Jaques. He spoke several passages well, and is upon the whole an improving actor. Mr. Macready's Mentevole, in The Italian Lover,1 is very highly spoken of. We only saw the last act of it, but it appeared to us to be very fine in its kind. It was natural, easy, and forcible. Indeed, we suspect some parts of it were, too natural, that is, that Mr. Macready thought too much of what his feelings might dictate in such circumstances, rather than of what the circumstances must have dictated to him to do. We allude particularly to the half significant, half hysterical laugh, and distorted jocular leer, with his eyes towards the persons accusing him of the murder, when the evidence of his guilt comes out. Either the author did not intend him to behave in this manner, or he must have made the other parties on the stage interrupt him as a selfconvicted criminal. His appeal to Manoa (the witness against him) to suppress the proofs which must be fatal to his honour and his life, was truly affecting. His resumption of a spirit of defiance was not sufficiently dignified, and was more like the self-sufficient swaggering airs of comedy, than the real grandeur of tragedy, which should always proceed from passion. Mr. Macready sometimes, to express uneasiness and agitation, composes his cravat, as he would in a drawing-room. This is, we think, neither graceful nor natural in extraordinary situations. His tones are equally powerful and flexible, varying with the greatest facility from the lowest to the highest pitch of the human voice. [Drury Lane. 2 O'Keeffe's farce of The Blacksmith of Antwerp was brought out here on Thursday, Mr. Munden being sufficiently recovered from his indisposition. It is founded on 1Julia; or, The Italian Lover, by Robert Jephson, was revived September 30. Egerton was Manoa. 2 Revived October 3. Munden was Otho. S the old story of Quintin Matsys and the Citizen of Antwerp who would marry his daughter to no one but a painter. It is full of pleasant incidents and situations, which succeed one another with careless rapidity, without fatiguing the attention or exciting much interest. It is one of the least striking of O'Keeffe's productions. It however went off very well, and we dare say will have a run. The music1 is pleasing enough.] MR. MACREADY'S OTHELLO. [Covent Garden] October 13, 1816. We have to speak this week of Mr. Macready's Othello,2 at Covent-Garden Theatre, and though it must be in favourable terms, it cannot be in very favourable ones. We have been rather spoiled for seeing any one else in this character, by Mr. Kean's performance of it, and also by having read the play itself lately. Mr. Macready was more than respectable in the part; and he only failed because he attempted to excel. He did not, however, express the individual bursts of feeling, nor the deep and accumulating tide of passion which ought to be given in Othello. It may perhaps seem an extravagant illustration, but the idea which we think any actor ought to have of this character, to play it to the height of the poetical conception, is that of a majestic serpent wounded, writhing under its pain, stung to madness, and attempting by sudden darts, or coiling up its whole force, to wreak its vengeance on those about it, and falling at last a mighty victim under the redoubled strokes of its assailants. 'Composed and selected by T. Cooke. 2 Macready performed Othello for the first time October 10. Kean had acted the part at Drury Lane, September 30. Young was Iago, and Mrs. Faucit Desdemona. Macready and Young exchanged parts on October 15 (see p. 264, post). No one can admire more than we do the force of genius Kean shows in this part, but he is He plays it like a gipsy, and not like Kean not the physiognomy, or the and passion which Mr. not stately enough for it. a Moor. We miss in Mr. costume, so much as the architectural building up of the part. This character always puts us in mind of the line "Let Afric and her hundred thrones rejoice." 1 It not only appears to hold commerce with meridian suns, and that its blood is made drunk with the heat of scorching skies; but it indistinctly presents to us all the symbols of eastern magnificence. It wears a crown and turban, and stands before us like a tower. All this, it may be answered, is only saying that Mr. Kean is not so tall as a tower: but any one, to play Othello properly, ought to look taller and grander than any tower. We shall see how Mr. Young will play it. But this is from our present purpose. Mr. Macready is tall enough for the part, and the looseness of his figure was rather in character with the flexibility of the South: but there were no sweeping outlines, no massy movements in his action. The movements of passion in Othello (and the motions of the body should answer to those of the mind) resemble the heaving of the sea in a storm; there are no sharp, slight, angular transitions, or if there are any, they are subject to this general swell and commotion. Mr. Kean is sometimes too wedgy and determined; but Mr. Macready goes off like a shot, and startles our sense of hearing. One of these sudden explosions was when he is in such haste to answer the demands of the Senate on his services: "I do agnize a natural ... hardness,' etc., as if he was impatient to exculpate himself from some charge, or wanted to take them at their word lest they should retract. There is nothing of this in Othello. He is calm and collected; and the reason 2 Othello, I, iii, 232-4. 1 YOUNG, The Revenge, v, ii. 3 1 why he is carried along with such vehemence by his passions when they are roused, is, that he is moved by their collected force. Another fault in Mr. Macready's conception was, that he whined and whimpered once or twice, and tried to affect the audience by affecting a pitiful sensibility, not consistent with the dignity and masculine imagination of the character: as where he repeated, "No, not much moved,” 1 and again, "Othello's occupation's gone,' "2 in a childish treble. The only part which should approach to this effeminate tenderness of complaint is his reflection, "Yet, oh the pity of it, Iago, the pity of it!" What we liked best was his ejaculation, "Swell, bosom, with thy fraught, for 'tis of aspic's tongues." This was forcibly given, and as if his expression were choked with the bitterness of passion. We do not know how he would have spoken the speech, "Like to the Pontic sea that knows no ebb," etc., which occurs just before, for it was left out. There was also something fine in his uneasiness and inward starting at the name of Cassio, but it was too often repeated, with a view to effect. Mr. Macready got most applause in such speeches as that addressed to Iago, "Horror on horror's head accumulate! This should be a lesson to him. He very injudiciously, we think, threw himself on a chair at the back of the stage, to deliver the farewell apostrophe to Content, and to the "pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war." This might be a relief to him, but it distressed the audience. —On the whole, we think Mr. Macready's powers are more adapted to the declamation than to the acting of passion: that is, that he is a better orator than actor. As to Mr. Young's Iago, we never saw a gentleman acted finer." Mrs. Faucit's Desdemona was very pretty. Mr. C. Kemble's Cassio was excellent. 66 1 Othello, III, iii, 224. 3 Ibid., IV, i, 206-7, misquoted. 2 Ibid., III, iii, 357. 3 Ibid., III, iii, 453-5, misquoted; it occurs just after. 6 Ibid., III, iii, 370, misquoted. ↑ Ibid., III, iii, 354. Drury-Lane. The town has been entertained this week by seeing Mr. Stephen Kemble in the part of Sir John Falstaff,1 as they were formerly with seeing Mr. Lambert in his own person. We see no more reason why Mr. Stephen Kemble should play Falstaff, than why Louis XVIII is qualified to fill a throne, because he is fat, and belongs to a particular family. Every fat man cannot represent a great man. The knight was fat, so is the player: the Emperor was fat, so is the King who stands in his shoes. But there the comparison ends. There is no sympathy in mind—in wit, parts, or discretion. Sir John (and so we may say of the gentleman at St. Helena) "had guts in his brains." " The mind was the man. His body did not weigh down his wit. His spirits shone through him. He was not a mere paunch, a bag-pudding, a lump of lethargy, a huge falling sickness, an imminent apoplexy, with water in the head. The managers of Drury-Lane, in providing a Sir John Falstaff to satisfy the taste of the town, seem to ask only with Mr. Burke's political carcass-butchers, "How he cuts up in the caul: how he tallows in the kidneys!" We are afraid the junto of managers of Drury-Lane are not much wiser than the junto of managers of the affairs of Europe. This, according to the luminous and voluminous critic in The Courier, is because their affairs are not under the management of a single person. Would the same argument prove that the affairs of Europe had better have been under the direction of one man? "The gods have not made" the writer 5 1 Stephen Kemble took the part of Falstaff in King Henry the Fourth, First Part, October 7, and in The Merry Wives of Windsor October 10. 2 Daniel Lambert (1770-1809) weighed 739 lb. 3 I Henry IV, II, iv, 251. 4 See Burke's Letter to a Noble Lord (Works, v, 145). 5 See Coleridge's first letter on "The Drama---Bertram Courier, August 29, 1816. in The |