It not only appears to hold commerce with meridian suns, and that its blood is made drunk with the heat of scorching skies; but it indistinctly presents to us all the symbols of eastern magnificence. It wears a crown and turban, and stands before us like a tower. All this, it may be answered, is only saying that Mr. Kean is not so tall as a tower: but any one, to play Othello properly, ought to look taller and grander than any tower. We shall see how Mr. Young will play it. But this is from our present purpose. Mr. Macready is tall enough for the part, and the looseness of his figure was rather in character with the flexibility of the South: but there were no sweeping outlines, no massy movements in his action.
The movements of passion in Othello (and the motions of the body should answer to those of the mind) resemble the heaving of the sea in a storm; there are no sharp, slight, angular transitions, or if there are any, they are subject to this general swell and commotion. Mr. Kean is sometimes too wedgy and determined; but Mr. Macready goes off like a shot, and startles our sense of hearing. One of these sudden explosions was when he is in such haste to answer the demands of the Senate on his services: ‘I do agnise a natural hardness,’ &c. as if he was impatient to exculpate himself from some charge, or wanted to take them at their word lest they should retract. There is nothing of this in Othello. He is calm and collected; and the reason why he is carried along with such vehemence by his passions when they are roused, is, that he is moved by their collected force. Another fault in Mr. Macready’s conception was, that he whined and whimpered once or twice, and tried to affect the audience by affecting a pitiful sensibility, not consistent with the dignity and masculine imagination of the character: as where he repeated, ‘No, not much moved,’ and again, ‘Othello’s occupation’s gone,’ in a childish treble. The only part which should approach to this effeminate tenderness of complaint is his reflection, ‘Yet, oh the pity of it, Iago, the pity of it!’ What we liked best was his ejaculation, ‘Swell, bosom, with thy fraught, for ’tis of aspick’s tongues.’ This was forcibly given, and as if his expression were choaked with the bitterness of passion. We do not know how he would have spoken the speech, ‘Like to the Pontic sea that knows no ebb,’ &c. which occurs just before, for it was left out. There was also something fine in his uneasiness and inward starting at the name of Cassio, but it was too often repeated, with a view to effect. Mr. Macready got most applause in such speeches as that addressed to Iago, ‘Horror on horror’s head accumulate!’ This should be a lesson to him. He very injudiciously, we think, threw himself on a chair at the back of the stage, to deliver the farewell apostrophe to Content, and to the ‘pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war.’ This might be a relief to him, but it distressed the audience.—On the whole, we think Mr. Macready’s powers are more adapted to the declamation than to the acting of passion: that is, that he is a better orator than actor. As to Mr. Young’s Iago, ‘we never saw a gentleman acted finer.’ Mrs. Faucit’s Desdemona was very pretty. Mr. C. Kemble’s Cassio was excellent.
Drury-Lane.
The town has been entertained this week by seeing Mr. Stephen Kemble in the part of Sir John Falstaff, as they were formerly with seeing Mr. Lambert in his own person. We see no more reason why Mr. Stephen Kemble should play Falstaff, than why Louis XVIII. is qualified to fill a throne, because he is fat, and belongs to a particular family. Every fat man cannot represent a great man. The knight was fat; so is the player: the Emperor was fat, so is the King who stands in his shoes. But there the comparison ends. There is no sympathy in mind—in wit, parts, or discretion. Sir John (and so we may say of the gentleman at St. Helena) ‘had guts in his brains.’ The mind was the man. His body did not weigh down his wit. His spirits shone through him. He was not a mere paunch, a bag-pudding, a lump of lethargy, a huge falling sickness, an imminent apoplexy, with water in the head.
The Managers of Drury-Lane, in providing a Sir John Falstaff to satisfy the taste of the town, seem to ask only with Mr. Burke’s political carcass-butchers, ‘How he cuts up in the cawl: how he tallows in the kidneys!’ We are afraid the Junto of Managers of Drury-Lane are not much wiser than the junto of Managers of the affairs of Europe. This, according to the luminous and voluminous critic in the Courier, is because their affairs are not under the management of a single person. Would the same argument prove that the affairs of Europe had better have been under the direction of one man? ‘The gods have not made’ the writer in the Courier logical as well as ‘poetical.’ By the rule above hinted at, every actor is qualified to play Falstaff who is physically incapacitated to play any other character. Sir John Falstaffs may be fatted up like prize oxen. Nor does the evil in this case produce its own remedy, as where an actor’s success depends upon his own leanness and that of the part he plays. Sir Richard Steele tells us (in one of the Tatlers) of a poor actor in his time, who having nothing to do, fell away, and became such a wretched meagre-looking object, that he was pitched upon as a proper person to represent the starved Apothecary in Romeo and Juliet. He did this so much to the life, that he was repeatedly called upon to play it: but his person improving with his circumstances, he was in a short time rendered unfit to play it with the same effect as before, and laid aside. Having no other resource, he accordingly fell away again with the loss of his part, and was again called upon to appear in it with his former reputation. Any one, on the contrary, who thrives in Falstaff, is always in an increasing capacity to overlay the part.—But we have done with this unpleasant subject.
THEATRICAL DEBUTS
The Examiner.
October 20, 1816.
There have been two theatrical or operatic debuts, to which we are in arrears, and of which we must say a word—Miss Mori’s Rosetta in Love in a Village, at Covent-Garden, and Miss Keppel’s Polly in the Beggar’s Opera, at Drury-Lane. Both of them appeared to us to be indifferent. Miss Mori is by much the best singer of the two, but there is something exceedingly unprepossessing and hard both in her voice and manner. She sings without the least feeling, or lurking consciousness that such a thing is required in a singer. The notes proceed from her mouth as mechanically, as unmitigated by the sentiment, as if they came from the sharp hautboy or grating bassoon. We do not mean that her voice is disagreeable in itself, but it wants softness and sweetness of modulation. The words of the songs neither seem to tremble on her lips, nor play around her heart. Miss Mori did not look the character. Rosetta is to be sure a waiting-maid, but then she is also a young lady in disguise. There was no appearance of the incognita in Miss Mori. She seemed in downright earnest, like one of the country girls who come to be hired at the statute-fair. She was quite insensible of her situation, and came forward to prove herself a fine singer, as one of her fellow-servants might have done to answer to a charge of having stolen something. We never saw a debutante more at ease with the audience: we suppose she has played in the country. Miss Matthews, who is a good-natured girl, and wished to patronize her on so delicate an emergency, presently found there was no occasion for her services, and withdrew from the attempt with some trepidation.
If Miss Mori did not enchant us by her incomprehensible want of sensibility, neither did Miss Keppel by the affectation of it. Sensibility is a very pretty thing, but it will not do to make a plaything of, at least in public. It is not enough that an actress tries to atone for defects by throwing herself on the indulgence of the audience:—their eyes and ears must be satisfied, as well as their self-love. Miss Keppel acts with very little grace, and sings very much out of tune. There were some attempts made to prejudice the audience against this young lady before she appeared: but they only had the effect which they deserved, of procuring a more flattering reception than she would otherwise have met with: but we do not think she will ever become a favourite with the town.