"Of Mr. Edwin Forrest's coarse caricature of Lear we caught a glimpse that more than sufficed to show that the actor had no conception of the part. His Lear is a roaring pantaloon, with a vigorous totter, a head waving as indefatigably as a china image, and lungs of prodigious power. There only wanted the candlewick mustaches to complete the stage idea of a choleric despot in pantomime."
"Mr. Forrest's Richard the Third forms no exception to those murderous attacks upon Shakspeare which this gentleman has so ruthlessly made since his arrival amongst us. Since the time of that elder Forrest, who had such a hand in the murder of the princes in the Tower, we may not inappropriately take this last execution of Richard at Drury Lane to be
'The most arch deed of piteous massacre
That ever yet this land was guilty of.'
"We have tried very hard, since witnessing the performance, to discover the principle or intention of it; but to no effect. We remember some expressions, however, in an old comedy of Greene's, which may possibly suggest something to the purpose. 'How,' says Bubble, on finding himself dressed out very flauntingly indeed,—'how apparel makes a man respected! The very children in the street do adore me!' In almost every scene Mr. Forrest blazed forth in a new and most oppressively-gilded dress, for which he received precisely the kind of adoration that the simple Bubble adverts to."
But while the hostile papers characterized the change in the acting of Forrest from what it was on his earlier visit as an unaccountable deterioration, and censured him without reason, other journals took up his defence, praised his performances warmly, and affirmed that he had made great improvement. What the former stigmatized as a becoming dull, cold, and formal, the latter eulogized as an outgrowing of former extravagance and an acquiring of refinement, measure, and repose. As he went on playing, his opponents diminished in numbers and virulence, while his supporters increased, and at last he had conquered a real triumph. It will be well to quote a few of the notices which appeared in friendly and impartial quarters in contrast to those of an opposite character already cited.
The Athenæum, in speaking of his opening night in Macbeth, said, "Mr. Forrest's former manner has received considerable modification and become mellowed with experience. He has learned that repose is the final grace of art. In the startling crises of the play his voice and action, both without effort, spring forth with crushing effect, not because he is an actor who chooses thus to manifest strength, but because he is a strong man, who simply exerts his excited energies. Macbeth, as he now performs it, is a calm and stately, almost a sculpturesque, piece of acting."
The Sun called his Lear a decisive triumph, and used the following words:
"Those contrasts, in which he delights, all tell well in the character of Lear, and they were used with excellent discrimination and great effect. There was something appalling in the bursts of fury with which that weak-bodied but intensely-impassioned old man was occasionally convulsed. The tottering gait, the palsied head, the feeble footsteps of old age were admirably given; but the deep voice and the manly contour of the figure showed that it was the old age of one who had been, in the heyday of life, 'every inch a king.' It was the old oak tottering to its fall, but the monarch of the forest still. The passion, too, was most artistically worked up to a climax, increasing in intensity from the scene in which he casts off Cordelia, through the scene in which he curses Goneril, until in the scene in which he becomes convinced of the treason of Goneril, when it became the desolating hurricane, destroying even reason itself. The scenes with Edgar were beautifully given. The different phases of the approach of madness were admirably marked. You could see, as it were, reason descending from her throne. The scene with Gloucester, too, was very fine; the biting apothegms which Shakspeare has in this scene put into the mouth of Lear were given with heartless, bitter, scornful, laughing sarcasm, which is perhaps one of the most unfailing characteristics of madness. The recognition of Cordelia was beautifully touching, and the lament over her dead body was given with an expression of heart-rending pathos of which we did not before imagine Mr. Forrest capable."
The praise given by the Times was still more emphatic: