DOWTON IN THE HYPOCRITE
| The Times.] | [September 19, 1817. |
Drury Lane Theatre.
The excellent comedy of The Hypocrite was acted here last night. Dowton’s Dr. Cantwell, is a very admirable and edifying performance. The divine and human affections are ‘very craftily qualified’ in his composition, which is a mixture of the Methodist parson ingrafted on the old French pietist, and accomplished Abbé. The courtly air of Moliere’s Tartuffe has been considerably lowered down and vulgarised to fit the character to the grossness of modern times and circumstances: only the general features of the character, and the prominent incidents of the story, have been retained by the English translator, and they seem to require the long speeches, the oratorical sentiments, and laboured casuistry of the original author to render them probable or even credible. It has been remarked, that the wonderful success of this piece on the French stage is a lasting monument of the stress laid by that talking and credulous nation on all verbal professions of virtue and sincerity, and of the little difference they make between words and things. With all the pains that have been taken to bring it within the verge of verisimilitude by the aid of popular allusions and religious prejudices, it with difficulty naturalizes on our own stage, and remains at last an incongruous, though a very striking and instructive caricature. Dowton’s jovial and hearty characters are his best; his demure and hypocritical ones are only his second best. His Dr. Cantwell is not so good as his Major Sturgeon, or his Sir Anthony Absolute, but still it is very good. Their excellence consists in giving way to the ebullition of his feelings of social earnestness, or vainglorious ostentation; the excellence of this in the systematic concealment of his inmost thoughts and purposes. Cantwell sighs out his soul with the melancholy formality of a piece of clockwork, and exhibits the encroachments of amorous importunity under a mask of still life. The locks of his hair are combed with appropriate sleekness and unpretending humility over his forehead and shoulders: his face looks godly and greasy; his person and mind are well fortified in a decent suit of plain broad cloth, and the calves of his legs look stout and saint-like in stockings of dark pepper-and-salt fleecy hosiery. Bitter smiles contend with falling tears; the whining tones of the conventicle with the insolence of success, and the triumph of his unbridled rage in the last act over his phlegmatic hypocrisy is complete. He was admirably supported by Mrs. Sparks, as old Lady Lambert, and by Oxberry as Mawworm. This last character is as loose and dangling as the sails of a windmill, and is puffed up and set in motion by one continuous blast of folly and fanaticism. The other characters in the piece were less happily supported.