The shock of accident nor dart of chance
Can neither graze nor pierce.”
LEAR.
Nearly every season for more than forty years Forrest played the part of Lear many times. He never ceased to study it and to improve his representation, adding new touches here and there, until at last it became, if not the most elaborately finished and perfect of all his performances, certainly the sublimest in spiritual power and tragic pathos. As he grew old, as his experience of the desolating miseries of the world deepened, as his perception was sharpened of the hollowness and irony of the pomps and pleasures of human power contrasted with the solemn drifting of destiny and death, as the massiveness of his physique was expanded in its mould and loosened in its fibre by the shocks of time and fate, he seemed ever better fitted, both in faculty and appearance, to meet the ideal demands of the rôle. He formed his conception of it directly from the pages of Shakspeare and the dictates of nature. His elaboration and acting of it were original, the result of his own inspiration and study. Heeding no traditional authority, copying no predecessor, but testing each particular by the standard of truth, he might have proudly protested, like the veritable Lear,—
G H Cushman
EDWIN FORREST AS
KING LEAR.
“No, they cannot touch me for coining,—
I am the king himself.”
No person of common sensibility could witness his impersonation of the character during his latter years without paying it the tribute of tears and awe.
Lear appears in a shape of imposing majesty, but with the authentic signals of breaking sorrow and ruin already obvious. He is a king in the native build and furniture of his being, not merely by outward rank. His scale of passion is gigantic, and always exerted at the extremes. When deferred to and pleased, his magnanimity is boundless and his love most tender. But, once crossed, nothing can restrain his petulance, and his outbursts of anger are terrible to others and dangerously expensive to himself. His identity is always marked by greatness, like some huge landmark dwarfing everything near. There is a royal scope and altitude belonging to the structure of his soul which is never lost. It is seen, whether he be ruler, outcast, or madman, in the grandeur of his mien, in the majestic eloquence of his thought and expression, in the towering swell of his ambition. He is ever insistingly conscious of his kingliness, and must be bowed to and have his way, as much when with the poor fool he hides his nakedness from the pelting blast as when in august plenitude of power he divides his realm among his children. This central point of unity Forrest firmly seized, and made it everywhere in his representation abundantly prominent and impressive.