Rail on the Lord’s Anointed!”—
were a bit of grotesque satire, a gigantic and serviceable absurdity, worthy of Rabelais.
The acting of Forrest in the tent-scene, where Richard in his broken sleep dreams he sees the successive victims of his murderous hand approach and threaten him, was original and effective in the highest degree. He struggled on his couch with horrible phantoms. Ghosts pursued him. Visions of battle, overthrow, despair, and death convulsed him. Acting his dreams out he dealt his blows around with frightful and aimless energy, and with an intense expression of remorse and vengeance on his face fell apparently cloven to the earth. He then arose like a man coming out of hell, dragging his dream with him, and, struggling fiercely to awake, rushed to the footlights, sank on his knee, and spoke these words, beginning with a shriek and softening down to a shuddering whisper:
“Give me another horse! Bind up my wounds!
Have mercy, Jesu! Soft; I did but dream.
O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me!
The lights burn blue. It is now dead midnight.
Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh.”
The merely selfish individual instincts and passions of unregenerate human nature are kept from breaking out into the crimes which they would spontaneously commit, by an ethical regulation which consists of a set of ideal sympathies representing the rights and feelings of other men, representing the word of God or the collective principles of universal order. The criminal type of character embodied in Richard throws off or suppresses this restraining and retributive apparatus, and enthrones a lawless egotism masked in hypocrisy. Thus, Richard had so obscured, clogged, and deadened the moral action of conscience, that his egotistic passions held rampant supremacy, and success made him gay and exultant, unchecked by any touch of remorse or shame. In his own eyes he clothed himself in the glimmering mail of his triumphant deeds of wickedness, and dilated with pride like Lucifer in hell. He could not weep nor tremble, but he could shake with horrid laughter. In drawing this terrible outline Shakspeare showed that he knew what was in man. In painting the audacious picture Forrest proved himself a profound artist. And the moral for the spectators was complete when the hardened intellectual monster of depravity, in the culmination of the secret forces of destiny and his own organism, was stripped of his self-sufficiency, and, as the supernatural world broke on his vision, he stood aghast, with curdled blood and stiffened hair, shrieking with terror and despair.
Forrest was too large, with too much ingrained justice and heavy grandeur, to be really suited for this part. He needed, especially in its scolding contests of wit and spiteful invective, to be smaller, lighter, swifter, more vixenish. It was just the character for Kean and Booth, who in their way were unapproachable in it. Yet the conception of Forrest was far truer on the whole; and his performance was full of sterling merit.