OTHELLO.
There was no character in which Forrest appeared more frequently or with more effect on those who saw him than in that of Othello. He was pre-eminently suited to the part by his own nature and experience, as well as by unwearied observation and study. The play turns on the most vital and popular of all the passions, love, and its revulsion into the most cruel and terrible one, jealousy. He devoted incredible pains to the perfecting of his representation of it; and undoubtedly it was, on the whole, the most true and powerful of all his performances, though in single particulars some others equalled and his Lear surpassed it. Unprejudiced and competent judges agreed that he portrayed Othello in the great phases of his character,—as a man dignified, clear, generous, and calm,—as a man ecstatically happy in an all-absorbing love,—as a man slowly wrought up through the successive degrees of jealousy,—as a man actually converted into a maniac by the frightful conflict and agony of his soul,—and, finally, as a man who in the frenzy of despair closes the scene with murder and suicide;—that he acted all this with an intensity, an accuracy, a varied naturalness and sweeping power very rarely paralleled in the history of the stage. The reason why the portraiture received so much censorious criticism amidst the abundant admiration it excited was because the scale and fervor of the passions bodied forth in it were so much beyond the experience of average natures. They were not exaggerated or false, but seemed so to the cold or petty souls who knew nothing of the lava-floods of bliss and avalanches of woe that ravage the sensibilities of the impassioned souls that find complete fulfilment and lose it. It is a most significant and interesting fact that when the matchless Salvini played Othello in the principal American cities to such enthusiastic applause, his conception and performance of the part were so identical with those of Forrest, and he himself so closely resembled his deceased compeer, that hundreds of witnesses in different portions of the country spontaneously exclaimed that it seemed as if Forrest had risen from the dead and reappeared in his favorite rôle. The old obstinate prejudices did not interfere; and although Salvini made the passion more raw and the force more shuddering and carried the climax one degree farther than the American tragedian had done, actually sinking the human maniac in the infuriated tiger, he was greeted with wondering acclaim. If his portraiture of the Moor was a true one,—as it unquestionably was,—then that of Forrest was equally true and better moderated.
G R Hall
EDWIN FORREST AS
OTHELLO.
In the first speech of Othello, referring to the purpose of Brabantio to injure him with the Duke, Forrest won all hearts by the impression he gave of the noble self-possession of a free and generous nature full of honest affection and manly potency. He alluded to Brabantio without any touch of anger or scorn, to himself with an air of quiet pride bottomed on conscious worth and not on any vanity or egotism, and to Desdemona with a softened tone of effusive warmth which betrayed the precious freight and direction of his heart:
“Let him do his spite;
My services, which I have done the seignory,
Shall out-tongue his complaints. My demerits
May speak, unbonneted, to as proud a fortune
As this that I have reached. For know, Iago,
But that I love the gentle Desdemona,
I would not my unhoused, free condition
Put into circumscription and confine
For the sea’s worth.”
The easy frankness of his look and the rich flowing elocution of his delivery of these words indicated a nature so ingenuous and honorable that already the sympathies of every man and woman before him were won to the Moor. This impression was continued and enhanced when, in response to the abusive epithet of Brabantio and the threats of his armed followers, he said, in a tone of unruffled self-command, touched with a humorous playfulness and with a deprecating respect,—
“Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them.—
Good seignior, you shall more command with years,
Than with your weapons.”
There was an exquisite moral beauty in the whole attitude and carriage which Forrest gave Othello in the scene in the council-chamber, where he replied to the accusations of using spells and medicines to draw Desdemona to his arms. There was a combination of modest assurance and picturesque dignity in his bearing, and a simple eloquence in his pronouncing of the narrative of all his wooing, so artistic in its seeming artlessness, so full of breathing honesty straight from the heart of nature, that not a word could be doubted, nor could any hearer resist the conviction expressed by the Duke,—
“I think this tale would win my daughter too,
Good Brabantio.”
To the bewitching power of simple sincerity and glowing truth he put into this marvellous speech hundreds of testimonies were given like that of the refined and lovely young lady who was heard saying to her companion, “If that is the way Moors look and talk and love, give me a Moor for my husband.”
When Desdemona entered, while she stayed, as she spoke, as she departed, all the action of Othello towards her, his motions, looks, words, inflections, clearly betokened the nature and supremacy of his affection for her. Through the high and pure character of these signals it was made obvious that his love was an entrancing possession; not an animal love bred in the senses alone, but a love born in the soul and flooding the senses with its divineness. On the keen fires of his high-blooded organism and the poetic enchantments of his ardent imagination the exquisite sweetness of this surrendered and gentle Desdemona played a delicious intoxication, and the enthrallment of his passion made the very movement of existence a rapture. Everything else faded before the happiness he felt. Life was too short, the earth too dull, the stars too dim, for the blissful height of his consciousness. In contrast with this enchanted possession, day, night, joy, laughter, air, sea, the thrilling notes of war, victory, fame, and power, were but passing illusions. The voice of duty could rouse him from his dream, but the moment his task was done he sank again into its ecstatic depths. All this still saturation of delight and fulness of expanded being the Othello of Forrest revealed by his acting and speech on meeting Desdemona in Cyprus after their separation by his sudden departure to the wars. As, all eager loveliness, she came in sight, exclaiming, “My dear Othello!” the sudden brightness of his eyes, the rapturous smile that clothed his face, his parted lips, his heaving breast and outstretched arms, were so significant that they worked on the spectators like an incantation. And when he drew her passionately to his bosom, kissed her on the forehead and lips, and gazed into her face with unfathomable fondness, it was a picture not to be surpassed of the exquisite doting of the new-made husband while the honeymoon yet hung over them full-orbed in the silent and dewy heaven, its inundation undimmed by the breath of custom. Then he spoke:
“O, my soul’s joy!
If after every tempest come such calms,
May the winds blow till they have wakened death;
And let the laboring bark climb hills of seas
Olympus-high, and duck again as low
As hell’s from heaven! If it were now to die,
’Twere now to be most happy; for, I fear,
My soul hath her content so absolute,
That not another comfort like to this
Succeeds in unknown fate.”
The last lines he uttered with a restrained, prolonged, murmuring music, a tremulous mellowness, as if the burden of emotion broke the vocal breath into quivers. It suggested a tenderness whose very excess made it timid and mystic with a pathetic presentiment of its own evanescence. The yearning, aching deliciousness of love filled his breast so more than full that even while he seemed to strive to hold back all verbal expression for fear of losing the emotional substance, it broke forth itself with melodious softness in the syllabled beats of the lingering words:
“I cannot speak enough of this content:
It stops me here: it is too much of joy.
Come, let us to the castle. O, my sweet,
I prattle out of fashion, and I dote
In mine own comforts.”
In the scene of the drunken brawl in Cyprus most actors had made Othello rush in with drawn sword, crying, with extravagant pose and emphasis, “Hold, for your lives!” Forrest entered without sword, in haste, his night-mantle thrown over his shoulders as if just from his bed. He went through the scene, rebuking the brawlers and restoring order, with an admirable moderation combined with commanding moral authority. Only once, when answer to his inquiry was delayed, his volcanic heat burst out. He spoke rapidly, with surprise rather than anger, and bore down all with a personal weight that had neither pomp nor offence, yet was not to be resisted. Throughout the first and second acts Forrest played Othello as a man of beautiful human nature, noble in honor, rich in affection, gentle in manners, though, when justly roused, capable of a terrific headlong wrath:
“Now, by Heaven,
My blood begins my safer guides to rule;
And passion, having my best judgment collied,
Assays to lead the way. If I once stir
Or do but lift this arm, the best of you
Shall sink in my rebuke.”
In the third act the diabolical malignity and cunning of Iago begin to take effect, more and more insinuating poisonous suspicions and doubts into the naturally open and truthful mind of Othello. The process and advancement of the horrid struggle found in Forrest a man and an artist to whose experience of human nature and life no item in the whole dread catalogue of the courses, symptoms, and consequences of love encroached on and subdued by jealousy was foreign, and whose skill in expression was abundantly able to set every feature of the tragedy in distinct relief. As now the guileless Desdemona shone on him, and anon the devilish Iago distilled his venom, he was torn between his loving confidence in his wife and his confiding trust in his tempter:
“As if two hearts did in one body reign
And urge conflicting streams from vein to vein.”
When he saw or thought of her a blessed reassurance tranquillized him; when he heeded the hideous suggestions of his treacherous servant a frozen shudder ran through him. The waves of tenderness and violence chased one another over the mimic scene. At one moment he said,—
“If she be false, O, then heaven mocks itself.
I’ll not believe it.”
At another moment he writhed in excruciating anguish under the fearful innuendoes which Iago wound about him. The spectacle was like that of an anaconda winding her tightening coils around a tiger until one can hear the cracking of the bones in his lordly back.
When the fiendish suggestions of Iago first took thorough effect the result startled even him, and he gazed on the awful convulsions in the face of his victim as one might look into the crater of Vesuvius. That which had seemed granite proved to be gunpowder. As with the prairie fire: the traveller lets a spark fall, and the whole earth seems to be one rushing flame. Then swiftly followed those lacerating alternations of contradictory excitements which are the essence of jealousy,—the mixture of intense opposites into an experience of infernal discord. His love lingers on her and gloats over her, and will not believe any evil of her. His suspicion makes him shrink into himself with horror:
“O curse of marriage,
That we can call these delicate creatures ours,
And not their appetites.”
Now he seeks relief in loathing and hating her, trying to tear her dear image out from among his heart-strings. From the crazing agony of this effort he springs wildly into wrath against her traducer. Forrest expressed these sudden and violent transitions from extreme to extreme with exact truth to nature, by that constant interchanging of intense muscles and languid eyes with intense eyes and languid muscles which corresponds with the successive apprehension of a blessing to be embraced and an evil to be abhorred. The change in his appearance and moving too was commensurate with what he had undergone. As he advanced to meet his wife on her arrival in Cyprus, he walked like one inspired, weightless and illumined with joy:
“Treading on air each step the soul displays,
The looks all lighten and the limbs all blaze.”
But after the dreadful doubt had ruined his peace, he grew so pale and haggard, wore so startled and dismal a look, was so self-absorbed in misery, that he appeared an incarnate comment on the descriptive words,—
“Look where he comes! Not poppy nor mandragora,
Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world,
Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep
Which thou ow’dst yesterday.”
There was an imaginative vastness and unity in the soul of Othello which aggrandized his experiences and allowed him to do nothing by halves. Forrest so perceived and exemplified this as to make his performance come before the audience as a new revelation to them of the colossal and blazing extremes, the entrancing, maddening, and fatal extremes, to which human passions can mount. His love, his conflict with doubt, his melancholy, his wrath, his hate, his revenge, his remorse, his despair, each in turn absorbingly possesses him and floods the earth with heaven or hell.
The unrivalled speech of lamentation over his lost happiness he gave not, as many a famous actor has, partly in a tone of complaining vexation and partly with a noisy pomp of declamation. He began with an exquisite quality of tearful regret and sorrow which was a breathing requiem over the ruins of his past delights. The mournfulness of it was so sweet and chill that it seemed perfumed with the roses and moss growing over the tomb of all his love.
“I had been happy if the general camp,
Pioneers and all, had tasted her sweet body,
So I had nothing known.”
Then the voice, still low and plaintive, swelled and quivered with the glorious words that followed:
“O, now, forever,
Farewell the tranquil mind! farewell content!
Farewell the plumed troop, and the big wars,
That make ambition virtue! O, farewell!”
And as he ended with the line,
“Farewell! Othello’s occupation’s gone!”
his form and limbs drooping, his lips sunken and tremulous, his very life seemed going out with each word, as if everything had been taken from him and he was all gone. Suddenly, with one electrifying bound, he leaped the whole gamut from mortal exhaustion to gigantic rage, his eyeballs rolling and flashing and his muscles strung, seized the cowering Iago by the throat, and, with a startling transition of voice from mellow and mournfully lingering notes to crackling thunderbolts of articulation, shrieked,—
“If thou dost slander her, and torture me,
Never pray more; abandon all remorse;
On horror’s head horrors accumulate;
Do deeds to make heaven weep, all earth amazed;—
For nothing canst thou to damnation add
Greater than that.”
The wild inspiration subsided as swiftly as it had risen, and left him gazing in blank amazement at what he had done. Again his struggling emotions were carried to a kindred climax when Iago told him the pretended dream of Cassio. He uttered the sentence, “I will tear her all to pieces,” in a manner whose force of pathos surprised every heart. His revenge began furiously, “I will tear her”—when his love came over it, and he suddenly ended with pitying softness—“all to pieces.” It was as if an avalanche, sweeping along earth and rocks and trees, were met by a breath which turned it into a feather. In the next act he gave an instance just the reverse of this: first he says, with doting fondness, “O, the world hath not a sweeter creature;” then, the imaginative associations changing the picture, he screams ferociously, “I will chop her into messes!”
Thence onward Othello was painted in a more and more piteous plight. The great soul was conquered by the remorseless intellect of Iago, leagued with its own weakness and excess. He grew less massive and more petulant. He stooped to spies and plots, and compassed the assassination of Cassio. His misery sapped his mind and toppled down his chivalrous sentiments until he could unpack his sore and wretched heart in abusive words and treat Desdemona with unrelenting cruelty.
Finally his tossing convulsions passed away, and a fixed resolution to kill the woman who had been false to him settled down in gloomy calmness. The curtain rose and showed him seated at an open window looking out on the night sky. Desdemona was asleep in her bed. He sighed heavily, and in slow tones, loaded with thoughtful and resigned melancholy, soliloquized,—
“It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul,—
Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars!—
It is the cause. Yet I’ll not shed her blood,
Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow,
And smooth as monumental alabaster.
Yet she must die, else she’ll betray more men.
Put out the light, and then put out the light.
If I quench thee, thou flaming minister,
I can again thy former light restore,
Should I repent me. But once put out thy light,
Thou cunning’st pattern of excelling nature,
I know not where is that Promethean heat
That can thy light relume.”
He permitted the audience to see the vast dimension and intensity of his love, doubt, agony, sorrow, despair, vengeance,—and the revelation was appalling in its solemnity. Henceforth even his invective was moderated and quiet. He seemed to fancy himself not so much revenging his personal wrong as vindicating himself and executing justice. He did not make a horror of the killing, as Kean did. He drew the curtains apart,—a slight struggle,—a choking murmur,—and as Emilia knocked at the door, and he turned, with the pillow in his hand, his listening attitude and his bronze face and glistening eyes formed a dramatic picture not to be forgotten. Then came the final revulsion of his agonizing sorrow:
“O, insupportable! O, heavy hour!
Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse
Of sun and moon; and that the affrighted globe
Should yawn at alteration.”
His deadly distress and paralyzing bewilderment now illustrated what he had before said, that he loved her so with the entirety of his being that the loss of her, even in thought, brought back chaos:
“Had she been true,
If heaven would make me such another world
Of one entire and perfect chrysolite,
I’d not have sold her for it.”
When Emilia revealed the plot by which he had been deceived, and convinced him of the innocence of his wife, an absolute desolation and horror of remorse, as if a thunderbolt had burst within his brain, smote him to the floor. Staggering to the fatal couch, his gaze was riveted on the marble face there, and a broken heart and a distracted conscience moaned and sobbed in the syllables,—
“Now, how dost thou look now? O, ill-starred wench!
Pale as thy smock! when we shall meet at compt,
This look of thine will hurl my soul from heaven,
And fiends will snatch at it. Cold, cold, my girl?
Even like thy chastity.
O, cursed, cursed slave! Whip me, ye devils,
From the possession of this heavenly sight!
Blow’ me about in winds! roast me in sulphur!
Wash me in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire!
O Desdemona! Desdemona! dead?”
The strain had been too great to be borne, and he was himself nearly dead. He wore the aspect of one who felt that to live was calamity, and to die the sole happiness left. Collecting himself, he spoke the calm words of appeal that justice might be done to his memory, nothing extenuated nor aught set down in malice. He turned towards the breathless form, once so dear, with a look of tenderness slowly dissolving and freezing into despair. Then, with one stroke of his dagger, he fell dead without a groan or a shudder.
“This did I fear, but thought he had no weapon;
For he was great of heart.”
Some actors have made Othello feared and disliked; others have caused him to be regarded with moral curiosity or poetic interest. As Forrest impersonated him he was first warmly admired, then profoundly pitied. Of the tragedians most celebrated in the past, according to the best descriptions which have been given of their representations, it may be said that the Othello of Quin was a jealous plebeian; the Othello of Kean, in parts a jealous king, in parts a jealous savage; the Othello of Vandenhoff, a jealous general; the Othello of Macready, a jealous theatrical player; the Othello of Brooke, a jealous knight; the Othello of Salvini, a jealous lover transformed into a jealous tiger; but the Othello of Forrest was a jealous man carried truthfully through all the degrees of his passion. One of his predecessors in the rôle had veiled the woes of the man beneath the dignities of his rank and station as a martial commander; another had theatricized the part, with wondrous study and toil, elaborating posture, look, and emphasis, presenting a correctness of drawing which might secure admiring criticism but could never move feeling; yet another, fascinated with the romantic accessories and vicissitudes of the character, made a gorgeous picture of a gorgeous hero in a gorgeous time. Forrest analyzed away from his Othello all adventitious circumstances; took him from the picturesque scenes of Venice, stripped off his official robes, and placed him on the stage in the glories and tortures of his naked humanity, a living mirror to every one of the struggles of a master-passion tearing a great heart asunder, driving a powerful mind into the awful abyss of insanity, making a generous man a coward, an eavesdropper, a murderer, and a suicide.
The explicit contents and teaching of the part as Shakspeare wrote it and as Forrest acted it are the unspeakable privilege and preciousness of a supreme human love crowned with fulfilment, and the fearful nature and results of an ill-grounded jealousy. The deeper implicit meaning and lesson it bears is the animal degradation, the frightful ugliness and danger, the intrinsically immoral and murderous character of the passion of jealousy. This all-important revelation latent in the tragedy of Othello has not been illumined, emphasized, or brought into relief on the stage as yet. It ought to be done. The historical traditions of tyrannical selfishness, almost universally organized in the interests of the world, which make men feel that in sexual love the lover possesses the object of his love as an appanage and personal property, all whose free wishes are merged in his will and whose disloyalty is justly visited with merciless cruelty and even death itself, have blinded most persons to the inherent unworthiness and vulgarity, the inherent ferocity and peril, of the passion of jealousy. It is common among brutes, and belongs to the brutish stage in man. It cannot be imagined in heaven among the cherubim and seraphim. Freedom, the self-possession of each one in equilibrium with all others and in harmony with universal order, belongs to the divine stage of developed humanity. There can be no certainty against madness, crime, and self-immolation so long as an automatic passion in the lower regions of the organism enslaves the royal reason meant to reign by right from God. Happen what may, self-poise and the steady aim at progress towards perfection should be kept. This cannot be when love is degraded to physical pleasure sought as an end, instead of being consecrated to the fruitful purposes for which it was ordained. The only absolute pledge of blessedness and peace between those who love and would hope to love always is an adjustment of conduct based not on mere feeling, whether low or high, but on feeling as itself subdued and disciplined by reason, justice, and truth, first developed in the thinking mind and constituted as it were into the science of the subject, then appropriated by the sentiments and made habitual in the individual character. What details of conduct will result, what innovations on the present social state will be made, when a scientific morality shall have mastered the subject and formulated its principles into practical rules, it is premature to say. But it is certain that the leading of one life in the light and another one in the dark will be forbidden. It is certain that the discords, the diseases, the distresses, the crimes, which are now so profuse in this region of experience will be no longer tolerated. And it is safe to prophesy that such delirious expressions of hate and revenge as have hitherto usually been thought tragic and terrible will come to be thought bombastic and ludicrous:
“O that the slave had forty thousand lives;
One is too poor, too weak for my revenge!
Now do I see ’tis true. Look here, Iago;
All my fond love thus do I blow to heaven. ’Tis gone.—
Arise, black vengeance, from thy hollow cell!
Yield up, O love, thy crown, and hearted throne,
To tyrannous hate! swell, bosom, with thy fraught;
For ’tis of aspics’ tongues! O blood, blood, blood!”
Othello, like most of the characters of Shakspeare, illustrates the historic actual, not the prophetic ideal. The present state of society is so ill adjusted, so full of painful evils, that things cannot always remain as temporary and local habits and mere empirical authority have seemingly settled them. To think they can is the sure mark of a narrow mind, a petty character, and a selfish heart. Nothing is more certain than continuous change. Nothing is, therefore, more characteristic of the genuine thinker than his ability to contemplate other modes of thought, other varieties of sentiment, than those to which he was bred. With the progress of social evolution the hitherto prevalent ideas of love and jealousy may undergo changes amounting in some instances, perhaps, to a reversal. Meanwhile, those who are not prepared to adopt any new opinions in detail should, with hospitable readiness impartially to investigate, consider within themselves which is better, an imperial delicacy and magnanimity in those who love causing them to refuse to know anything that occurs in absence so long as each preserves self-respecting personal fidelity to the ideal of progressive perfection? or, as at present, spiritual mutilation and misery, treacherous concealment, espionage, detection, disgrace, frenzy, and death?
One thing at all events is sure, namely, that of him alone whose love for God, or the universal in himself and others, is superior to his love for the individual, or the egotistic in himself and others, can it ever be safely said, as it was once so mistakenly said of the unhappy Moor,—
“This is a man
Whom passion cannot shake; whose solid virtue
The shock of accident nor dart of chance
Can neither graze nor pierce.”