Oh, Regan, will you take her by the hand?’
One would think there are tones, and looks, and gestures, answerable to these words, to thrill and harrow up the thoughts, to ‘appal the guilty, and make mad the free,’ or that might ‘create a soul under the ribs of death!’ But we did not see, or hear them. It was Mr. Kean’s business to furnish them: it would have been ours to feel them, if he had! It is not enough that Lear’s crosses and perplexities are expressed by single strokes. There should be an agglomeration of horrors, closing him in like a phalanx. His speech should be thick with the fulness of his agony. His face should, as it were, encrust and stiffen into amazement at his multiplied afflictions. A single image of ruin is nothing—there should be a growing desolation all around him. His wrongs should seem enlarged tenfold through the solid atmosphere of his despair—his thoughts should be vast and lucid, like the sun when he declines—He should be ‘a huge dumb heap’ of woe! The most that Mr. Kean did was to make some single hits here and there; but these did not tell, because they were separated from the main body and movement of the passion. They might be compared to interlineations of the character, rather than parts of the text. In the sudden reiteration of the epithet—‘fiery quality of the Duke,’ applied to Cornwall by Gloucester, at which his jealousy blazes out to extravagance, we thought Mr. Kean feeble and indecisive: but in breaking away at the conclusion of the scene, ‘I will do such things: what they are, yet I know not; but they shall be the terrors of the earth,’—he made one of those tremendous bursts of energy and grandeur, which shed a redeeming glory round every character he plays.
Mr. Kean’s performance of the remainder of the character, when the king’s intellects begin to fail him, and are, at last, quite disordered, was curious and quaint, rather than impressive or natural. There appeared a degree of perversity in all this—a determination to give the passages in a way in which nobody else would give them, and in which nobody else would expect them to be given. But singularity is not always excellence. Why, for instance, should our actor lower his voice in the soliloquy in the third act, ‘Blow winds, and crack your cheeks,’ &c. in which the tumult of Lear’s thoughts, and the extravagance of his expressions, seem almost contending with the violence of the storm? We can conceive no reason but that it was contrary to the practice of most actors hitherto. Mr. Rae’s manner of mouthing the passage would have been ‘more germane to the matter.’ In asking his companion—
‘How dost, my boy? Art cold?
I’m cold myself’——
there was a shrinking of the frame, and a chill glance of the eye, like the shivering of an ague-fit: but no other feeling surmounted the physical expression. On meeting with Edgar, as Mad Tom, Lear wildly exclaims, with infinite beauty and pathos, ‘Didst thou give all to thy daughters, and art thou come to this?’ And again, presently after, he repeats, ‘What, have his daughters brought him to this pass? Couldst thou save nothing? Didst thou give ’em all?’—questions which imply a strong possession, the eager indulgence of a favourite idea which has just struck his heated fancy; but which Mr. Kean pronounced in a feeble, sceptical, querulous under-tone, as if wanting information as to some ordinary occasion of insignificant distress. We do not admire these cross-readings of a work like Lear. They may be very well when the actor’s ingenuity, however paradoxical, is more amusing than the author’s sense: but it is not so in this case. From some such miscalculation, or desire of finding out a clue to the character, other than ‘was set down’ for him, Mr. Kean did not display his usual resources and felicitous spirit in these terrific scenes:—he drivelled, and looked vacant, and moved his lips, so as not to be heard, and did nothing, and appeared, at times, as if he would quite forget himself. The pauses were too long; the indications of remote meaning were too significant to be well understood. The spectator was big with expectation of seeing some extraordinary means employed: but the general result did not correspond to the waste of preparation. In a subsequent part, Mr. Kean did not give to the reply of Lear, ‘Aye, every inch a king!’—the same vehemence and emphasis that Mr. Booth did; and in this he was justified: for, in the text, it is an exclamation of indignant irony, not of conscious superiority; and he immediately adds with deep disdain, to prove the nothingness of his pretensions—
‘When I do stare, see how the subject quakes.’
Almost the only passage in which Mr. Kean obtained his usual heartfelt tribute, was in his interview with Cordelia, after he awakes from sleep, and has been restored to his senses.
‘Pray, do not mock me:
I am a very foolish fond old man,