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No bad motto for Desdemona, which awaited us; though truly the Moor’s was a fearful return for such devoted love.
Before I go to the performance itself, let me make a few general remarks.
It is a constantly contested point in Germany, whether Shakspeare should be given in a literal translation, in a free one, or in a still freer paraphrase. I decide for the second; premising that the liberty should be restricted to this,—unfettered scope in the spirit of the German tongue,—even though a play of wit or words should occasionally be lost by the means. But to alter in any considerable degree the course of the play; to omit scenes; to give to Shakspeare words and ideas perfectly foreign to him,—can only deform and mutilate him, even when done by the greatest poet. People say Shakspeare is better to read than to see, and cannot be performed in a literal translation without carrying us back to the infancy of the scenic art; since, as they maintain, theatrical representations in Shakspeare’s time were no more than stories in dialogue, with some attempt at costume. I will not go into the question of the accuracy of this assertion; but thus much I know,—that the representation of Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Hamlet, and Othello, on the English stage,—all which pieces are given with slight omissions, and in which things generally supposed the most shocking to taste and probability, even the obligato king’s trumpeters, are not wanting,—nevertheless leave a feeling of such full and untroubled satisfaction on my mind, as reading or hearing read (even by Tieck, the best reader I know of,) never had the power to produce in the most distant degree;—nay, still more, I confess that it is only since I have see them here, that I have been sensible of all Shakspeare’s gigantic proportions in their full amplitude. It is true, that to produce this, a degree of concert on the part of all the actors and an excellence in those who support the chief characters are necessary, which are wholly wanting in Germany;—for Macbeths in Berlin, (as Clauren would say,) and Macbeths in London, are as different sort of people as Shaskpeare himself and his excellent commentator Franz Horn. The first actors here, such as Kean, Kemble, Young, &c., are, as I have elsewhere remarked, men of great cultivation, who have seen the best society, and devoted their lives to the earnest study of their great national poet. They seldom act any other characters than his, and do not mix up a tragic hero with one of Iffland’s Geheimenräthe (privy councillors,) nor Talbot with Herr von Langsalm, nor appear to-day in Othello, and to-morrow in Wollmarkt.
It strikes one as very singular, that in appearance, and to a great extent in reality, the public before whom these distinguished artists have to present themselves is so rude, ignorant and unmannerly. Yet perhaps this very thing may produce a good effect on them. As the truly virtuous love virtue, so must an English actor love his art,—for its own sake alone,—and trouble himself little about his reception: in the end, he is thus most sure to obtain universal applause. And indeed I must confess that, spite of all this roughness, there is a portion of English audiences which has at bottom sounder taste and sense than the feeble, hyper-refined people of our German metropolitan towns; nay, even among the vulgar crowd there is an invisible church of the initiated, whose existence never suffers the sacred fire in the breast of the actors to be wholly extinguished; it is not very busy in public criticism, but has a mighty effect in society.
Many Germans don’t like to be told that other nations excel us in any thing: and truly I perceive the fact with great regret: but that must not prevent my speaking out my conviction, that, as we have no dramatic poet of Shakspeare’s calibre, so we possess no actor capable of making his characters live before our eyes in their full significancy. It was not always so, as it is asserted; and I myself have retained impressions received in my earliest youth from Fleck and Unzelmann, which have never been renewed in Germany. Schröder and Eckhof seem to have stood yet higher; and I remember with singular pleasure the enthusiastic descriptions given me of them by old Archenholz, who had also seen Garrick. He thought Schröder at least Garrick’s equal.
That in order to form anything like a correct judgment of foreign actors, we must first in some degree throw ourselves in thought into their nationality;[85] must accustom ourselves to many of their manners and usages, which, like many turns of their language, always affect us as strange, however well we may understand them,—will be admitted by every thinking man. At first, these causes always more or less distract the attention; and I never saw more than one individual who, (if I may use the expression,) had a perfectly cosmopolitan organization,—the perhaps never-equalled, certainly never-surpassed, Miss O’Neil. In her it was only the pure abstract human mind and soul that spoke;—nation, time and external appearance, vanished from the thoughts in an ecstacy which carried all before it.
But back to the present.
We saw Othello, then; in which the combined acting of the three greatest dramatic artists of England afforded me a high intellectual treat, and has elicited this somewhat long ‘expectoration;’ but caused me to feel most painfully the want of the above-mentioned heroine. Had she been there, I should have witnessed the highest point of all theatrical representation. Kean, Young, and Kemble, compose the ruling triumvirate of the English stage. The first has without doubt the most genius; the second is brilliant and sustained in his acting; the third, though less distinguished in the highest tragedy, uniformly dignified and intelligent. This representation of Othello was the first time of their playing together. It was indeed a rare enjoyment! Othello and Shylock are Kean’s greatest parts. It is amazing with what profound knowledge of the human heart he not only portrays the passion of jealousy,—first slumbering, then gradually awaking, and ending in madness; but with what wondrous accuracy he catches the Southern nature of the Moor,—the peculiar characteristics of the race, and never for a moment loses sight of them. In the midst of the high and noble bearing of the hero, something animal occasionally peeps forth that makes us shudder, while on the other hand it gives force to his agonizing torment, and places it bodily before our eyes. The simplicity of his acting at first, the absence of all bragging about his past achievements, and his intense love for the woman of his choice, win the hearts of the spectators as they have won that of Desdemona: the ugly Moor is forgotten in the complete, heroic man; till, amid the torments of lacerating jealousy, that hidden fierce nature slowly reveals itself to our eyes; and at length we think we see before us a raging tiger, rather than a being of like nature with ourselves. I was here confirmed anew in my persuasion, that a great poet, still more than a moderate one, stands in need of a great actor to make him perfectly understood and estimated. In Berlin, for instance, the strangling scene was not only ludicrous, but really indecent. Here, the blood froze in one’s veins; and even the boisterous and turbulent English public was for a time speechless, motionless—as if struck by lightning. Nay, I must acknowledge that sometimes during the tragedy, Othello’s long torment, which the fiend-like Iago with such devilish calmness doles out to him drop by drop, was so painful, and the terror of what I knew was to follow grew upon me so involuntarily, that I turned away my face as from a scene too horrible to contemplate. Young’s Iago is a master-piece, and his acting first made this character thoroughly clear to me. It is, perhaps—and here I must recant, at least in this one case, an assertion I made before—Iago is perhaps, contrary to Shakspeare’s usual custom, not a character quite founded in nature, but rather a brilliant conception of the poet:—but then with what astonishing consistency is it carried through! He is an incarnate fiend; a being nourished with gall and bitterness, capable neither of love nor joy; who regards evil as his element; the philosophizing on himself, the contemplating and full and clear setting forth of his own atrocities, is his only enjoyment. The tie which binds him to human kind is feeble; it is only revenge for the suspected injury done him by the Moor: and even this seems but a sort of pretext which he makes to himself with the last expiring breath of moral sensibility, and his genuine delight in torture and distress ever the real and leading motive. And yet even this monster is not utterly revolting. His intellectual superiority, his courage, his consistency, and, at the last, his firmness in extremity, never suffer the consummate villain to sink into abject, vulgar degradation. Iago is a hero, compared to Kotzebue’s models of virtue. Completely in this sense Young played the character: his manners are gloomy and morose, but noble; no smile passes over his lips, and his jests lose nothing by this dryness: certain of his power, he treats all with calm superiority, but with well-defined ‘nuances:’ to his wife he is simply rough and domineering; to Roderigo, authoritative and humorous; to Cassio, polite and friendly; to the Moor, reverential and attached, but always serious and dignified. Kemble, on his part, played Cassio as admirably; and perfectly as Shakspeare describes him; “a man, framed to make women false;” young, gay, gallant, of a noble mein, good-natured character, and polished manners.—Desdemona, unhappily, was but moderately represented; and yet the touching contrast of her gentle, patient, womanly devotedness, with the Moor’s burning passion, was not utterly lost.