The rise of Irving from comedy and melodrama to Shakespearean drama is attentively and sympathetically followed. His performance in the "nightmare play" of The Bells is pronounced to be a triumph of merit; the sense of relief experienced on the fall of the curtain was in itself the highest praise. The programme at the Lyceum ended with Pickwick, with Irving as Jingle. Punch regarded it as an incongruity: he preferred to see Irving play The Bells without the Jingle. There was nothing wrong with Charles I but the play. "His make-up was admirable, his playing of the first and the last Act well-nigh faultless; but between these two Acts the actor was left to make the best bricks possible out of the scantiest wisps of straw.... I have no hesitation in saying that the last Act is as affecting a spectacle as anything I have ever seen on the stage." With Irving's Richelieu, in 1873, Punch was disappointed, though allowing him some pathetic moments. But Irving, it is suggested, may have been the victim of the bad traditions attaching to what was after all a pretentious and "wind-baggy" play. Irving's Hamlet was another matter altogether, and is treated very seriously and exhaustively by Punch. It was a "genuine and well-deserved success." No such strong and general sensation had been produced since Fechter, over whom Irving had the great advantage of speaking as a native the tongue in which Shakespeare wrote. No impersonation with which Punch was familiar, including that of Macready, displayed a more consistent conception, more sustained intention, more intelligent mastery of this many-sided character. This much granted, Punch severely criticized Irving's cavalier treatment of the text, his suppressions and omissions, his handling of all the scenes with the Ghost. The psychological interpretation of Hamlet's madness erred through over-emphasis on his pathetic and gentle side. The unsound strain was kept too much in the background, and consistency was attained at the expense of the text. Sundry scenic innovations are also condemned, and altogether high praise is tempered with a good deal of acute and legitimate criticism. On the vexed question of Hamlet's madness Punch writes intelligently, but without the wit which inspired the immortal couplet in Gilbert's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern:—
Hamlet is idiotically sane,
With lucid intervals of lunacy.
There are some good lines, however, in the issue of December 12, 1874, on "Hamlet's Right Hair," whether flaxen or raven. After all, as Punch argues, it is not a question of the thatch of Hamlet's upper storey:
... It is a brain
Fitting the part, that's asked to play the Dane.
Turning from serious drama to melodrama and comedy high and otherwise, we find a liberal acknowledgment of the excitement furnished by the Colleen Bawn, Boucicault's bedevilled version of Gerald Griffin's fine novel The Collegians, when it was produced towards the close of 1860. The plot is fully set forth, and "Jack Easel" confesses that he enjoyed the evening very much. "Whatever may be the opinion of the learned regarding Mr. Boucicault as a dramatist, there can be little doubt of his merits 'on the boards.' I can hardly imagine a better stage Irishman." But Punch, who had no mercy for Boucicault's resentment of criticism, in March, 1862, printed a mock notice signed "Dion Boucicault," threatening condign punishment on all who disparaged his genius or dared to leave the theatre before the curtain fell and D.B. appeared before the same. And a month later we read a mock trial of an unfortunate pittite who had ventured to make some unfavourable comments on the Cave scene. The production of the melodrama founded on Charles Reade's Never Too Late to Mend, in 1865, met with Punch's approval. Some of the audience hissed the prison scenes: yet Menken had been tolerated. This was the famous and notorious Adah Isaacs Menken, a native of
"The Menken"
Louisiana; dancer, actress, school teacher, journalist and poetess, married first of all to a Jew, whose faith she adopted, and then to the "Benicia Boy," Heenan, the prize-fighter. After a chequered career on and off the stage in America she appeared at Astley's in Mazeppa in 1864, when Punch made reference to her as "a bare-backed jade on bare-backed steed." It was certainly a succès de scandale, but "the Menken" made a stir in the literary world and found patrons and friends in Charles Reade, Charles Dickens (to whom her volume of poems, Infelicia, was dedicated), and Swinburne. In Paris, to which city she migrated, and where she died in 1869, she enjoyed the friendship of Dumas and Théophile Gautier. "The Menken" was not intended for a placid domestic life; she would not have been in her element at a Mothers' Meeting; but she was a highly educated woman, had studied Latin and Greek, had played Lady Macbeth, and, though not a Sappho, was a much better poetess than Ella Wheeler Wilcox.