RICHARD.
Quite early in his histrionic career Forrest wrote to his friend Leggett, “My notions of the character of Richard the Third do not accord with those of the players I have seen personate it. They have not made him gay enough in the earlier scenes, but too sullen, frowning, and obvious a villain. He was an exulting and dashing, not a moody, villain. Success followed his schemes too rapidly and gave him too much elation to make appropriate the haggard and penthouse aspect he is usually made to wear. Contempt for mankind forms a stronger feature of his character than hatred; and he has a sort of reckless jollity, a joyous audacity, which has not been made conspicuous enough.” In general accord with this conception he afterwards elaborated his portraiture of the deformed tyrant, the savage humorist, the murderous and brilliant villain. He set aside the stereotyped idea of Richard as a strutting, ranting, gloomy plotter, forever cynical and sarcastic and parading his crimes. Not excluding these traits, Forrest subordinated them to his cunning hypocrisy, his gleaming intellectuality, his jocose irony, his exulting self-complacence and fiendish sportiveness. He represented him not only as ravenously ambitious, but also full of a subtle pride and vanity which delighted him with the constant display of his mental superiority to those about him. Above all he was shown to be possessed of a laughing devil, a witty and sardonic genius, which amused itself with playing on the faculties of the weaklings he wheedled, scoffing at what they thought holy, and bluntly utilizing the most sacred things for the most selfish ends. There can be no doubt that in removing the conventional stage Richard with this more dashing and versatile one Forrest restored the genuine conception of Shakspeare, who has painted him as rattling not brooding, exuberantly complacent even under his own dispraises, an endlessly inventive and triumphant hypocrite, master of a gorgeous eloquence whose splendid phrases adorn the ugliness of his schemes almost out of sight. His mental nature devours his moral nature, and, swallowing remorse, leaves him free to be gay. The character thus portrayed was hard, cruel, deceitful, mocking,—less melodramatically fiendish and electrical than the Richard of Kean, but more true to nature. The picture was a consistent one. The deformity of the man, reacting on his matchless intellect and courage and sensual passion, had made him a bitter cynic. But his genius was too rich to stagnate into an envenomed gloom of misanthropy. Its exuberance broke out in aspiring schemes and crimes gilded with philosophy, hypocrisy, laughter, and irony. Moving alone in a murky atmosphere of sin and sensuality, he knew himself to the bottom of his soul, and read everybody else through and through. He believed in no one, and scoffed at truth, because he was himself without conscience. But his insight and his solid understanding and glittering wit, making of everything a foil to display his self-satisfied powers, hid the degradation of his wickedness from his own eyes, and sometimes almost excused it in the eyes of others. Yet, so wondrous was the moral genius of Shakspeare, the devilish chuckling with which he hugged the notion of his own superiority in his exemption from the standards that rule other men, instead of infecting, shocked and warned and repelled the auditor:
H B Hall & Sons
EDWIN FORREST AS
RICHARD III.
“Come, this conscience is a convenient scarecrow;
It guards the fruit which priests and wise men taste,
Who never set it up to fright themselves.”
Thus in the impersonation of him by Forrest Richard lost his perpetual scowl, and took on here and there touches of humor and grim comedy. He burst upon the stage, cloaked and capped, waving his glove in triumph over the downfall of the house of Lancaster. Not in frowning gutturals or with snarling complaint but merrily came the opening words,—
“Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York.”
Gradually as he came to descant upon his own defects and unsuitedness for peace and love, the tone passed from glee to sarcasm, and ended with dissembling and vindictive earnestness in the apostrophe,—
“Dive, thoughts, down to my soul. Here Clarence comes.”
The scene with Lady Anne, where he overcomes every conceivable kind and degree of obstacles to her favor by the sheer fascination of his gifted tongue, was a masterpiece of nature and art. He gave his pleading just enough semblance of sincerity to make a plausible pathway to the feminine heart, but not enough to hide the sinister charm of a consummate hypocrisy availing itself of every secret of persuasion. It was a fearful unmasking of the weakness of ordinary woman under the siege of passion. No sermon was ever preached in any pulpit one-half so terrible in power for those prepared to appreciate all that it meant. When Lady Anne withdrew, the delighted vanity of Richard, the self-pampering exultation of the artist in dissimulation, shone out in the soliloquy wherewith he applauded and caressed himself:
“Was ever woman in this humor wooed?
Was ever woman in this humor won?
I’ll have her,—but I will not keep her long
To take her in her heart’s extremest hate,
With curses in her mouth, tears in her eyes,
The bleeding witness of my hatred by;
Having heaven, her conscience, and these bars against me!
And I no friends to back my suit withal,
But the plain devil, and dissembling looks!
And yet to win her,—all the world to nothing!”
In many places in the play his air of searching and sarcastic incredulity, and his rich vindictive chuckle of self-applause, were as artistically fine as they were morally repulsive. As Kean had done before him, he made an effective point in speaking the line,
“To shrink my arm up like a withered shrub:”
he looked at the limb for some time with a sort of bitter discontent, and struck it back with angry disgust. When the queenly women widowed by his murderous intervention began to upbraid him with his monstrous deeds, the cool audacity, the immense aplomb, the half-hidden enjoyment of the joke, with which he relieved himself from the situation by calling out,—
“A flourish, trumpets! strike alarums, drums!
Let not the heavens hear these tell-tale women
Rail on the Lord’s Anointed!”—
were a bit of grotesque satire, a gigantic and serviceable absurdity, worthy of Rabelais.
The acting of Forrest in the tent-scene, where Richard in his broken sleep dreams he sees the successive victims of his murderous hand approach and threaten him, was original and effective in the highest degree. He struggled on his couch with horrible phantoms. Ghosts pursued him. Visions of battle, overthrow, despair, and death convulsed him. Acting his dreams out he dealt his blows around with frightful and aimless energy, and with an intense expression of remorse and vengeance on his face fell apparently cloven to the earth. He then arose like a man coming out of hell, dragging his dream with him, and, struggling fiercely to awake, rushed to the footlights, sank on his knee, and spoke these words, beginning with a shriek and softening down to a shuddering whisper:
“Give me another horse! Bind up my wounds!
Have mercy, Jesu! Soft; I did but dream.
O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me!
The lights burn blue. It is now dead midnight.
Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh.”
The merely selfish individual instincts and passions of unregenerate human nature are kept from breaking out into the crimes which they would spontaneously commit, by an ethical regulation which consists of a set of ideal sympathies representing the rights and feelings of other men, representing the word of God or the collective principles of universal order. The criminal type of character embodied in Richard throws off or suppresses this restraining and retributive apparatus, and enthrones a lawless egotism masked in hypocrisy. Thus, Richard had so obscured, clogged, and deadened the moral action of conscience, that his egotistic passions held rampant supremacy, and success made him gay and exultant, unchecked by any touch of remorse or shame. In his own eyes he clothed himself in the glimmering mail of his triumphant deeds of wickedness, and dilated with pride like Lucifer in hell. He could not weep nor tremble, but he could shake with horrid laughter. In drawing this terrible outline Shakspeare showed that he knew what was in man. In painting the audacious picture Forrest proved himself a profound artist. And the moral for the spectators was complete when the hardened intellectual monster of depravity, in the culmination of the secret forces of destiny and his own organism, was stripped of his self-sufficiency, and, as the supernatural world broke on his vision, he stood aghast, with curdled blood and stiffened hair, shrieking with terror and despair.
Forrest was too large, with too much ingrained justice and heavy grandeur, to be really suited for this part. He needed, especially in its scolding contests of wit and spiteful invective, to be smaller, lighter, swifter, more vixenish. It was just the character for Kean and Booth, who in their way were unapproachable in it. Yet the conception of Forrest was far truer on the whole; and his performance was full of sterling merit.