The Complete Works of William Shakespeare - Israel Gollancz William Shakespeare [3445]
Edmund Kean, 1787-1833.
During the present century the most conspicuous histrionic successes in Shakespearean drama have been won by Edmund Kean, whose triumphant rendering of Shylock on his first appearance at Drury Lane Theatre on January 26, 1814, is one of the most stirring incidents in the history of the English stage. Kean defied the rigid convention of the ‘Kemble School,’ and gave free rein to his impetuous passions. Besides Shylock, he excelled in Richard III, Othello, Hamlet, and Lear. No less a critic than Coleridge declared that to see him act was like ‘reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning.’ Among other Shakespearean actors of Kean’s period a high place was allotted by public esteem to George Frederick Cooke (1756-1811), whose Richard III, first given in London at Covent Garden Theatre, October 31, 1801, was accounted his masterpiece. Charles Lamb, writing in 1822, declared that of all the actors who flourished in his time, Robert Bensley ‘had most of the swell of soul,’ and Lamb gave with a fine enthusiasm in his ‘Essays of Elia’ an analysis (which has become classical) of Bensley’s performance of Malvolio. But Bensley’s powers were rated more moderately by more experienced playgoers. Lamb’s praises of Mrs. Jordan (1762-1816) in Ophelia, Helena, and Viola in ‘Twelfth Night,’ are corroborated by the eulogies of Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt. In the part of Rosalind Mrs. Jordan is reported on all sides to have beaten Mrs. Siddons out of the field.
William Charles Macready, 1793-1873.
The torch thus lit by Garrick, by the Kembles, by Kean and his contemporaries was worthily kept alive by William Charles Macready, a cultivated and conscientious actor, who, during a professional career of more than forty years (1810-1851), assumed every great part in Shakespearean tragedy. Although Macready lacked the classical bearing of Kemble or the intense passion of Kean, he won as the interpreter of Shakespeare the whole-hearted suffrages of the educated public. Macready’s chief associate in women characters was Helen Faucit (1820-1898, afterwards Lady Martin), whose refined impersonations of Imogen, Beatrice, Juliet, and Rosalind form an attractive chapter in the history of the stage.
Recent revivals.
The most notable tribute paid to Shakespeare by any actor-manager of recent times was paid by Samuel Phelps (1804-1878), who gave during his tenure of Sadler’s Wells Theatre between 1844 and 1862 competent representations of all the plays save six; only ‘Richard II,’ the three parts of ‘Henry VI,’ ‘Troilus and Cressida,’ and ‘Titus Andronicus’ were omitted. Sir Henry Irving, who since 1878 has been ably seconded by Miss Ellen Terry, has revived at the Lyceum Theatre between 1874 and the present time eleven plays (‘Hamlet,’ ‘Macbeth,’ ‘Othello,’ ‘Richard III,’ ‘The Merchant of Venice,’ ‘Much Ado about Nothing,’ ‘Twelfth Night,’ ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ ‘King Lear,’ ‘Henry VIII,’ and ‘Cymbeline’), and has given each of them all the advantage they can derive from thoughtful acting as well as from lavish scenic elaboration. But theatrical revivals of plays of Shakespeare are in England intermittent, and no theatrical manager since Phelps’s retirement has sought systematically to illustrate on the stage the full range of Shakespearean drama. Far more in this direction has been attempted in Germany. In one respect the history of recent Shakespearean representations can be viewed by the literary student with unqualified satisfaction. Although some changes of text or some rearrangement