WILLIAM C. MACREADY.
Of the Hamlet of John R. Duff there is, strange to say, no record in New York, although he played here occasionally between the years 1814 and 1827. He was very popular in Boston and Philadelphia, and a writer in the Boston Centinel, in the autumn of 1810, does “not hesitate to say, that in some of the scenes [of Hamlet], and those of no ordinary grade of difficulty, he has never been excelled on the Boston boards.” His wife is still considered by certain old play-goers to have been the best Ophelia ever seen in the United States, and no account of the tragedy in this country can be complete without mention of her name. As Ophelia, in New York and elsewhere, she supported the elder Booth, the elder Kean, the elder Conway, Cooper, Payne, Wallack, and other stars; and Mr. Booth wrote to George Holland in 1836 that he considered her “the greatest actress in the world.”
Mr. Macready was the first of a trio of remarkable Hamlets who came to this country from England at about the same period. Charles Kean was the second, in 1830, Charles Kemble the third, in 1832. Of Macready’s Hamlet he says himself, in his Reminiscences: “The thought and practice I have through my professional career devoted to it, made it in my own judgment and in those [sic] of critics whom I had most reason to fear and respect, one of the most finished, though not the most popular, in my repertoire.”
In Cole’s Biography of Charles Kean, inspired by its subject and written under his direction, if not at his dictation, is the following account of his first attempt at Hamlet: “The new Hamlet was received with enthusiasm. From his entrance to the close of the performance the applause was unanimous and incessant. The celebrated ‘Is it the King?’ in the third act, produced an electrical effect. To use a favorite expression of his father’s, ‘The pit rose at him.’”
Concerning the Hamlet of Charles Kemble, his daughter wrote, in 1832: “I have acted Ophelia three times with my father, and each time in that beautiful scene where his madness and his love gush forth together, like a torrent swollen with storms that bears a thousand blossoms on its turbid waters, I have experienced such deep emotion as hardly to be able to speak.... Now the great beauty of all my father’s performances, but particularly of Hamlet, is a wonderful accuracy in the detail of the character which he represents,” etc.
All of this would seem to be ex parte evidence, but it is interesting nevertheless; and neither Mr. Macready, Mr. Kean, nor Miss Kemble, perhaps, was very far astray. On the other hand, George Henry Lewes (On Actors and the Art of Acting) says that “Macready’s Hamlet was, in his opinion, bad, due allowance being made for the intelligence it displayed. He was lachrymose and fretful; too fond of a cambric pocket-handkerchief to be really effective.... It was ‘a thing of shreds and patches,’ not a whole.” The flourishing of this handkerchief just before the play scene gave great offence to Forrest, who had the bad taste to hiss it in Edinburgh; and thus began the wretched feud which nearly convulsed two continents, and ended in bloodshed at Astor Place, New York.
CHARLES KEMBLE.