“Naught’s had, all’s spent,
Where our desire is got without content.”
RICHARD.
Quite early in his histrionic career Forrest wrote to his friend Leggett, “My notions of the character of Richard the Third do not accord with those of the players I have seen personate it. They have not made him gay enough in the earlier scenes, but too sullen, frowning, and obvious a villain. He was an exulting and dashing, not a moody, villain. Success followed his schemes too rapidly and gave him too much elation to make appropriate the haggard and penthouse aspect he is usually made to wear. Contempt for mankind forms a stronger feature of his character than hatred; and he has a sort of reckless jollity, a joyous audacity, which has not been made conspicuous enough.” In general accord with this conception he afterwards elaborated his portraiture of the deformed tyrant, the savage humorist, the murderous and brilliant villain. He set aside the stereotyped idea of Richard as a strutting, ranting, gloomy plotter, forever cynical and sarcastic and parading his crimes. Not excluding these traits, Forrest subordinated them to his cunning hypocrisy, his gleaming intellectuality, his jocose irony, his exulting self-complacence and fiendish sportiveness. He represented him not only as ravenously ambitious, but also full of a subtle pride and vanity which delighted him with the constant display of his mental superiority to those about him. Above all he was shown to be possessed of a laughing devil, a witty and sardonic genius, which amused itself with playing on the faculties of the weaklings he wheedled, scoffing at what they thought holy, and bluntly utilizing the most sacred things for the most selfish ends. There can be no doubt that in removing the conventional stage Richard with this more dashing and versatile one Forrest restored the genuine conception of Shakspeare, who has painted him as rattling not brooding, exuberantly complacent even under his own dispraises, an endlessly inventive and triumphant hypocrite, master of a gorgeous eloquence whose splendid phrases adorn the ugliness of his schemes almost out of sight. His mental nature devours his moral nature, and, swallowing remorse, leaves him free to be gay. The character thus portrayed was hard, cruel, deceitful, mocking,—less melodramatically fiendish and electrical than the Richard of Kean, but more true to nature. The picture was a consistent one. The deformity of the man, reacting on his matchless intellect and courage and sensual passion, had made him a bitter cynic. But his genius was too rich to stagnate into an envenomed gloom of misanthropy. Its exuberance broke out in aspiring schemes and crimes gilded with philosophy, hypocrisy, laughter, and irony. Moving alone in a murky atmosphere of sin and sensuality, he knew himself to the bottom of his soul, and read everybody else through and through. He believed in no one, and scoffed at truth, because he was himself without conscience. But his insight and his solid understanding and glittering wit, making of everything a foil to display his self-satisfied powers, hid the degradation of his wickedness from his own eyes, and sometimes almost excused it in the eyes of others. Yet, so wondrous was the moral genius of Shakspeare, the devilish chuckling with which he hugged the notion of his own superiority in his exemption from the standards that rule other men, instead of infecting, shocked and warned and repelled the auditor:
H B Hall & Sons
EDWIN FORREST AS
RICHARD III.
“Come, this conscience is a convenient scarecrow;
It guards the fruit which priests and wise men taste,
Who never set it up to fright themselves.”
Thus in the impersonation of him by Forrest Richard lost his perpetual scowl, and took on here and there touches of humor and grim comedy. He burst upon the stage, cloaked and capped, waving his glove in triumph over the downfall of the house of Lancaster. Not in frowning gutturals or with snarling complaint but merrily came the opening words,—