I ll have these players Play something like the murder of my father Before mine uncle."
"
59
The play
ll
Wherein
king."
Our Shakespearean scholar found fault with an emphasis, after the act was done. he said he ; Booth emphasized catch,
"
"
"
The
to the
actor
whole passage. He really empha sized both words, and all in due relation. The Third Act opened. The play went The atmosphere of Hamlet, with whose on.
very being Booth was for the time consubstantiated, enveloped also the listening scholar, and gradually nourished him out of
his
criticism.
And
work, that we heard him uttering unconscious groans for sympathy, as the catastrophe drew near and that foreboding illness, "here about
to that degree did the influence
tones of
If
it
be now,
:
tis
not to come.
is all.
If
be."
it
it
will
come
the readiness
Let
60
THE TRAGEDIAN.
We
life
set his
at
a pin
fee
"
science, the very strength of his moral na ture, which withholds his hand from attempt
ing his own life, also makes him fear to take that of the king. The beginning of the meditation To be, or not to be was ut
"
"
murmur
of a
"
from bourn no traveller returns whose given with accelerated and vibrating intensity, the
(in a
"
last
stroke of emphasis coming suprisingly on the word. It shocked the elocutionist, but
When
make."
Here he made a
Then, as
if
be
ginning a new sentence, and without pause in the delivery of it, he went on
"
On
HAMLET.
.1
61
"
ing,
he affirmed, that
"
bodkin
was a
local
term, in some parts of England, padded yoke, worn over the shoulders for the sup and that a port of burdens on either side
for a
;
"
bare bodkin
and
all
signed, has,
we
lexicographers.
On
meditation done
Nymph,
in
thy orisons
Be
all
my
sins remembered."
is
made
to catch
a glimpse of the king and his minister at the discovery being intended to ac espial
harshness
towards Ophelia.
We
The
find
no warrant
s
Hamlet knows, it is true, by manner, that she is acting a part Ophelia under instructions. But we think every one
intuitive
nature
by
his
endeavor to
is justified by his own assumed madness or by his wipe away both from his own
;
"
mind and
that
hers,
all trivial
fond
records,"
"
so
all
the
commandment
"
of the Spirit
alone
may
live
62
"
THE TRAGEDIAN.
Within the book and volume of
his brain
"
and
all
to
be aware of
other listeners.
In spite of the set purpose, his deep love bursts forth in jets of passionate tenderness. He It did so in Mr. Booth s rendering. with wildness rather than severity. spoke
He
was
in constant action
;
striding across
passing out, still speaking, and beginning the next speech before he re en seem now to hear his voice ring tered.
the stage
We
to
go
to a
nunnery
then, approaching her tenderly, he threw into those oft-repeated words to a nunnery, go," the whole force
;
"
pause in
action
Mr. Macready played Hamlet in Boston, and Cambridge crowded the boxes yes, and applauded too, as that sensible but unim
of aginative actor gave his studied version
Hamlet
Hamlet
idleness.
"
(to Horatio).
They
are
coming
to the play
to
have
HAMLET.
"
63
"
changed natures with Osric the waterfly for he danced before the foot-lights, flirting a This white handkerchief above his head
;
!
was that
"famed
performer" to
"
whom Em
erson refers,
when he says All I then and all I now remember, of the tra
:
What may
this
mean,
complete
steel
corse, again in
moon?
s.
Booth
tires
idleness
was Hamlet
He
re
up the
appears like
that enters
him next
to witness the
We
find
Mercury
airily
and Nemesis, the lover s wit playing above the avenging purpose.
(We may
became
in
the
temporary
manager of a theatre
on
this occasion,
the second
whose whole
office it is to
drugs
fit,
say
apt,
64
THE TRAGEDIAN.
Thou mixture rank, of midnight weeds collected, With Hecate s ban thrice blasted, thrice infected
Thy natural magic and dire property, On wholesome life usurp immediately."
In Booth
delivery of these
fearful lines,
each
word
dropped
poison.
The
weird
music of
his voice
cisive action,
made
scene the
mem
orable event of the night.) The king does blench Upon the talk of
"
the poisoning
fire."
"
he
rises
"
The
his
play abruptly
ends.
first
Hamlet
left alone.
To him come,
then
the
traitor
school-fellows;
In two
which
follows, the tragedian indicated, by a master stroke of intonation and expression, the span
nature
the restrain
to
Soft;
now
to
my mother.
;
let
not ever
bosom."
The
soul of
Nero enter
this firm
The thought
denly
to
of
Nero
occur to him, to
HAMLET.
ror,
65
"
word Nero a sur of gesture and emphasis. prising repulsion These lines were a fit prologue to the
and
to lend to the
"
great scene of the play, in the Third Act, the interview with his mother. The strong the earnest pleading, the impas current,
sioned
conscience,
life,
the
noble
purpose,
the
intense personal
Booth
this
"
in this scene,
for those,
abstract
ilized
man
be
Hamlet
weakly conclude
him
to
choly born
"
much
offended."
"
shall not
budge;
"
You go not, till I set you up a glass Where you shall see the iw-most part
of
you!
He had
already said
"
I will speak
"
daggers to
"
her."
That word
the matter.
inmost
The sound
greatly pro
was like a search of steel. After he had killed Poing probe lonius, mistaking him for the king, he gave separately each word of the line
first syllable,
longed on the
66
"
THE TRAGEDIAN.
Thou wretched,
rash, intruding fool, farewell
"
with ascending emphasis, in tones of mingled grief and anger, and as if dashed
all
and
with tears.
What exalted passion is in the continuing In the comparison of portion of this scene the portraits, what dramatic action, thought,
!
imagery, language
belongs to
We
Shakespeare. ing towards him, where he sits, in the glory and beatitude of his own peculiar heaven. All we claim for Mr. Booth, all that can fcje
the
We
claimed for any actor, is, that he shall, by power of imaginative sympathy, pass
himself,
and draw us after, into the strong of Shakespeare s thought ; shall re current mould and rekindle to our attentive senses,
individuality
the
of
his
unmatched char
his father
acters.
he
Where
seal."
was "This your husband" (kissing the picture and in a voice that sheathed affection for his father, in reprobation for
his mother).
"Look
follows"
(with startling
change of manner)
HAMLET.
"
67
Here
is-s-s your husband, like a mildewed ear Blasting his wholesome brother
"
The words of this phrase were shaken and eddied over by one continuing flood of tone ; in obedience to a passionate method, most expressive and quite peculiar to our actor.
At
the opportune
A cutpurse
over Booth
devotion.
and the
rule,"
There seemed
reaching and imploring look in his full blue eyes, arching the inner angles of the brows,
gave the face a tender exaltation, as he be gan that strange colloquy between Hamlet, his guilty mother, and his father s spirit, with the words
"
"
gracious figure?
until
just before its exit at the opposite door, Booth stood rooted to the spot from which
first saw it ; stood with steady gaze, out stretched hands, and such pathetic reverence of voice and action, that, though we looked
he
68
TEE TRAGEDIAN.
in a
memory
"
of
write,
Ghost.
to her,
Hamlet."
"
Ham.
Queen.
How
is it
with you,
"
Ham.
"
"
the question
were idle;
Assume a
virtue
if
you have
it
not,"
Booth paused
"
after
u
virtue,"
then uttered
the words, if you have it not," as if a spring of love gushed in his heart, and he caught at a hope, that she might have re
pented already. In the grave-yard scene, after he has matched wit with the clown, and given
another example of that blended airiness and melancholy which seemed the very form of
Shakespeare
thought, the
funeral proces
(to
Horatio).
That
"
is
Laertes,
mark
uttered with perfect simplicity and generous high breeding. Perhaps in qualification of an
opinion heretofore expressed, the princeliness
EAMLET.
came out more strongly
tes says
"A
69 Mr. Booth
s
in
de
When
sister
be,"
Laer
my
Hamlet, according
exclamation
"
to the
text, utters
the
What!
"
No
heard.
Only a wild, inarticulate cry escaped him ; and he muffled his face in his cloak. He
seemed
to
thought. Following this fine touch of feeling and character, came what seems to us a wholly
:
"
unauthorized reading
What
is
he whose grief Bears such an emphasis V whose phrase of sorrow Conjures the wandering stars, and bids them stand Like wonder-wounded hearers ? This is I,
Hamlet the
Dane."
So Shakespeare but Booth made a after the word stand then said
;
"
"
full stop
"
Look
wonder-wounded
hearers, this
is
I,"
etc.
The
scene, however, was grandly carried to The storm of mingled grief and completion.
70
THE TRAGEDIAN.
Hamlet consents
Laertes, but
is
of
evil.
We
:
possessed
passage thus
"
It is
would, perhaps
woman,
"
meaning,
it
man, yet I
said
"
feel it
As would,
"
woman,"
meaning,
me."
How
how
The wavering
latter reading
;
suasion,
a whit
special
providence in the
Choate
"
said,
"
exquisitely
finer
Rufus have seen him act Hamlet and again, in comparing Kean
fall
sparrow."
of a
and Booth, he
touches."
"
said,
This
man (Booth)
has
The last scene was full of grace and dra matic truth, in the fencing match with Laer-
HAMLET.
tes,
71
and
in its
Well might Fortinbras, coming in peaceful march from recent victory, exclaim
"
0, proud Death
What
feast is
cell,
Mr. Booth, for the true meaning of a line in Hamlet s last speech. After he has wrested the poisoned cup from Horatio s hand, he
says
"
If
me
in
thy heart,
breath in pain,
felicity awhile,
work
in his
lifts
own
his
frame, he begs Horatio to live, and hand toward that heaven whither he
felt
We have taken more copious notes of Booth s Hamlet than of any other character assumed by him. But in reviewing the mis
cellany, something of Antony s impatience at the prolixity of his messenger from Rome,
prompts us to exclaim
"
Grrates
me :
the
72
THE TRAGEDIAN.
"
what marvelous and the personal We venture no opinion. But various life ? the total impression left by Mr. Booth s per sonation, at the time of its occurrence, and which still abides, was that of a spiritual melancholy, at once acute and profound.
!
sum
What
is
the
sum
of
Hamlet
unity of that
and
graver
purpose.
You
felt
its
presence even
when
he was
As
defines, refines,
Booth
let s
Ham
SHYLOCK.
THE Hebrew blood, which, from some re mote ancestor, mingled in the current of his and was evidently traceable in his life
;
features
for house, nest for birds), did also undoubtedly in or fluence Mr. Booth s conception of the char
acter of Shylock. He made it the representative Hebrew: He the type of a race, old as the world.
and
it
filled it
hands,
whom
political oppression
could subdue
and which
to our
down
own
attention of
mankind
towards
power.
74
"
THE TRAGEDIAN.
This Jacob from our holy
Abraham
was,"
carried the
tiquity,
mind back
an
for
Edmund Kean
a malignant usurer ; and so represented, to our thinking, rather Gratiano s idea of the Jew, than Shakes
But Kean, after making the audipeare s. ance hate him, did, by one of his sudden
turns of power, and by the pathos of his voice, in the passage beginning
Nay, take my life and an entire revulsion of feeling in the produce listener, so that pity took the place of ex
"
all,"
ecration.
made usury
employment
the
;
Jew
accidental
or enforced
is
natural
He
disdained
all
appeal
He gave to the compassion of his judges. the passage quoted only as a softened ex
pression of that inexorable logic, which in other scenes, yields a certain dignity to the character, and wins our reluctant regard.
SEYLOCK.
75
ginning
Geo. Frederick Cooke, in the passage be Hath not a Jew eyes ? when he
"
"
came
it
to the
word
"
affections,"
so
informed
it
with
human
with
marked
point
of his
performance.
But
if
Kean
means
Cooke s turning the Jew out of the current of his reasoning wrath, when he had wealth and power, and was rejoicing in the pros
pect of revenge,
his
in order to complain of
wounded
affections,
seems
at best
but a
Booth, on the
intended, evenly include them in that in ventory of the qualities and conditions of
his claim to
be
of
traits
scene.
Ob
he holds and
power, Antonio.
He
says,
musing on
7t>
TIIE
"
TRAGEDIAN.
If I
He
can catch him once upon the hip, grudge I bear him. hates our sacred nation."
Again
"
What
are there
masques ?
Lock up
my
doors
....
My
sober
house."
Perhaps the grandest performance of Shylock ever given by Mr. Booth, or any other, was on the third of September, 1850, during his last engagement before going to Califor
nia.
He
was
omed
The gen
was
as
we have
indicated.
Salanio and opened. Salarino are conversing of Antonio s losses. Shylock enters, having just found out Jes
sica s
theft, and heard of her elopement. You knew, none so well as should say, But no word of my daughter s flight." you,
He
"
could
His voice seemed could be shaped into words, and so leaped from his lips, a
distinguish.
it
we
eruption
of
inarticulate
speech.
SHYLOCK.
This as he was coming
in.
77
When
fairly
on
He
im
mediately proves himself an overmatch for the lighter wit of the two Venetian gallants.
them makes a feeble rally, then they and receive without further par his tremendous questioning. ley The fiery scorn he threw into the words
of
One
stand
silent,
"
A bankrupt
a prodigal
that used to
to
call
come
so
smug upon
the mart.
...
bond."
He was wont
me
usurer.
And he strode down the stage to the farthest corner, the white fire of his anger writhing
in his face, animating his tread, and flying out in his wild but determinate gesture.
Salarino.
his flesh:
"
Why I am
s
sure
if
he
forfeit,
what
"
To
bait fish
withal."
We
in
one of his
holding a fishing-rod. with a gesture inexpressibly violent and rapid, he seemed to be tearing the flesh, and
throwing it into the sea. The whole of the next speech rode on a
mighty
tide
ating, rushing
78
THE TRAGEDIAN.
fearful pauses
by
the
smiting blows of
thunder-stroke.
How
those
questions
irresisti
scorn, solid as
Nor can we tell from what depth of vigor arose the grand and various expression of the next scene, directly after, on the en trance of Tubal. Let the reader review the
text.
"
....
"
No
I
ill
No
my
shoulders.
thank God,
thank
God."
"
am
glad of it. I ll torture him. I am glad of would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys."
it."
I will
if
he
forfeit."
me
at our
gogue,
Tubal."
changes.
act,
In the fourth
room, calm, his tumult of passion condensed into a settled purpose ; and with a kind of
dignity, if unrelenting hate like his can bear
that quality. From the audience, he listens to the Duke, then quietly begins
:
SHYLOCK.
"
79
;
And by
If
have possessed your Grace of what I purpose our holy Sabbath have I sworn To have the due and forfeit of my bond
:
you deny
it,
let
Upon your
charter,
and your
city s
freedom."
The last two lines were given with an outreach ing and arching motion of the arm and hand, palm downward, like the stoop of a bird of prey.
We
pas
sionate purpose,
below the
Portia,
against
the
Shylock
religion
flint
but as his
moved him,
name
of God,
his breast,
Booth folded his arms upon and bowed his head in reverence.
"
My
deeds upon
my head
"
As Christ was mercy, Shylock. been floating in Shakespeare s mind that other fearful imprecation, His
exclaims
there
may have
"
children."
The
spirit
appears in
:
words with
80
"
THE TRAGEDIAN.
An
oath,
I
an oath,
have an oath
in
heaven
Shall
my
soul?
No, not
The
is
crisis
finds his
suffering
it.
thrice,
And
let
the Christian
uttered between set teeth, and with repeated still holding to the last, gesture of repulsion
:
dominant element of
mind.
IAGO.
AN
That a
actor
man
so insphered the erosity of soul, should have to make it one of his character of lago as
is
most admirable and popular representations, a case in point. lago seems not so much
a debauched intelligence as an intelligence which had been the devil s own from the
beginning,
that kind
Yet his diabolism was not of which delights primarily in others consisted rather in an unresting
He
am
is
a constitutional
In audacious contrast to
that I
am,"
lago
"
am."
to
He
in
is
human
to this
human
82
THE TRAGEDIAN.
selves criminal, in order to justify the pro ceeding of his spontaneous malignity. He is
the parent of
literary art.
is
But Goethe slights his fiend into heaven, and gives him preternatural power to work mis
chief on the earth:
while lago
successes
(which are only postponed failures) are the mere product of his busy brain, and his
plumed-up
not by
will.
He
"
works by
wit,
and gay
witchcraft."
"
light-hearted monster;
cordial,
comfortable
villain."
another version.
nine
swift
;
and
brilliant.
He
the panther ; the subtlety, the fascination, the rapid stroke of the fanged serpent. There
was
less variation
in his performances,
this part,
one
than he exhibited
in the portrayal of
IAGO.
83
On
we
most vividly remember, he was possessed by He came on the his most splendid devil.
stage, clear as spirit, and the voice he used was that most sweet and audible, deep-re
volving bass.
He
"
His delivery of the text was a master ing." It had all the of colloquial style. piece turns, the tones of nature, the unex abrupt
and the occasional persuasive which belong to the best conversation. force, In the first scene, having quieted Roderigo s complaints, he breaks out with
pectedness,
"
Rouse him
delight,
(that
it,
Othello),
make
And
incense her kinsmen, though he in a fertile climate dwell, Plague him with flies though that his joy be joy, Yet throw such changes of vexation on t,
; :
As
it
may
lose
some
color."
Observe the rapid alternation of subject in these lines, and the chasing up of mis
chievous suggestion they contain.
Roderigo.
logo.
Here
is
her father
house
ll
call
aloud.
Do with like timorous accent and dire yell, As when (by night and negligence) the fire
Is spied in
populous
cities.
in this passage.
Booth
84
uttered
THE TRAGEDIAN.
it with a devilish unconcern, as if with the fancy of terror and dismay, pleased and playing meanwhile with his sword-hilt,
He
then strikes
house, and speak the key-hole, sounds the reso ing through
nant alarm,
What,
felt
ho, Brabantio
"
Yet
"
in
play saying this, The duplicity, ing with some inward bait." the double nature, the devil in him, was
subtly manifest.
in the darkness,
we
that his
mind was
After Roderigo has made himself known and while Brabantio, from
is
the window,
ities,
why
"
who
represents
interrupt
the
silly gentleman,"
make him
"
the old
man
order to get a
Sir, sir,
sir,"
invariably done upon the and which indeed is in the text so stage? set down.
at once, as
is
in the mood of complaint, us note the ludicrous error, usually com mitted by actors, in lago s next speech
let
:
"
While we are
Zounds,
if
sir,
God,
down
the
emphasis
IAGO.
85
motive
!
plump on
Booth
that
"devil,"
as if the highest
s
for serving
bidding
said
devil bid
you,"
meaning,
the
devil
against serving God. In the first scene, lago enters, lying to In the second he enters, lying to Roderigo.
In the third, he is Othello about Roderigo. the trial of Othello s a silent attendant during
in
But no one who saw Mr. Booth marriage. any of these scenes, either speaking or
could escape
the impression
of the
silent,
presence of a malign and potent intellect. The second act opens in Cyprus. Desdemona is waiting and anxious for the arrival
of Othello.
"
She says
;
am
do beguile
"
The thing
am by
In lago
He
which was a
poet caught in the very act of invention ; with just those pauses, abstractions, flashes, and occasional career of speech, when a line
or two
came out
entire
which
befit
the
86
THE TRAGEDIAN.
The ambition
his
of
many
actors
is
to
make
Booth used
grand voice, not as echo, but as inter His imagination was so penetrative, that he did not stop at the imagery, but
preter.
voiced the thought or emotion imaged. In simple passages, however, where the ring, or
or buzz, or plunge, or clang, or suspiration, of the words, is identical with their
hum,
meaning, as was the case in the early days of human speech, nothing could exceed the
sphered beauty of that tongue s utterance. An example occurred in lago, on the night
know
He
"
The Moor
the
;
word, gave with the very sound of the instrument and tossed it from his lips with the careless
He
grace
The
critic
lis
in the audience,
alert
tener for the remainder of the play. In the that concludes this self-betraying soliloquy
scene, occur the lines
"
Now
Not out
The
IAGO.
87
parenthesis, Booth illustrated, by looking up to heaven with, defiant forehead and gesture,
smile.
lago has fooled Roderigo to the top of his too drunk, and bent ; made Cassio drunk
vulgarly
so,
rel follows,
a quar most actors make him the town rises, and Othello ap
pears, lago is called on for explanation, and finds himself in just those circumstances
which give a stinging relish to the motion How he stood, still, but with of his mind.
a quick spirit in every fibre, between the roused Othello and the drunken Cassio, vig ilant, vital, ready for the unknown emer
was
"
"
He
passage beginning
I
Touch me not so near: had rather have this tongue cut from
"
my mouth
"
Than
it
When
"
left
As
am an
man
bodily
wound."
The simpler meaning is conveyed, by the usual emphasis on But this em bodily."
"
phasis
would
oppose
bodily
to
spiritual
88
THE TRAGEDIAN.
faith in the latter.
"
Booth, with fine penetration, said, I thought you had received some "bodily wound" em
phasizing both words, as if there were no other wounds to suffer from. And we find
__
him
directly after
"
blowing
reputation,"
the
loss of
like a
bub
of evil re
:
source has Shakespeare invested lago and what subtlety of adaptation did Booth ex
hibit in those soliloquies,
"
wherein he
"
plumes
up
his will
and
ulty he brings to bear on the other charac dare not attempt ters of the drama
!
We
to analyze his look, tone, manner, the undefinable efflux of wickedness, under the guise
of friendship,
by which,
in
he obtains the mastery over Othello s mind. One or two points may bear specific mention. Finding the suspicion he has awakened in
the Moor, applies
alone to
it,
Cassio, leaving
:
Desdemona yet
"
clear of
lago says
Good name
Is the
my lord
"
the
words
"
IAGO.
isolation
89
in
an altered, clear, low tone, he aims directly at Othello s heart, and plants in it the first surmise of
his wife s infidelity. His addresses to
by uttering them
Othello had a fearful symmetry of falsehood. He lied so like truth, that had we been in Othello s place, we felt he would have deceived us too. His soliloquies, and those looks and slight
gestures aside, alone revealed his true char
acter.
Between
his
these tokens of self-betrayal, he passed with incredible rapidity of transition ; and did it
with a keen
relish,
Yet was the odiousness of lago s nature lightened and carried off by the grace and force of Booth s representation. For, dis
guise it as we may, the love of natural to man, that we take an
delight in the exhibition in a play. good or evil
for
youth, dilating and glancing with a green malignant light, shine still with all the old
fascination
;
and glow
in
memory by some
write of Booth
s
occult
association, as
we
He
90
"
THE TRAGEDIAN.
It is a
common
wife."
He
gave
"
Burn
like the
with a voice like a writhing inward flame. Wherever Shakespeare raised one of his
characters above
it
its
habitual level,
by plum
with the splendor of his own imagi ing nation, Booth instinctively took wing with
him,; ,and the
"
manner
in
which he gave
the drowsy syrups of the world Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep Which thou ow dst yesterday,"
all
Nor
was, as if a boding angel, in tones of profoundest music, banished all the agents of repose, and created the doom he pronounced.
In the night scene, where Roderigo en counters Cassio, on the very night when the deeper tragedy of the play is consummated, lago appears with a light and a drawn sword.
The
light shone
on Booth
pale
and
fiendish
face, as,
Kill
men
the
dark!"
1AGO.
It will be
91
instigated
In the
last scene, as
saying,
"
thee,"
runs
at
and
stabs
him.
Booth
replied,
staunching the wound, and mastering the anguish of it, and with a look of steady
hatred and defiance,
"
I bleed, sir,
but
"
not
kitted."
As
You
are right,
you
devil."
OTHELLO.
DURING
a certain
week
in the
autumn
of
to us a special revelation of
On Tuesday, September 14th, Mr. Booth enacted Othello. On Wednesday, 15th, lago that lago we and on Thursday, have just briefly noticed
the scope of the histrionic art.
16th,
Othello
again.
The
entireness
of
tially diverse,
still
abides.
Booth
known
to us
his
figure rose so surely in our imagination as we read the play, that we heard, not without
some misgiving, the announcement of Mr. Booth as Othello, the first time for many
"
years."
We
performance, some
OTHELLO.
the deep-revolving subtle villainy of his
familiar
93
more
part might appear, to despoil the frank and noble presence of the Moor. But
scarcely too much to say, that the two characters did not lie more clearly asunder
it is
in
the
s
in
Mr.
Booth
Othello was a Christian graft upon a wild He was a Mauritanian Arabian stock.
The Eastern origin of his race ; his prince. birth in Africa ; his military life ; his Venetian
had part in building up a charac ter, compact of strength, fervency, simplicity, and honor. Accordingly, Booth s persona tion was marked, especially in the earlier
culture
;
all
portion of the play, by an oriental largeness and calm. Even when his frame of nature
is
wrenched from
its
fixed place,
by lago
preternatural enginery, there is a continual recoil and reinstatement of the Moor s solid
virtue
;
so that
the same time that he moves our sympathies beyond any other male character in Shake
speare. might sum up Mr. Booth s characterization in one word magnanimity. In this mood of mind he enters on the
We
94
imagine Booth
Othello,
THE TRAGEDIAN.
s
how would
own we hope to
tries to
create in
him be heightened
lago
Moor
"Tis
better
as
it
is."
with a gravity, a weighty last three words, which a reproof, and was intended to dis conveyed miss the subject. lago returns to the charge :
this
Booth gave
distinctness
on the
Nay, but he prated, spoke such scurvy and provoking terms Against your honor ;
"
And
"
home
it
without
effect,
and power
for
spite.
my
life
and being
From men
May
As
this that I
have
reached,"
given with peculiar intonation, and rising em phasis, imparting a fine accent to the meaning,
did not add to the dignity of a Moorish prince to become the son-in-law of a Vene tian senator.
that
it
OTHELLO.
"
95
.
But that
I love
all
and
"
in tones that
seemed the
of his
picturesque and effective are the The whole night scenes of this great play of the First Act, with its large variety of
!
How
place
Fifth, with
and persons, and the whole of the much of the Second and Fourth
and
love.
It is the
Brabantio
(entering
Down
"
sides.)
lago strikes in
am
sir,
for
you."
Perhaps he intended to pick off that gentle man, whose purse he had already drained, even as he does later in the play. Perhaps in encountering him he only meant to pre
serve him, in
yb
TEE TRAGEDIAN.
speculate on the motives and conduct of
s
We
are
Shakespeare
characters,
living persons.
And
living,
not only
but
immortal.
lago
He has no sympathy plainly expects a fight. with that romance of honor, which governs
Othello
s
conduct.
He
edge of
it.
But
so disengaged
from
all
pur
pose or permission of quarrel is the Moor, that he playfully and nobly says
"
for the
dew
will rust
them."
Then turning to Desdemona s father, who has just called him he adds, in a thief," manner of mingled reproof and deference
"
"
Good
weapon."
But
crept a keen, low-toned, cool disdain. old father insists on Othello s arrest,
The
and
Then came
from Booth
"
The
flash
and outbreak of a
fiery
mind,"
in the
words
"
Both
ou of
my
rest;
Were it my
cue to fight,
"
should have
known
it
Without a prompter
OTHELLO.
the
97
Charles
Lamb
To
it
said that
he was quite un
Hamlet
Othello
s so
liloquy,
be or not to
be,"
because he
s
had heard
so often recited.
is
ad
neyed. But Mr. Booth so cleansed it from the scurf of custom ; gave it with such dig
nity,
directness,
to hear
all
seemed
it
To
genius
He
;
took us
see
house, and
made us
the very progress of his courtship and the gentle lady, the house affairs dispatched, sit
ting a
"
charmed
father loved
Her
Still
me
Oft invited
me
questioned
I
me
the story of
my
life,
From year
That
have passed. I ran it through, even from my boyish days, To the very moment that he bade me tell
it."
love, in
In
we
"insolent
whom
he was
"sold
to
slavery,"
98
of his
listens
"
THE TRAGEDIAN.
redemption thence." with greedy ear
"
"
Desdemona
"
Which I observing, Took once a pliant hour, and found good means
"
draw from her a prayer of earnest heart, That I would all my pilgrimage dilate, Whereof by parcels she had something heard, But not intentively."
In these words and in the following lines, where he quotes Desdemona, we seem to hear her speaking through him, with all her
innocent finesse, and full-hearted tenderness. Twas pitiful," as if concluding then with
"
and with rising in wondrous The Twas flection pitiful. was made to the Senate, and not to address
fresh access of feeling,
"
the audience.
We
my
daughter
too."
The
that in
in actors,
we excluded
all
literatures beside
the English, and all nations who did not speak the English tongue. And simply be cause of the unquestioned supremacy of
Shakespeare.
lations,
The French and Italian trans and the actors who perform in them,
OTHELLO,
99
may
The
Germans, by
may put in a better claim. The name of Devrient, has a vague high fame, in the Ger man Shakespeare, as well as in the drama of
his
native
land.
Travelled
scholars
have
many
Dawison, as a representative of Shakespear ean character and the cultivated audiences of New York and Boston have recently en
;
joyed the rare pleasure of seeing him play Othello in German, to Mr. Edwin Booth s
lago
in English.
watched his performance with eager It was full of beauties, and strik ingly original and natural, in action and by He dismissed Cassio as if he loved play.
interest.
We
him.
as if
He lay on a couch in his own chamber, no one were looking at him. He hung
last scene,
uttering
whose simple pathos touched the heart. His voice is sweet and flute-like, but of little His facial ex compass, or variety of tone. was intense and vivid, though with pression sameness and his gestures were indetermi Yet he made one exit, in nate and heaving.
;
100
THE TRAGEDIAN.
Act, in which, by abrupt and repeated looking back, and by pauses, glances, and play of feature, he expressed
in a
the contending emotions of Othello s mind, manner that Roscius might have envied,
at the height of Shake introduced the long first scene of speare. the Fourth Act, always omitted on the Eng
He
lish
but which
is
so
necessary to that continuity and accumulation of evidence, which overbears Othello s mind,
and hurries on the catastrophe and for this we thank him heartily. He carried natural His affection for Desdeness to an excess.
manifest
perhaps a
little
It lacked
dignity,
and that
reti
cence which belongs to calm, firm natures, whose flame of love is contained, intense,
and steady.
He
German.
These remarks
in that scene
we
the scene of ent consideration of the play Othello and Desdemona meeting at Cyprus.
The words
and
first
"
"
"
"
content,"
"
calm,"
comfort,"
content
Moor
"
speeches.
He
calls
her
his
soul s
OTHELLO.
101
joy."
So
that he
feels
the most
serene
We
return to Mr.
If it
hath her content so absolute, That not another comfort like to this,
My soul
Succeeds in
unknown
fate."
The calm
and exalted
passion, the sad, prophetic, far-off music he infused into this passage, can never be for
gotten.
shall recall it, once, in the course of this analysis. On that scene of confusion so skillfully
We
engineered by lago,
with Cassio drunk, and the town alarmed, Montano wounded, Othello appears, roused with indignation.
The
tropic blood,
till
now
He
;
or rather as
loving
him, he loved discipline and honor more. have had the initial touches of this
We
man
We
s vast capacity for imaginative emotion. are prepared for the grand Third Act, exhibiting the second distinct phase of Othel
lo s nature,
102
dividuality.
THE TRAGEDIAN.
We
The
sun,
bering within, imparting, so long as they were kept subdued, a lion-like strength to
his character, are here set loose,
and lashed
by
the devil-agency of
lago.
we
In order to save a repetition of names, shall speak, for the time, of Othello and
as
Booth
one person.
They were
one, to
our apprehension. note the noble con fidence of Othello towards Cassio, whom he I do believe sees parting from his wife.
"
We
twas
he."
ture, to
of jealousy, that it required the repeated subtle probe of lago s wit before even Cassio
yes,
oft,"
given with a hearty and happy remembrance of Cassio s friendship. And not till lago
has,
by covert
and
brought Othello,
agonized question,
who
"
What
mean ?
"
OTHELLO.
103
does
and woman," pushing that general words card like an ingenious juggler. Othello takes it, and finds it inscribed with characters of
dismay. The fiend follows up his advantage, and wrings from the heart of his victim, in the words tones that for ex O, misery of inward desolation we have never pression
"
"
heard equaled. Yet in the next long speech, we find his shaken manhood partially recovering its
poise
:
"
Thinkest thou
d make a
life
of jealousy?
"
self-respect of
man
Nor from mine own weak merits The smallest fear or doubt of her
For she had eyes
will I
draw
revolt:
and
"
chose
me."
The word
"
revolt
of genius in tone, of which he furnished such numberless examples. It came with access of emphasis, as if he felt, for an instant, how dreadful a thing her revolt might be, then dismisses the thought at once. It was that
subtle touch of lago
"
s,
in the phrase
you,"
104
THE TRAGEDIAN.
for
those
"
"
proofs
lago.
Othello.
I see, this
"
hath a
dashed your
spirits."
Not a jot.
Not a
jot,"
in a tone, playing
filled
And
again,
soon after
till
moved,"
words
"
honest
meaning, of and given with a ges the fore ture strangely original and fine of the lifted hand pointed vertically to finger
"Fear
not
my
government,"
course,
my
self-control,
If I
etc.."
matched the airy sweep of the to prey at fortune," the words, imagery ; a darting and dispersed ges accompanied by
in a voice that
"
ture.
"
Desdemona comes
If she
I
ll
be
false,
itself!
not believe
The
dispels
suspicion, as
OTHELLO.
"
105
little."
Your napkin
is
too
generous islanders." The scene occupied by Emilia in finding the fatal nap
kin,
it,
and plotting
mischief with
Tis not to
is fair,
To say my
wife
But
begun
the
already, to Othello s mind, lago has And to turn that virtue into pitch.
we may imagine
gentle lady to her guests, maddening her husband, so that he abruptly leaves them, and reenters on the scene to lago, with the
exclamation
"
Ha, ha!
false to
me?
to
me ?
"
He
of ignorance
I
if
hyperbole
So
"
Had
had nothing
106
THE TRAGEDIAN.
self- wounding,
But the
scorpion
mood
is
of
change of mano in a style large, oriental, he came down ner, the stage ; and looking towards the listeners,
brief duration.
entire
With
full
volume
"
of his voice, not loud but deep, into the fare well." The melancholy grandeur of the lines,
however
soul.
uttered, finds
its
way
"
into
every
his
farewell,"
great heart seemed to burst as in one vast The phrase, the tranquil continuing sigh.
"
mind,"
clear
brain-tones,
mind had
its
succes
images of glorious war, filing and dis appearing before his mind s eye, employed some of the grandest elements of voice, sub
dued
to retrospective
"
Othello s occupation
And
eyes
bronzed
as
s
face
if
lending
all
them a
scene, of the
strange
sadness
happiness had
this
gone
after.
Kean
manner, in
was very
different.
At
the
close
"farewell,"
OTHELLO.
107
them, and so brought them down upon his head, with a most effective gesture of des
pair.
But the
is
Edmund Kean.
the setting of the "farewell," the like grand pause in the passion of the play the ominous pause of the maelstrom, at the
which gives
it
such
The
passion
returns
with redoubled power, to the evident sur prise, and almost to the discomfiture of lago,
whom
demand
The ing ocular proof of his wife s infidelity. villain can make only short protests. Words
can but faintly indicate the
"
terrific
and cum
"
marked
clearness,
as
realization.
The
fit
;
passes,
in a whirl of doubt
towards
resolution,
demanding
proof,
lago
is
Strong circumstance
"
Which
the handkerchief.
108
THE TRAGEDIAN.
Such a handkerchief was your wife s) did I to-day
"
(I
am
sure
it
with."
When
did, in
saying this, while pretending to lay his hand on his heart, to enforce asseveration, tuck
away more
handkerchief, which, with fiendish purpose, he intended Cassio should wipe his beard
with.
Now
Othello
appears the third distinct phase of The history nature, the oriental.
of that handkerchief arises in the mind of the Moor, and with it the dim and dominat ing superstitions of the East, the birthplace
of his race.
He
"
exclaims
do
I see
tis
Now
true
"
The passion of the Third Act is so intense and varying, the drain on the physical power
of the actor, especially his voice,
is
so enor
mous
sea,"
have been cut out of the representation. Edmund Kean never gave them. Mr. Booth omitted them on his first performance but
;
OTHELLO.
restored
109
Their utter
images and names of those eastern seas, he endowed with a peculiar freshness and sur
"
"
prise.
sounded
like a torrent
Till that
Swallow them
gave the sound, and figured the very action of engulfing waves.
of the river Rhone, as they leave the lake of Geneva, are singularly pure.
The waters
The turbid Arve empties into the Rhone ; and, side by side, without mingling, flow the two distinct currents in the same channel.
Even
so
was
it
with Othello
mind.
The
current of his pure and inextinguishable love, runs side by side, without mingling, with the
his heart
flow of foul and bloody thoughts poured into by lago. He blows his love to
heaven
in
He
invokes
his love to
throne to
Some
swift
means of death,
For the
fair
devil."
110
THE TRAGEDIAN.
in
the
very next
all
s
He
takes
Desdemona
hand
This hand
felt
moist,
my
lady."
no age, nor known no sorrow." This argues fruitfulness, and liberal heart: Othello. Hot, hot, and moist. This hand of yours requires
Desdemona.
" "
It
yet has
fasting
and
prayer."
Hebrew
He
goes on
"
Much
attitude
of prayer. Then, still holding her hand in one of his, and pointing with the other, and
devil here,
in
the voice sustained at the close, and given in such a manner that the attentive listener
supplemented
the
"
meaning
and
fear
OTHELLO.
Ill
must do
tion
"
so in
your
performance.
For here
On
s
devil
here,"
then a with the same searching intensity doubt seems to rise in his mind, and kindly
;
That commonly
(slight pause)
rebels"
history of the handkerchief, contain the only touch of the supernatural in this ing domestic tragedy, was told with a fine orien
tal fanaticism.
"
The
She was a charmer, and could almost read The thoughts of people."
to give
the
And
bid me,
when
my
fate
would have
me
wive."
as
a Chaldean
human
"
destiny.
Make
it
eye."
The priceless, unreplaceable preciousness of the handkerchief, was condensed in the word
"darling,"
tonation.
112
Desdemona.
"
TEE TRAGEDIAN.
Is it possible ?
"
"
Othello (instantly).
Tis true.
in the
There
world
magic in the
web
of
it.
sibyl, that
had numbered
The sun
to
The whole passage came with a frenzy of spontaneous narration ; and with gesture full of subtle intimations, not mimicries, for turning, swift as a swallow in flight, example,
from the inspiration of the ing of the work.
"
sibyl, to the
sew
Fetch
it;
let
me
see
it,"
it
could
the play might fully atone, that she could bear to stand by and hear this relation, wit
ness
Othello
little
astonished grief, and and yet withhold the angry exit, word that would have set all right.
her mistress
s
The
omission of the
first
scene
of the
fault.
it
It should
the simulated
The wild
that pa-
OTHELLO.
renthesis of contemplation,
his
"
113
where he
"
refers
instructed na shadowing passion to and not to lago s report and so ture," makes the very emotion he suffers under
"
the an occult proof of his wife s guilt bloody thoughts which clot into single, ter his trance are all of the rible words
and ex and can employ the very highest pression, Moreover, that scene genius of any actor. the auditor for the following, and prepares accounts for Othello s direct and cruel ac
closest texture of dramatic situation
cusations.
The
We
come now
It
the
last
scene
the
was full of fate. Mr. bed-chamber. Booth entered with an eastern lamp lighted in one hand, and a drawn scimitar in the other. The oriental subjective mood had
obtained
"
full
"
posed
proofs
The sup possession of him. had sunk into his mind, and
This
is
fully
shown
For to deny each article with oath, Cannot remove or choke the strong conception That I do groan withal. Thou art to die."
114
THE TRAGEDIAN.
again
is
And
there
"
The
movement, the
mination of his voice, sounding like thought overheard, filled the scene with an atmos
know
not where
is
that
Promethean
heat,"
as if the adjective had just occurred to him and accompanied by a wandering and ques
We
shame
items for
comment from
view
or exalted passion, like this one we have in and especially as the excellence of ;
Mr. Booth s acting could not be measured by the number of good points he made, but by the entireness of identification. Yet we find no help for it. Observe the eastern
imagery employed
throughout
"
this
scene.
The moon
moon
"
chaste
"
stars
the
"
error
"
of
the
"
;
"
trees
"
the base
Indian
;
;
"
world as
"
and
perfect
chrysolite."
OTHELLO.
115
:
The deed
"
is
done.
Emilia enters
s foul
good
Othello.
my lord,
"
yonder
murder
done."
"What, now?"
Emilia.
Othello.
But now,
It is the
my
lord."
very error of the moon She comes more near the earth than she was wont,
"
mad."
His gesture seemed to figure the faith of the Chaldean, and to bring the moon more near.
"
"
Roderigo killed
killed
"
"
(with wonder).
the
And
Cassio
throat).
"
(glutting
words in his
O,
all
depth in
hell,
But that
To
this extremity."
He
uttered that
first
tremendous
line
with
burning intensity.
thought, and put
"
it
mouth
of Satan
etc.
And
a lower
deep,"
out, and under the spell grand presence, and in the tragic con
is
of which the
"
human
voice
is
capable.
"
Wash me
Othello has
wounded
:
him.
He
says
116
"
THE TRAGEDIAN.
I
am
live ;
For in
my sense,
tis
happiness to
die."
We
Act
now
in the
Second
If it
Twere now
to be
Then, the expression came from the absolute ; now, the same word tells of the last bitterness of his grief and self-con demnation
:
"
full
circle."
From this moment his own death is assured. At the summons, Bring him away," and
"
as
he
is
beginning his final speech Soft you; a word or two before you
go,"
he takes a silken robe, and carelessly throws it over his shoulder ; then reaches for his tur ban, possessing himself of a dagger he had
concealed therein.
"
Of one
Of one whose hand, Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away Richer than all his tribe."
He
uttered the
"
indeed
word
his wife,
with a lingering fullness and tender ness of emphasis, and with a gesture as if, in
OTHELLO.
the act of throwing from him.
it
117
his
away, he cast
own
life
If the excellence of a performance may be judged by its effect on the audience, this one
the silent tears of strong men, carried by the imaginative stress of the scene beyond the reaches of their critical
and refined
bear witness. For ourself, we went no more to the play during that engage ment but walked about as in a voluntary
culture
;
dream, not caring to dispel by attendance on even his other performances, the pathetic
illusion
he had created.
MACBETH.
AMONG
those undefined influences which
stream from the greater dramas of Shake speare may be numbered the climate of the
play; and
servation,
this,
tells
reader.
chill
From
mists of Scotland.
from im languor and fierceness of passion agination which rides upon the current of the
and revels in gorgeous color and in and sensuous forms, we pass to that higher imagination, which allies itself to the
blood,
rich
intellectual and, spiritual nature
;
in a
word,
to the at
The
ductile flame of
Mr. Booth
histrionic
form with
The
supernatural element in
Mac
in its
is
beth
is
The
character
more
closely knit
the action
more peremp-
MACBETH.
119
in the
In his ambition, and tory and progressive. of satisfying it, there are points ways
of likeness to Richard.
toward
dread,"
his
"
remorse or
a victim to both
these conditions
which projects
is
So dominant
sisters
weird
themselves seem
like
the
outward
They appear shapes of his guilty purposes. first upon the scene, then vanish, then reap
pear, as
if
We
had seen
performances,
and
heard musical
readings of the text by other actors. They Booth was possessed reported the character.
by it. A captain in the service of his king, and returning from successful fight, in com pany with Banquo, he is met upon a blasted
heath by the three witches.
ural
The
grandeur, and
significant brevity,
preternat of
And
this,
we
contend,
is
120
tastical,
THE TRAGEDIAN.
half-comic aspect of the
three old
women.
Booth betrayed his strong inward agitation and when they vanished (that is, clattered
off the stage),
the
air,
sition,
which
and
We
And
must
illustrate this
scene by a
com
parison.
The earth hath bubbles, as the water has, Whither are they vanished ? Macbeth. "Into the air; and what seemed corporal melted As breath into the wind."
"
Banquo.
"
Mr. Vandenhoff, the elder, a gentleman whose readings from Shakespeare and other poets delighted large audiences in this coun try some twenty years since, had a voice sin We saw him gularly sweet and sonorous. act Macbeth, or rather heard him read the for his action was always secondary. part His delivery of the passage quoted, was a
;
He
air.
gave
You
But he did Booth did. With not give the vanishing. a sudden upward look, and with a sudden
MACBETH.
121
springing tone, not musical, but like the whiz into of a shaft from a cross-bow, he gave
"
the
air"
No.
Could he dally with the image ? Voice, look, action, conveyed the instant
:
And the conclusion thought, the vanishing. of the sentence came in the same style
"
"
corporal
(looking at his
"
own
body),
"
(short
i),
with wonder.
with a succession of emphasis, swift, and filled To assign the method of vari
:
ous actors, we might say Vandenhoff played the imagery Macready, the analysis ; Kean, the passion of the scene Booth, the charac
; ;
ter,
which not only includes the other methods, but supplies an element wanting in them.
Two
truths are
told,"
pression,
drew upon that well-spring of imaginative ex which lay deep in Booth s nature, and which Macbeth gave scope for, in a more condensed and terrific way, than any other
character.
"
The
was
effect of the
"
supernatural
soliciting
No
voice that
we have
ever
of, could convey like his, the unbodied beauty or terror of supernatural
122
emotions.
THE TRAGEDIAN.
The music
in his ears.
of
the
"imperial
saw the throne in vision, but between him and it were dark horrible imaginings." ness, fearful guilt, and
theme
"
was
He
"
"My
tone
and gesture
that
shape),
Shakes so
Is
my
single state of
man
that function
is
But what
This phrase was uttered in one continuous tone of involved resonance, and in such a manner as to make the listener feel that the
thronging shapes of Macbeth
objective realities. In that terrific invocation
to the
"
by Lady Macbeth
Spirits
thoughts,"
she says,
"
Stop up the access and passage to remorse That no compunctious visitings of nature Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace ( ?) between
;
The
effect
and
it."
s,
which
is,
commentary,
preserve
this reading.
But
it
MACBETH.
speare
123
"
wrote
"
"
pace,"
not
peace."
"
He
are
personifies
to
nature,"
"
whose
"
"
visitings
and
"
it,"
the
fell
purpose
sundering them,
She
with
welcomes
"
husband
!
Great Glamis, worthy Cawdor Greater than both by the all-hail hereafter!
"
But
his
mind
is
bewildered,
and
his
will
weakened, by images of terror his ambition has conjured up. His uncertain and post
poning mood, found
fit
manner
of
Mr. Booth
this scene
and in the
If
twere done
when
tis
done,"
that
Note the crowd and jostle of inconsequent thoughts, in words that defy punctuation. His mind flies at a tangent, from the need of despatch in the horrid deed he contemplates, to the hope
full
mood found
utterance.
of success
life
to
come,
followed by fears of retribution in the life Mr. Booth did not play the that now is.
trumpet stop of
"
124
THE TRAGEDIAN.
of his taking
off."
But
wife,
at length,
is
his
he
resolved,
purpose of regicide. from which he goes to kill the king, appears before him, the dagger of the mind. The the look, the evasion of the object, pause,
which
still
haunted
his vision,
pass, as expressed
by
At
7s this
a dagger that
I see before
me,"
low-toned, scarce audible, with a prolonged emphasis on the first word, and in that man
ner as
if
which marked all his soliloquies. The whole It speech was given in volumed whispers. was filled with fearful shadows. It made one
hold his breath in dreadful expectation, as the
actor passed silently
"
With Tarquin
ravishing
strides,"
stantive
MACBETH.
uity ! Even Lady Macbeth, as she was, sometimes thinks in images
125
ambitious realist
;
as
now
to
opening, describe by
"
she
speaks
of
the
surfeited
I have drugged their possets That Death and Nature do contend about them, Whether they live or
die."
her husband.
He
not only
"
own
phantoms,"
Methought I heard a voice cry, Sleep no more Macbeth does murder sleep the innocent sleep,
!
;
Balm
of hurt minds.
"
What wealth of meaning in these words And what assuaging fullness of comfort,
!
little
word,
"
balm
"
Hurt
minds,"
tones.
Goethe pregnantly
said,
The power
of
art lies, not in reporting, but in conveying invoke the aid of your impressions."
We
126
actor
s
THE TRAGEDIAN.
manner,
the culminating speech Lady Macbeth has gone to
in
of this scene.
gild the faces of the grooms with Duncan s Left alone, Macbeth hears a knock blood.
Whence
is
that knocking?
with me, when every noise appals me ? What hands are here? Ha! they pluck out mine eyes! Will all great Neptune s ocean wash this blood
How is t
Clean from
my hand?
"
Looking on his hands with starting eyes, and a knotted horror in his features and wiping one hand with the other from him, with intensest loathing. The words came, like the weary dash on reef rocks, and as over sunken wrecks and drowned men, of
;
my hand will
one
red."
rather
seas incarnardine,
Making
the green
launched the mysterious power of his voice, like the sudden rising of a mighty wind from some unknown source, over those
multitudinous seas," and they swelled and congregated dim and vast before the eye of the mind. Then came the amazing word,
" "
He
incarnardine,"
MA CBETH.
127
one red." The whole pas ing the green sage was of unparalleled grandeur ; and in
conveyed the impression of an infinite and unavailing remorse. During the alarm at the discovery of the murder of the king, Macbeth goes to Dun
tone, look, action,
can
Had
I
had
etc.
While delivering this speech, and the follow ing one, wherein he justifies himself for the added murder of the grooms, an intelligent
reporter for the press happened to enter the he exclaimed. theatre. That s not good
"
"
"
What
Booth to-night
"
Nothing was the matter, except that the actor had reached the height of the histri
onic art, and was speaking Macbeth s false sentiments with pretended feeling. He de livered the forced imagery, in the affected
manner
common
crown.
"
the
Hazlitt says of Kean s Macbeth, that he was deficient in the poetry of the character;
"
"
and that he did not look like a man who had encountered the Weird Sisters." How
"
128
then,
THE TRAGEDIAN.
ask, could he play the part at For, unless we are made to feel that the actor is possessed by visions of the mind, all?
startled by voices in the air, waylaid, and drawn on to his confusion, by those
"
we may
Secret, black,
it
and midnight
hags,"
gives, as
one heart-rending picture of re morse, after the commission of a murder. This might be done, without representing
Kean
Macbeth.
Booth s performance, on the contrary, was constituted by imagination, kindled and Macswayed by supernatural agencies.
beth
the
s
action
is
intervals
are
show the native affinity of the imaginative faculty with what is best in man. A fine example occurs in these
lines
:
"
slide
Duncan
is
in his grave
After
life s fitful
Treason has
nor poison,
MACBETH.
spontaneous
"
129
"
life.
"
The
"
fitful
fever,"
trea
son,"
steel,"
poison,"
mies of
life,
came
remembered words. The passage was be gun, and closed, and rounded in with tones
of mournful music.
own ghost, by appearing in bodily form, and pointing to his wounds. This rank ex pedient might have been toned into art, by means of costume, obscured lights, and espe
cially by a judicious wonder in the faces and manner of the guests, at the outbreak of Mac-
beth
not see.
We
swift as frenzy
thoughts."
Mr. Booth had to do with the bodily pres ence, and it must be confessed he spirit
ualized
it His passion of blended strangely. terror and fury, made the object a horrible and left it so, as it disappeared. shadow,"
"
"
And overcome
us, like
What
is
The
130
cool
"
THE TRAGEDIAN.
commentator says nothing, or
s
replies
summer
the
But
aglow or chilled with the pas sion of the scene, gave quite another ver The summer s cloud was to him a sion.
actor,
" "
huge shadow, suddenly scaling the heavens, charged with lightning, and filling the specta He used overcome in the tor with fear.
"
"
sense proximate to
"
overwhelm," or
"
stoop
The speech is made in answer to upon." his wife, who has left the feast and come to his rescue. The vanished ghost still has him
in
possession,
and he turns
"
to his
guests,
with
You make me
strange,
Even
When, now I think you can behold such sights, And keep the natural ruby of your cheeks,
When mine
fear,"
and
filling the speech with an intense and varied fury of wonder. The same power of imagination that con
jured up the
"
unreal
mockery,"
played also
meaning he infused
blood."
will
have
MACBETH.
silent by.
131
The
first
nant murmur,
fate.
like
an assent to a decree of
Then,
"
in livelier tone
;
blood will have blood They say Stones have been known to move, and trees to speak;
"
speech
"
The
secret st
"
man
of
blood,"
came with so profound secret st the word and quiet an intonation, that we feared the. emphasis it manifestly requires, must be lost. But beneath the lowest depth of his voice,
"
there might at any time open a lower deep ; and here, after a momentary pause, the close
caught distinctly from some unfathomed source the syllabled rumination Man of
listener
"
blood."
Among
by
side
with the warlike speech of the later scenes, that one following the death of the queen was
the most significant. Macbeth is left alone in the world. which had seemed to Life,
him
a
"
little
value,
becomes
walking
shadow."
The
sense of vague
132
desolation
THE TRAGEDIAN.
which the actor conveyed in this and in the whole speech to which it phrase, belongs, can bear no closer comment
:
"
What
he,
That
-was not
Am I
to fear, or
"
The word
flighj;
fear
"
was uttered
in
an upward
a scorn of
in
it
fear.
"
similar
example occurred
Lear
Through
appear."
His voice flashed the appearance. Yet no one could on such examples found a rule of elocution. There is no rule for sympathy ; none for imaginative art.
"
bear a charmed
of
life
To one
woman
born."
The word
two, as
it is
"
charmed
in
in one prolonged, resonant, confident syllable. So close was Mr. Booth s identification of
character that
fest, in
its
transpirations
were mani
minor and unconsidered ways. We may instance as contrasted examples the dif ferent modes of fighting and dying, in Rich
ard and in Macbeth.
externally similar.
The circumstances
are
In each play a brave and guilty king dies in single combat, either with
MACBETH.
133
the rightful heir to the throne, or his repre sentative, after suffering a supernatural and
But how different is prophetic visitation. In Rich the soul of the respective scenes.
ard, the vision of the night has passed like a In the battle forgotten dream.
"
A thousand hearts
is still
bosom."
His kingdom
at stake.
The hope
of
victory lives in the fast embrace of his enor mous and tenacious will, and never leaves
Accordingly,
And
fought
while in Macbeth, he flung out voice and action, with the desperate abandonment of a
LEAR.
WHAT audacity of genius, or what igno rance of the greatness of the task could have induced Mr. Booth, at the age of twentythree, to study and represent the character
His suc of Lear, we need not now inquire. cess in the personation is a fact of dramatic Hazlitt says, under date of April, history.
1820
"
We
But pleasure to come (so we anticipate)." the critic has left it on record, that these
"
pointed
and he goes on in
his
brilliant
way, through several pages, descanting on the grandeur of the character, and marking in scene after scene, the deficiency and
"
"
by Mr.
performance of it. This sounds like implicit testimony from an unwilling witness
s
Kean
to the superiority of
rate, it sets the
Booth
Lear.
At any
a question
first
LEAR.
repeated by dullness
135
entirely at rest ; as first in order of
Booth
performance came
Indeed, as the public mind was preoccupied by Booth s admired personation, there was
danger that Kean himself, when he came to play the part, might be regarded as the imi
tator.
And
him
into
The critic, however, Hazlitt s caustic pen. could not dismiss his favorite without giving
Booth one disparaging touch,
"
in the follow
In a subsequent part Mr. ing sentence Kean did not give to the reply of Lear
:
Booth
in the text,
and in this he was justified for, it is an exclamation of indignant and he irony, not of conscious superiority immediately adds with deep disdain, to prove
did,
; ;
When
do
stare, see
how
"
136
reader.
THE TRAGEDIAN.
Lear has just entered on the scene, and with fantastically dressed with flowers
;
the exclamation
"
me
for
coming
am
the king
himself."
No
irony here, but downright mad earnest. Directly after, in reply to Gloster s question
Is
t
?"
the sense of outraged majesty, which, com plicated with filial ingratitude, was the very occasion of his madness, comes back on him
in
full
tide
of consciousness, as
he ex
claims
"
"
which
When
do
stare, see
how
the subject
quakes."
To
"
sustain his
"
subject
spect.
There
none.
The
filled
only other oc
his blind
Edgar and
who
Edgar.
Gloster.
stand by
reverence.
"
"
"
0,
let
me
kiss that
hand
"
Lear
is
LEAR.
137
realities to
him.
life,"
etc.
was our privilege, in early youth, to see Mr. Booth enact Lear, at the National Theatre in Bos ton. We saw him then for the first time.
performances in London,
it
The
blue eye
profile,
the white beard the nose in keen as the curve of a falchion the
;
;
ringing utterance of the names, Regan," the close-pent-up passion, striv Goneril ;
"
"
"
the kingly energy ; the affecting recognition of Cordelia in the last act made a deep impression on our boyish
;
mind.
We
closet study of the great poet, coupled with the reading of Charles Lamb s refined and ingenious strictures on the capacity of
saw and heard all this, but we We were not old enough.
the stage, conspired to prevent our attend ance on a representation of either Hamlet or
many
years.
The
grandeur and subtlety of Mr. Booth s per formance in other characters, however, led us one night to dare his Hamlet. We found
the atmosphere of the play-house not stifling
138
THE TRAGEDIAN.
to the imagination, provided there was genius on the stage. Lamb s fantastic theory van
ished.
The
s
Booth
Hamlet,
us with eagerness to
hold the just representation of this character to be the sublime of the actor s art.
We
There be players that we have seen play, and heard others praise, and that highly," who, whether developed among us, or arriv ing from over sea with their budget of literary
"
credentials, did little else in Lear, but show us the choler or the querulousness of an old
king, abused and abandoned of his children. They yielded to the temptation of rendering the stormier passages with melodramatic fury,
and the milder ones with the peevish feeble ness of age. Mr. Kean seems to have over done the part in both these respects. But
overdoing, on the stage, is usually the result of under-thinking. And if there be one char
acter in Shakespeare which requires in an actor fullness of thought, delicacy and subtlety of apprehension, and beyond these, the im
aginative and identifying power, character of Lear.
it
is
the
scholastic per-
LEAR.
formance, which
pleasure.
It
139
we
It did not move that educated gentleman. Marvelous as was the imitation of the us.
signs of passion,
we
felt
He was the intellectual show pulse of life. man of the character, not the character itself.
never got inside. Conception is a bless not vouchsafed to actors of his school. ing With Mr. Booth the case was different.
He
We
vivify the
figure,
filled
and we were
the
hitherto
not disappointed.
niche.
He
of mind, rising empty colossal and unexpected out of age and desti tution ; the frenzy of outraged feeling in this
The grandeur
child-changed father, passing upward from a poignant sense of his own suffering, and en
larging
to
a sublime
;
which bound up
his
the pathos
kingliness
and sanity ; the anguish ; and, through all, the essential in a word, the interior life of
Lear, came forth and shone in the focal light of Mr. Booth s representation.
140
In the
first
THE TRAGEDIAN.
scene
we
impatient majesty of the old king who yet, out of his deeper love, parleys with Cordelia; hears her cool answers ; controls his rising
passion,
till
he casts her
"
and
Thy
This, and the banishment of Kent, who takes her part, employed the most sonorous ele ments of Mr. Booth s voice, shaken and
weighted as with age, yet betraying latent physical vigor, and choked in passages by the
force of contending emotions. hold the to be necessary to the identity show of vigor
We
when he
his
is
Life
and wits
all."
at once
Had
not concluded
When
filial
Goneril, putting aside the mask of piety, first assumes the governess, Mr.
as with a blow.
Then
"
partially recovering, he put those fearful ques Are you our daughter ? Does tions
"
LEAR.
141
"
"
of mind, the terrible suspicion just waking in him that he has dispossessed himself irrevocably, the bursts of anger
"
The agony
Degenerate bastard
I ll
"
Woe
"
How
show;
"
the imperious impatience towards Albany; the desperation, as he strikes his head
"
Beat at
And
all
crowded
few lines, and a few moments, were ren dered as they were conceived, with wonder
ful variety
and
truth.
Even
fine
in this whirl
and kingly the of his reply to Albany, who dis courtesy claims all knowledge of what had moved him, in the words
his passion,
"
wind of
how
It
may be
so,
my
lord."
142
THE TRAGEDIAN.
(So again at the end of the play, in a scene unhappily omitted by Mr. Booth, Lear speaks
to
Albany
"
this button.
Thank you,
"
sir;
the phrase receiving an exquisite accent of courtesy, from the infinite pathos of the sit
uation.)
the imprecation on Goneril. This it the curse." customary word roughens the sense of it unnecessarily.
It
is
Then comes
to call
"
It is in substance a
may
be childless
but
may
be a
to her;
that she
may
The
an
"
now
inflicting
on her
is
"
"
an
in Jehovah eye." Putting eye stead of Nature," a Jew might have uttered Mr. Booth began it as a solemn adjuration it. The indig to the unseen power of Nature.
for
nant bitterness in the terms of imprecation, seemed as if it was converted out of sweetest
images of what a child should be, that lay in the core of his fatherly heart. This double
action of his mind, in the
agony which
it
in-
LEAR.
143
volved, swayed and shook his kneeling figure and lent his voice a wild vibration that drew The heart involuntary sympathy and awe. followed him as he arose and ran out with extended arms. Lear reenters, and in the
course of his speech to Goneril, in a similar vein of feeling, but with that change sug gested by the lines
"
me
perforce,
Mr. Booth produced one of those large which distinguished his personations.
"
effects
Thou
shall find
That I I have
ll
cast off
"
resume,"
There
is
the end of this First Act, which rivals in pathos that omitted scene in Othello, which
we commented on
It consists of
a brief dialogue between Lear and the Fool. The Fool s talk, matter and
"
144
THE TRAGEDIAN.
broken exclamations, touch the core of the plot, and point to the tragic consummation. Let the reader ponder this scene, if he would
pass into the presence of the character. In the opening scene with Regan, in the
Second Act, all the unexpressed tenderness which the old king had felt for his best-loved child Cordelia, seemed to pass by a kind of
vicarious deflection
fatherly hope.
glad to see your highness." I know what reason I think you are I have to think so; if thou should not be glad,
"
his only
Regan.
Lear.
am
"
Regan,
from thy mother s tomb, Beloved Regan, Thy sister s naught. 0, Regan, she hath tied Sharp-toothed unkindness like a vulture, here
I
would divorce
me
Sepulchring an adultress.
thee."
When
says
Ask
her
forgiveness
"
Dear daughter,
still
I confess that I
am
old,"
etc.
And, when
from
tion
his
Never, Regan She hath abated me of half my train Looked black upon me struck me with her tongue,
:
LEAR.
Most
serpent-like,
145
:
fall
hope
in
Regan
Thy
Thou
The
offices of nature,
better
know
st
bond of childhood,"
etc.
Mr. Booth sounded the various stops of grief, of parental love, of irony, of indignation, of baffled but clinging hope, which filled inter
changeably, or inhabited together in discord, the heart of Lear, until Goneril enters.
art of Shakespeare, in her upon the scene, that the two bringing unnatural daughters may vie with each other
in impious speech, so that Lear, heart-struck, if not heart-broken, is torn and cast loose at
last
The transcendant
from
all ties
ing to the
"
heavens
age."
The
with noble anger, filled with grief and un shed tears, crowned with majesty yet with
out
its
lendings
visiting
upon those
10
after
"
the
146
THE TRAGEDIAN.
his
!
overwhelming energy of
rushes out into the storm
wrath, as he
s
is
The
final test of
an actor
worthiness to
his
power
to
catch and reproduce the insanity of Lear. Hazlitt says Mr. Kean s performance, when the king s intellects begin to fail him,
:
and are
was curious
and quaint, rather than impressive or natural. He driveled and looked vacant, and moved his lips so as not to be heard, and did nothing, and appeared at times as if he would quite The spectator was big with forget himself.
expectation
of
means employed
not correspond to the waste of preparation." Dana takes a directly opposite view. He
for one
is a study himself acquainted with the workings of an insane mind. And it is hardly less true that the acting of Kean
says
"It
was an embodying of these workings. There was a childish feeble gladness in the eye, and
a half-piteous smile about the mouth, at times, which one could scarce look upon without
tears."
remains, did
Kean
LEAR.
147
Lear
The
phases
differ as
mind.
A generalized
would hardly
considering ; but this, it would seem, was the sum of Kean s achievement.
The madness
mind
;
neither was
It
a declension towards
The im was exalted, although diverted from agination the truth of things and presented, at times, a grandeur of thought and speech, which has
imbecility.
was an aberration.
no
The
its
rea
among
the subjects of
think the text of Shakespeare, mused upon, will bear out this inter deeply It is certain that the view might pretation.
We
charac
with a Greek vigor of imagination, personifies the elements, addressing them as substantial beings, and with a majesty of self-exaltation,
yet dashed with madness,
"
calls
them
"
Servile ministers
148
THE TRAGEDIAN.
What Lamb
calls
"
the
contemptible machinery of the storm," was It was the tempest in Lear s forgotten. mind, that Mr. Booth made us conscious of,
and
this
topmost height of the actor s art. His mind played over the minor crazed nimble stroke of quick passages, with the cross lightning." There was no weakness or
"
act.
Instead of
eye,"
"
we saw
ened
and shining in his eyes. His sharp looks, and his keen crazy questioning of Edgar, whom yet he treated with a kind of
shifting
fraternal tenderness
manner, when
Arraign her
first,
tis Goneril,"
and
"
Then
let
see
her
heart"
if
because
source of tears.
LEAR.
149
we touch
chamber
scene which follows the arrival of Cordelia. His return to soundness of mind, in the ap
peasing presence of* his one true daughter, was as subtle, tender, and graduated, as the
willful. Never, mouth, have we heard a more pathetic utterance, than he gave to the line
even from
his
"
If
for
me
I will drink
it."
it filled with music, but with the remorseful humility of a bruised heroic
Our
notes on Booth
close
abruptly.
The
scene for
sounding the inmost depths of human feeling, not only in this play, but in all dramatic
literature,
Lear. It does not lessen our chagrin to that Garrick played at an earlier date,
Booth played Tate s add and Kean at a later, in that diversion on Shake speare s grandest drama, which leaves out the indispensable Fool, and puts in the superflu
was
left out.
ous
folly.
We
Lear
have no
fault to
find with
Booth
so far as
he followed Shakespeare.
We
But
his
performance was a
150
THE TRAGEDIAN.
reverently
through
its
suggestion of a grief
we may
guess
at,
but
which, in
its
fullness,
unexpressed.
CASSIUS.
IN earlier years Mr. Booth assumed many minor characters of Shakespeare, which he afterwards surrendered, as Richard II., Hot There may spur, King John, Posthumous.
still
latter character.
played it in Boston, with Mr. Forrest as Brutus, about the year 183T.
so
surrendered.
He
Cassius was a
restless spirit,
Roman, whose
splenetic
Italian,
and
to
the
modern
this
"
But when we
name
Italian
fiend,"
constant
between Brutus and friendship Cassius must of course be put from view.
The
noble head, the mobile features, the spare figure of .Booth gave him a singular
for the part.
external fitness
in
Perhaps no
of
his, tran passage any performance scended in colloquial style the well-known street scene with Brutus. His description of
152
THE TRAGEDIAN.
swimming in the Tiber raw and gusty day and of Caesar s sickness when he was in Spain," were Booth s vivid por especially noteworthy.
on that
" "
"
traiture
He
touched
the
arm
line
His coward
lips
fly,"
Cassius, by a subtle reversion of the common the color fled from his lips," implies phrase, a sarcasm on Cagsar s quality as a soldier.
"
Booth
illustrated the
if
meaning by a momen
tary gesture, as
carrying a standard.
The
movement was
sarcasm,
action,
but
which sometimes appeared in this actor s personations ; marking the ex great cess in him, however, of those high histrionic powers, keen feeling and shaping imagination. His Cassius was signalized by one action of characteristic excellence and originality. After Caesar had been encompassed and stabbed by the conspirators, and lay extended on the floor of the Senate-house, Booth strode right across the dead body, and out of
the scene, in silent and disdainful triumph.
SIR GILES
OVERREACH.
OUT
down
to
to Payne, Colman, Otway, even to Sheil and Maturin, the path of our actor was a track of light and, against the mass of dramatic dullness it some
times met,
"
Stuck
fiery off
indeed."
His
play,
"
"A
New Way
memory
stands in our
We
some of the bolder strokes, and hold a can some of the finer touches of this
work.
When
he speaks of having,
Margaret
decayed,"
The
he adds,
"
More than a
Between
Booth infused
into those
two
italicized
words
154
the
rich
THE TRAGEDIAN.
aspiring
In the scene of fine perceptions. extern Marrall to work the where Sir Giles urges
"
tis
beg,"
steal
of his right hand downward, and as in act of than beg," palm up, as in act of taking
:
solicitation
ease.
need
be, catch,
the attentions of
piece.
"
You
ll
If you are my true daughter, venture alone with one man, though he came
Semele."
Like Jupiter to
Margaret protests
"
If to
obey you
"
I forget
my
honor,
He must and
Sir Giles.
will forsake
me."
How
Forsake thee
Do
wear a sword for fashion; or is this arm Shrunk up or withered ? Does there live a man, Of that large list I have encountered with,
1
er
me?
"
155
with
shall
These
lines
were so
full
and
s art,
bristling
that
we
attempt an analysis of Mr. Booth s victori He uttered ous method of rendering them. with a shriek of astonish forsake thee
"
"
ment.
"
Do
wear a sword
for fashion?
"
word blown
its
disdainful, like
In saying it, he the scabbard with his left hand, and clutched
crest.
He
the fingers of the left hand, and gave the phrase in throated and roughened tones of The words of the continuing lines scorn.
were
solid
"
"
rammed with
"
life,"
and
full
of the
temper of Sir Giles, down to the word when his voice dropped suddenly blood ; to its subterranean chamber, and he uttered
"
that did oppose me," in a cool the phrase of tone, which seemed to assure the depth
doom
is
of
all
antagonists.
Wellborn, cheated and hated of Sir Giles, presented to him by Lady Allworth, with
156
the remark,
"
THE TRAGEDIAN.
If I
The manner
in
so."
his
back turned, betraying an inward strife by subtle motions of head, hands, and features, until, mastering repugnance by policy, he turned suddenly with affected heartiness, and grasped the youth s hand, saying, My
" "
s question if he is not moved the imprecations of those he has by wronged, Sir Giles replies
"
was a
most
felicitous
touch.
When
foaming billows
;
split
Their flinty ribs or as the moon is moved When wolves, with hunger pined, howl at her
brightness."
The change
words
"
at her
made
the listener
feel the
ity.
example of self-assertion, and suggested how grandly Mr. Booth could have enacted Coriolanus. We do not know that he ever did this character but one night in personate when the mood was on, he took Cincinnati, down a volume of Shakespeare, and read the
;
to his
son Edwin.
sight of objects
Lamb
157
disproved
by notable examples.
tion rather deal with sensible objects, accord Fuseli, the ing to its own exalting laws ?
went out
met, seemed to him to be ten feet high! Father Hennepin, the first white man who ever
wild
looked
upon
"
the
Falls
of
Niagara,
least six
makes,
in his quaint
"
surmise,
that they
hundred
feet high ! he bore truer testimony to the spirit of the scene, than does
And
who
of the
When Booth, on a certain occasion, as Sir Giles, chal lenged Lord Lovel, and ran (not shuffled) out, but finding he was not followed, came
cliff in
English
feet.
directly back, stood just within the scene, and uttered these words in his deepest voice,
"
Are you
pale?"
he took
his stature
to dilate
his figure
seemed
his will,
and actually
who
LUKE.
IN Massinger
the
s
"
City
name
of
"
Riches,"
part of Luke.
"
The
plot
simple.
Luke, a
ruined prodigal, is obliged to accept, in order to keep base life afoot," the situation of
servant to his brother
s
Madam.
s
His conduct
in this capacity is so
exemplary
its
reality,
Luke
all
his
immense
wealth.
his
The
in solitary luxury,
John appears, as Luke, though struck at first with terror, soon comprehends the situation, and dashes from the scene in a rage.
Sir
when
The
vant
s
man
in ser
number of band-boxes
and bundles, and scolded by madam for his But the tardiness, at first provoked a smile. manner of gentle reverence, and the intellec-
LUKE.
tual intonation with
159
the auditor
"
These from the Tower, these from the old Exchange, And these from Westminster, I could not come
Much
sooner."
Coming from the room filled with riches which he has unexpectedly inherited, he
says
"
am
"
not with that epicurism of elocution which the words invite, but with the roughened
voice of a
selfish joy.
man who
He
of
it,
way
"
my way
is
me,"
he sounded the grand organ stop of his voice, with that easy power, which at once startled
SIR
EDWARD MORTIMER.
seeing Booth, at the of twenty, play lago, was so struck with age his excellence that he wrote the young tra
WILLIAM GODWIN, on
gedian
praise.
letter,
filled
s
with
discriminating
"
From Godwin
"
novel called
Caleb
Williams,"
the
"
Colman dramatized the play called Iron Chest and Mr. Booth s por
;
trayal
we have
always regarded as one of his most effective use the adjective with personations.
We
deliberate intent.
Effective
it
was beyond
measure, and above praise. Indeed, if it had been our actor s purpose to combine in one
representation all the daring, and difficult, and terrific feats, in look, voice, action, of which his supple frame was capable, he could not have selected a better field for the ex
hibition than this play affords. that ever saw Mr. Booth as Sir
Who
Ed
just
his utterance of
ton,"
name
"
discloses
him
S1H
EDWARD MORTIMER.
?
161
from
It carried
the invisible speaker the whole tragedy, in its muffled, yet resonant and boding cry.
The opening
soliloquy of Sir
Edward, a sen
sitive, generous, honorable man, but stained with the guilt of a secret murder, was filled
He
invokes
Which
lifts
angry deep,
his picturing voice, the look of the chafed and billowy sea very then, by a fine ethereal transition, the motion
of a bird in
air.
is,
"
The
as the actor
jump
Sir
all
the
time."
the
evolution of character, but in the presenta These tion of special scenes and situations.
were given with wonderful resource of voice and look, and equal vividness and variety of
action.
first
scene
who
seeks to
162
"
THE TRAGEDIAN.
Sirrah What am I about? Oh, Honor! Honor! Thy pile should be so uniform, displace One atom of thee, and the slightest breath Of a rude peasant makes thine owner tremble
!
"
The
this speech,
rapid changes in voice and manner, in and the original intonation of the
concluding phrase, at once reckless and sus tained, and as if the building were about
were marked by Mr. and inimitable method. unique No actor we have ever seen seemed to have such control over the vital and invol untary functions. He would tremble from
tumbling into ruin,
Booth
head
arm
to the finger tips, while holding it in the as in the last firm grasp of the other hand
Curse on
my
flesh to tremble
so."
The veins of his corded and magnificent neck would swell, and the whole throat and face become suffused with crimson in a moment, in the crisis of passion, to be succeeded on
To the ebb of feeling by an ashy paleness. throw the blood into the face is a compara
sim tively easy feat for a sanguine man by the breath ; but for a man of pale ply holding
SIR
EDWARD MORTIMER.
163
complexion to speak passionate and thrilling words pending the suffusion, is quite another
thing. O
On
it
must be ob-
served that no amount of merely physical exertion, or exercise of voice, could bring
color into that pale, proud, intellectual face. This was abundantly shown in Shylock, in
Lear, in Hamlet, where the passion was in tense, but where the face continued clear and
pale.
To
In the
terrible
scene in the library, when he proposes the oath of secrecy to Wilford, and
"
Waxing
desperate with
imagination,"
reenacts the
in the
threat to Wilford
Dare
to
make
The
slightest
And
the
movement
Compared
Than cherubs
damned!
"
the accents of which, even to the last rever berant word, ring startlingly clear in our
memory
his face, or
no color mantled
mingled
in the manifest
working
of his features.
But when
old Winterton
164
comes
fixing
in,
THE TRAGEDIAN.
and Sir Edward turns
glance,
to Wilford,
and utters
be angiy,
careless,"
Be very angry
if I
find
you
the reiterated word, given in prolonged and kindling tones, carried also a flush of feeling
visibly into his face.
where he
"
seizes Wilford,
I will crush thee
!
Slave
That no
vile particle of
May
O, agony
!
ha ha ha
! !
"
not
harm
thee, boy,
and rushes from the scene, the gust of anger gathers and spends itself without change of color ; but the sudden revulsion of feeling
that takes place with the
"
words
thee,
boy,"
I will
not
harm
crimsons his face and neck with burning shame. His ghastly pallor in the death
scene shall conclude this episode on color.
In a word, he commanded
potic ease.
his
own
pulses, as
in a published criti
manual eloquence
SIR JED
WARD MORTIMER.
165
beauty of this hand-play, shone throughout the drama, above the terror of the represen tation. The indescribable motion of both
Too tender
"
the creeping, trembling play of his pale, thin fingers over his maddening brain ; and his
when describing the assassination, may serve as examples. melancholy interest attaches to this part,
action
in
view of the
fact that
acter in which
BRUTUS.
MB. BOOTH was never
the literary fashion.
He came unheralded, and without letters. He was obliged to introduce himself to the
manager of the Richmond
occasion of his
try.
first
theatre, on
in this
the
He came
s
to
coun
Colman
"
Mountaineers,"
"
to a
moderate
house.
the
But the fire took, and the next day town was ablaze with interest in the new
an interest that scarcely flagged tragedian the following thirty years. during It was the native whim of this monarch of
to mix with tragedy, to go about incognito the people ; to play at second-rate theatres. The reward he got, beside that richest and
;
ever sure reward which the artist enjoys in the excellence of his work, was a fullness and heartiness of popular appreciation which our
actor felt
was
infinitely better
He avoided the listless approval of scholars. and fashionable audiences, with the blue blood
BRUTUS.
167
sleeping in their veins, and who go to the He turned with joy theatre for idle pastime.
to crowded audiences of the people with the red blood leaping in their arteries, who went
to the theatre to see the play,
and him in
it
and
whom
by the grandeur,
of his impersonations. If the exclusive, of nice culture, excluded himself from these im
personations, on account of the place in which they shone, or the company who enjoyed their light, then the loss was irreparably his.
The
little
"
Eagle,"
"
large as the
theatre in London in Globe which Shakespeare had a share, and in which Shakespeare played. Good society shunned
the
"
Globe."
There
is
no evidence that
Lord Bacon
"
Large-browed
Verulam,"
it.
When
Shakespeare
company played before the Queen, it was at The the palace, and not at the play-house.
was not fashionable. Neither was A few gray heads, whose "Eagle." hearts continued warm a few critical brains ;
"
Globe
"
the
168
TEE TRAGEDIAN.
a few enthusiastic youths ; and the remainder of the little cockpit was filled up by that
into
in
its
places
nutshell,
of
amusement.
Bounded
that
Hamlet became
"
king of the infinite spaces of thought ; Rich ard found ample room and verge enough for his vast ambition and there took place
"
the most intense and memorable representa tion of John Howard Payne s tragedy of Brutus, or the
Roman
Father.
rich material for his
literature.
and in
Junius
Brutus, a supposed fool, but hiding his wit through policy, hears from Sextus Tarquin
his confession of the
ravishment of Lucretia
and breaks out upon him in a speech of fiery Throwing aside the mask of indignation. folly, Brutus incites his countrymen to re venge, and to the extirpation of the Tarquins. He is clothed with civil and military power, and vanquishes the enemy. But his own
son, fighting
is
taken
Here centres the chief and closing prisoner. interest of the play, in the struggle between the duty of the magistrate, and the feelings
of the father.
In
Roman
BRUTUS.
169
triumphs, and Brutus condemns his son to The play has supernatural scenes, death. which are failures but those scenes which
;
turn on the domestic affections, display un usual power. believe the tragedy was
We
It is cer written expressly for Mr. Booth. tain that the author was an intimate and ad
Booth enters running, and is called by some other character on the scene to minister The rounded back, the to his amusement.
blank face, the restless, aimless motion of the Moved by hands, enacted folly to the life.
his evil genius, Tarquin reports for pastime to Brutus, the details of his crime, beginning
fill
wonder.
"
Brutus replies
say nothing that would
You can
make me
wonder."
Before the
his looks
"
last word he made a slight pause, grew keen, he uttered the word
w onder
r
"
During Tarquin
straightened.
son, and on
recital,
He
fire
stood,
with indignation
170
THE TRAGEDIAN.
transformed as into a strong avenging angel (Tarquin s story done), he hurled upon him
last
millions of
years."
Never
fibre
shall
we
of his frame
And
all
the
Constringed in
mass,"
Nor can we
forget
Booth
pale
and
nor the lightning of his glance, nor the unexpected, but most dramatic move
terrible face,
speech.
While
speaking he stood still, towering above his victim; but after the words "millions of
years,"
he began to stride down the stage. The power which had animated his voice was
;
and he
literally
it
occupied the
pass over
little
trans
he would
then turning abruptly, he strode up again to the other ex treme, a fearful play of look and feature, betraying meanwhile a silent, inward, grow
among
the audience
ing,
and tremendous
resolution.
BRUTUS.
171
next find him in the public square, addressing the citizens, over the body of
We
There was no elocution in this was rough in voice, half choked speech. with feeling. The manner was at the farthest remove from that of an opera singer, listening
Lucretia.
It
to
his
own
musical grief.
But
his
tones
seemed the outcry of a torn and bleeding heart, and in them a noble anger strove with and finally overmastered the softer emo
tions.
no passage in any of his, either in or out of Shake performance speare, exhibited a greater intensity of dra matic conception, or a more thorough accord
It
is
of utterance and action than did the closing The Roman costume left scene of this play.
There might be and sub movements of head and feature, now tler quivering and writhing with emotion, now To watch this fixed in immovable resolve. varied movement would have satisfied the
head, neck, and arms bare. seen swift changes of color
;
swifter
deaf.
To
listen to the
accompanying tones,
wrung thence
by the passion of the hour, would have given mental vision to the blind.
PESCARA.
SHIEL, in his play of the "Apostate," wrote the part of Pescara for Booth. Booth
responded,
Shiel: that
defective
by creating the
is,
character
its
for
he poured into
his
ugly and
mould
life.
own
abounding
To
think both parties might have been bet ter employed, Shiel in writing, Booth in de
for a more desperate example of inhuman depravity than this Pescara, could
we
lineating
we
answer,
is
let
him be
so.
The
difference of the
a capable young
man
of twenty-eight, to see
how
life,
He is full leaving God entirely out. of subtlety, and many parts of his speeches, as set forth by the unmatched art of Shake
speare, might, when viewed apart from his Pescharacter, shine in ethical discourse.
PESCARA.
cara,
173
an uninteresting
villain,
passions in turgid rhetoric ; and holding the attention only by a cruel force of will, exercised in his office
as
is
governor of Granada.
Probably, there worked through the dull
brain of the author, and out into his dark and cruel Spaniard, some dim reminiscence
of Shakespeare s Certainly, in the
"
super-subtle
Venetian."
personation
of Pescara,
spirit
Booth drew
off
some of that
which
filled his lago, adulterated it with Shiel, and offered it with great acceptance to the rank
light."
Yet the flashing and magnetic eye ; the crisp, resonant, and changeful tones ; the natural attitudes of easy power ; the lithe strength in action, always characteristic of Booth,
lent their
also,
wonted charm to this performance and made even Pescara yield a transi
tory delight. Two sets of characters figure in the play ; Moors and Christians. Pescara is one of the
Christians.
matic.
rival, is
entrance is highly dra a Moor, and his successful Hemeya, saying to Florinda
first
His
174
"
THE TRAGEDIAN.
Who now
shall part us ?
"
"I,"
action,
entrance in Richard, and something of the stealthy tread of his lago ; while the word he
uttered, gave voice in one little syllable to the whole malign personality of the char
acter.
In a
later scene,
he was accustomed to
A
in
Florinda,
But
he,
delicacy,
filled
which never
left
him, even
when most
with the inspiration of his art, in a few lowtoned words reassured her, and proceeded without a moment s pause, to possess with
his vision the
imagination
of his auditors.
sat at the centre
The calm
"
directing
mind
heart of peace."
REUBEN GLENROY.
LET
and
us touch a few other characters with
a slight pencil.
Country,"
is
In Colman
"
play,
Town
by
Reuben,
old
accompanied
Cosey,
of London.
The kind
Cosey.
I
"
beg pardon
Bringing
your
"
mind."
Reuben.
her
to
my mind ?
first
word with a
pathetic
ringing clearness, paused slightly before and and closed the sentence, in a after her,"
OCTAVIAN.
OCTAVIAN, in the Mountaineers," is a rag ged and melancholy Spaniard, of high birth and breeding, who finds his love, Floranthe, after long and wretched separation, and under
"
extraordinary circumstances.
of this discovery
was de
picted by Mr. Booth with a tender fullness of expression most winning to the popular also recall one unique gesture. heart.
We
locked the fingers of his raised hand within the fingers of Floranthe, while speak a subtle and beautiful diversion on ing,
that dangerous thing, the stage embrace. Booth rarely yielded even to the most
He
On one occasion, however, in Octavian, at the close of the play, he came towards the footlights as the curtain was descending, let
it fall
still
atmosphered by
the
character,
silently with
the
melancholy beauty
of
bowed
drew.
audience, and
BERTRAM.
CLERGYMEN
witness the
"
"
"
The old feud between of Mr. Croly. the pulpit and the stage makes it difficult for any combatant to fight, either for love, or
aline
fame, or hire,
The
didactic
presenting truth,
poles native
:
respectively at opposite
is
by temperament or mental constitution towards either one or the other method, but
never towards both.
for the
and
an author
determined
view furnish what excuse it may Reverend J. Maturin, who wrote the wretched tragedy of Bertram." The play is and that is a little worse than the Apostate," Morbid passion, adul highly unnecessary.
Let
this
"
"
tery, ress ;
murder, suicide, mark its criminal prog and it is choked by a throng of incon gruous and unnatural incidents.
as the play is, Booth descended occa his sionally to its level, and by the touch of
12
Bad
178
THE TRAGEDIAN.
and
art,
in the
enjoyment of
happily
his
consum
mate
we sometimes
is
lost sight of
the author.
Bertram
borne in on
men
In his slow recovery of consciousness, Mr. Booth took the spectator with him. One could almost feel the partial flow and quick ebb of the vital current ; and the intermit
tent thrill of
life
to his extremities.
He
soil,"
de
No dews
from Heaven
fall
on
this blighted
and
"
will not
mock
it,"
with
grace.
melancholy, undeserved,
Byronic
play
We
worthy
to illustrate
our subject.
PIERRE.
MR. BOOTH
of
"
Pierre, in
Otway
tragedy
Venice
Preserved,"
was distinguished by
one salient passage of extraordinary energy and clearness. He is urging his fellow con
spirators
to
fire
the
city
of Venice.
He
stood with his back to the audience, appeal ing with fierce eloquence to each one of his
companions
in turn.
Well do we remember
The Adriatic
in her robes of
flame."
performance of this part that we took place at the Howard Atheneum recall, After the in Boston, about the year 1847. we met a gentleman, ripe in years and play,
The
last
culture,
out his career, and who said he had never seen him exhibit more beauty or clearness of voice and gesture, than on this occasion.
The remark
"
acquires value, in view of the blown surmise," that the actor s voice, if
not his general histrionic power, had become impaired by the accident to his face.
THE STRANGER.
OF
Kotzebue
s
play, entitled
"
The Stran
gesture
ger, or Misanthropy and Repentance," only the piquant tone and this remains
:
they see
me
with
my runaway wife
upon
my
arm."
this play, so weak and so un of representation, the question natu worthy rally arises, why did not Mr. Booth enact
In considering
Timon? We suppose the managers might have answered. We can only regret that he did not add this mighty figure to his Shake spearean gallery. We can only fancy the large and hospitable style he might have lent
to the beginning of the play ; his scorn when the tide of prosperity
impetuous
is
turning,
isolated majesty of mien and voice, becoming the sullen grandeur of the closing scenes.
and the
THE TRAGEDIAN.
inclusive, if not the
IN the exercise of the most effective and most exalted of the fine arts, the art of acting, Mr. Booth s method was
"
Unremovably coupled
"
to
nature."
The
term
theatrical,"
invidiously
used,
could never be justly applied to him. Nature was the deep source of his power and she imparted her own perpetual freshness to his
;
personations.
We
tire
more than we
as the poise
of her.
and
drift
of
summer
clouds
the
;
or play of lightning ; the play of children as the sea, storm-tossed, sunlit, moonlit, or
and
his
art
awakened
emotions.
in
the
observer
corresponding
AN
INCIDENT.
GARRICK, in addition to his other gifts, was an admirable dancer. Kean danced he also
;
sang exquisitely, employing a faculty not un common with rough-speaking men. Booth
could neither dance nor sing. The single comic song with which he enlivened his per
jingle, scorning
was simply a grotesque melody, and depending for its success on odd turns of expression, verbal and vocal. We recall a true incident, show
in farce,
formance
After a splendid success in tragedy, he stood at the wing (as at other times, on going behind the scenes, we have seen him stand),
he had just personated, and listening in tently to an excellent singer, then before the audience. Unable to congratulate him at the
time,
room
singer, in
Booth entered
AN
INCIDENT.
183
the room, silently stretched himself at full took one of the length upon the sanded floor, singer
s
feet,
held
it
so a
placed it upon his own neck, few moments, then, rose and de
A DIALOGUE.
A hotel chamber, dimly lighted. Time SCENE. summer evening. Mr. Booth discovered sitting at an open window, smoking. A glazed cap, and a round
about formed a part of his dress, giving him the appear ance of a Middy Ashore." Enter Guest. Inter
"
change of
salutations
and
courtesies.
G-uest. I
ning.
saw your Sir Giles last eve How do you manage to carry the
"
"
scene so smoothly, with such weak support ? Actor. By close attention to the business
of the stage.
G-uest.
to lose yourself in
your impersonation.
Actor. Else
ter ?
G-uest.
how
And
diverse
processes
same
time?
Actor. Nothing easier
machin
ery
is
oiled.
"A
a strange
are
al]
play,
A DIALOGUE.
rogues from beginning to end
virtue, rogues in vice.
foibles of the
lines,
;
;
185
rogues for
good by making the good counterplot against the villains. Did you see how near they came
to letting Shakespeare s birthplace slip into I once the hands of a Yankee speculator ?
saw, on the 23d of April, the whole way from London to Stratford lined with flowers, in
They should
the
of
title
preserve
(Murmurs
"Vestiges
of a book then
popular).
Creation."
Actor (Catching the allusion, instantly re joins). Yes, he was the god of the histrionic art in England. Can you tell me whether
Howard Payne be
still
mot G-uest. I cannot. upon him, made by some London critics, who cut up his tragedy of Brutus. The author was indiscreet enough to retort through the
"
"
press.
"
Whereupon
The
labor
we
Mr. Booth, ever read in public ? you The Actor. Reading is emasculate acting. drama should never be so treated. (Then
186
THE TRAGEDIAN.
added, smiling) I did attempt it once. I read the ** Ancient Mariner at the Chatham
"
Street Theatre in
the read
The boys were cracking ing was a failure. nuts and calling out to each other, Hi
"
"
hi
all
Guest. I fear your audience was of similar quality to those sailors, who are said to have
bought up the
regard
to the
first
edition of the
poem, out of
disgusted
fathom the meaning. I would I had been and heard your reading, even with there,"
the
"
Hi
hi
"
Guest.
How
how
flew;
allur
The fair breeze blew, the white foam The furrow followed
free."
Guest (Listens patiently, but hears no Ancient Mariner that night. more of the
"
"
The
actor was
"
not
the vein
").
Actor.
The
me
greatly.
A DIALOGUE.
187
my
Europe. The French style, in the antiquated tragedy of Racine, is closer to nature than ours.
last visit to
even
Francaise
purity of accent).
first
By
Actor.
Come down
bit.
with
me
to
in
supper;
come, take a
stairs).
going
(on the
Guest declines, bids good-night, and sees the actor pass across the hall, and out of sight, with his natural and kingly stride.
THE TRAGEDIAN.
His knowledge and accent of the French He played tongue were simply perfect.
Orest
at
in
Racine
"
tragedy,
Andromaque,"
Frenchmen of
that city
speak of him to
this day, as
a secorxd Talma.
MEETING on one
the late Governor
Andrew, a
company
of gentlemen and ladies, the talk turned on the stage and the drama, and was varied by imitations running up into the region of
Shakespearean
criticism.
Clarke, present, related an adven ture he had with Mr. Booth in Louisville.
who was
was the germ of an excellent which has since appeared in the At paper, lantic Monthly. At the close of the inter view therein described, and which appears so
His
recital
THE TRAGEDIAN.
full
189
of histrionic, eccentric, and psychological interest, the player told the preacher that he
had
theist,
on him as a Unitarian, a monohimself being a Jew. Whether the latter statement referred to race or religion,
called
is left
little
uncertain.
Nothing can be surer, however, than that Mr. Booth s mind was deeply exercised by
religious problems
"
ings
of futurity
chance companions of his convivial hours, or even the thrilled auditor and spectator of his
matchless
little
bitual
mood.
passed into
all religions
He
with a certain
humility and humanity, and, we may add, with a certain Shakespearean impartiality.
Among
was
Hebrew
times,
child
At
other
and in sympathy with his favorite poet, Shelley, he delighted to lose himself in the
THE TRAGEDIAN.
IN recording our impressions of him, who, power of identification be the actor s su preme gift, was perhaps the greatest of all actors, we have lived over again hours of rare
if
aesthetic delight.
this happiness
We
communicated
len
Its
is
to the reader.
is
The
His voice
air.
hushed.
His eye
quenched.
"
No more
Fill its blue
im
agination of Shakespeare,
urn with
fire."
That organization,
fibrous, delicate, has
so
elastic,
firm,
dense,
dust.
become a pinch of
indestructible
hope, that,
Abysmal deeps
of
personality,"
how, when, or under what aspect, who can himself shall arise immortal and tell?
sacred
still
to
the beneficent
ministry of
beauty.
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1932
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