Are lethargied—Ha! waking—’tis not so;
Who is it that can tell me who I am?
Lear’s shadow? I would learn; for by the marks
Of sovereignty, of knowledge, and of reason,
I should be false persuaded I had daughters.
Your name, fair gentlewoman?’—
These fearful interrogatories, which stand ready to start away on the brink of madness, should not certainly be asked like a common question, nor a dry sarcasm. If Mr. Kean did not speak them so, we beg his pardon.—In what comes after this, in the apostrophe to Ingratitude, in the sudden call for his horses, in the defence of the character of his train as ‘men of choice and rarest parts,’ and in the recurrence to Cordelia’s ‘most small fault,’ there are plenty of stops to play upon, all the varieties of agony, of anger and impatience, of asserted dignity and tender regret—Mr. Kean struck but two notes all through, the highest and the lowest.
This scene of Lear with Gonerill, in the first act, is only to be paralleled by the doubly terrific one between him and Regan and Gonerill in the second act. To call it a decided failure would be saying what we do not think: to call it a splendid success would be saying so no less. Mr. Kean did not appear to us to set his back fairly to his task, or to trust implicitly to his author, but to be trying experiments upon the audience, and waiting to see the result. We never saw this daring actor want confidence before, but he seemed to cower and hesitate before the public eye in the present instance, and to be looking out for the effect of what he did, while he was doing it. In the ironical remonstrance to Regan, for example:
‘Dear daughter, I confess that I am old—
Age is unnecessary, &c.’