peculiar character of her lip she gave an expression of contempt more striking than any she had hitherto displayed." The general character of this part of her performance is summed up to the like effect by an eloquent writer in a recent number of 'Blackwood's Magazine,’ who, in recording his admiring reminiscences of Mrs. Siddons's Lady Macbeth, assures us that, in the murder scene, "her acting was that of a triumphant fiend."* But, in examining the play, we have shown how Shakespeare exhibits the heroine as anything but triumphant in the perpetration of the deed, her husband's ruminations upon which draw from her an anticipation of that remorseful distraction which is destined to destroy her. We have shown, too, how remote she is from that bitterness of contempt which Mrs. Siddons expressed with such intensity, but which policy no less than feeling must have banished from Shakespeare's heroine while she felt her very selfpreservation to depend upon her calming the nervous agitation of her husband. Shakespeare, in short, from the very commencement of Lady Macbeth's share in the action, has exhibited in her-not that "statuelike simplicity" of motive for which Mr. Campbell contends, and which Mrs. Siddons strove to render— but a continual struggle, between her compunction for the criminal act, and her devotion to her husband's ambitious purpose. This conscious struggle should give to the opening invocation- Come, come, you spirits That tend on mortal thoughts, &c. a tremulous anxiety as well as earnestness of expression, very different from what we find recorded respecting this part of Mrs. Siddons's performance:— "When the actress," says Mr. Boaden, "invoking the destroying ministers, came to the passage— *Marston; or, the Meinoirs of a Statesman.'-Blackwood's Magazine, June, 1843, p. 710. Wherever, in your sightless substances, the elevation of her brows, the full orbs of sight, the raised shoulders, and the hollowed hands, seemed all to endeavour to explore what yet were pronounced no possible objects of vision. Till then, I am quite sure, a figure so terrible had never bent over the pit of a theatre." In all this we perceive the gesture of one-not imploring the spirits of murder, as Shakespeare's heroine does--but commanding them, according to Mrs. Siddons's conception. The action, in short, is not suited to the word. The same must be said of her performance of the great sleep-walking scene, though regarded as Mrs. Siddons's grandest triumph in this part. Here, of all other passages in this personation, the actress's looking and speaking the impassive heroine of antique tragedy was out of place. A somnambulist from the workings of a troubled conscience, is a thing peculiar to the romantic drama, and impossible in the classic. A person such as Mrs. Siddons's acting represented Lady Macbeth to be, would have been quite incapable of that "slumbry agitation" in which we behold Shakespeare's heroine. As little could the latter, while under its influence, have maintained the statue-like solemnity with which the actress glided over the stage in this awful scene. We have shown already that Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth, so far from presenting, in this final passage, anything of the "unconquerable will" of a classic heroine, is, in her incoherent retrospection, the merely passive victim of remorse and of despair-helplessly tremulous and shuddering. "But Siddons," says the writer in Blackwood already cited, "wanted the agitation, the drooping, the timidity. She looked a living statue. She spoke with the solemn tone of a voice from a shrine. She stood more the sepulchral avenger of regicide than the sufferer from its convictions. Her grand voice, her fixed and marble countenance, and her silent step, gave the impression of a supernatural being, the genius of an ancient oracle-a tremendous Nemesis." "She was a living Melpomene," says the same writer in conclusion; and this is evidently what Mr. Campbell means by saying "she was Tragedy personified." But the muse of the classic tragedy, and the muse of the romantic, of which the Shakespearian is the summit, are personages exceedingly different. They who cite Mrs. Siddons's Lady Macbeth as exhibiting the highest developement of her histrionic powers, are perfectly right; but when they speak of it as transcendently proving her fitness for interpreting Shakespeare, they are as decidedly wrong. It is not "a statue-like simplicity," to repeat Mr. Campbell's phrase, that makes the essence of Shakespearian character, but a picturesque complexity-to which Mrs. Siddons's massive person and sculptured genius were essentially repugnant. Her genius, indeed, has been well described as rather epic than dramatic, rather Miltonian than Shakespearian. Justice to Mrs. Siddons, and justice to Shakespeare, alike demand that this should be clearly and universally understood. The best homage to genius like hers, as to genius like his, must be, to appreciate it, not only adequately, but truly. After all that we have said, it may well be supposed that we have little desire to see or hear of any future performance of this play which shall not be conducted on the principle of thorough fidelity to the spirit of its great author. He, indeed, thought proper to exhibit in its hero the most poetical of selfishly ambitious assassins; but could little contemplate that his "black Macbeth" was to be converted into the sentimental butcher of our modern stage-a conception much more worthy of a Kotzebue than of a Shakespeare, It is high time that this national disgrace should be wiped away. The operatic insertions, founded, as we have seen, upon a total inversion of the dramatist's own meaning and purpose in the preternatural agency, must be utterly banished-they are as insufferable here as they would be in Richard the Third,' or in Othello,' or in Hamlet.' The suppressed scenes and passages must be restored. And, above all, the two leading characters must be truly personated. Then, but not till then, shall we see the moral of this great tragedy resume, in our theatres, its pristine dignity. Our sympathies will no longer be vulgarly and mischievously appealed to in behalf of a falsely-supposed passive victim of demoniacal instigations, but will find that natural and healthy channel into which the great moralist has really directed them. We shall see on the stage, as we do in the text of Shakespeare, that when a character of the highest nervous irritability, but quite devoid of sympathy, is once attracted to the pursuit of a selfishly and criminally ambitious object, its career will of necessity be as destructive to the nearest domestic ties as to political and social security. Above all, we shall cease to have obtruded upon us that mistaken poetical justice which consists in making every sort of criminal be punished by repentance in this life. Shakespeare knew much better. It is one of his greatest titles to the gratitude of mankind, that he shrunk not from shewing his auditors that there are certain kinds of villains who can never know remorse, because they are utterly incapable of sympathy. One of these is, the blunt, honest-looking knave, whom he has portrayed in Iago: another is, the poetically whining villain, whom he has exhibited in Macbeth. The mighty artist wasted not his moralizing on persuading inherent villany to be honest; he expended it more profitably, in teaching the honest man to see through the fairest visor of the incurable knave. We are the more encouraged to hope for a just theatrical rendering of this great creation, by the fact that we possess a rising Shakespearian actress of the highest promise. Among the wide range of Shakespearian characters in which this lady has already exhibited such various powers, it is her persona tion of the Lady Constance in the splendid revival of King John' which made so large a figure in the last Drury-Lane season, that peculiarly demands attention in reference to our immediate subject. In this part, as in that of Lady Macbeth, the most respectable efforts since Mrs. Siddons's time had never amounted to anything beyond a vastly inferior expression of Mrs. Siddons's conception of the character, to which the stage, as well as the audience, were accustomed to bow with a sort of religious faith and awe. The bias which the peculiar character of her genius gave to her personation of the heroine of King John,' will be found strictly analogous to that which marked her representation of Macbeth's consort. She made strongwilled ambition the ruling motive of Constance, rather than maternal affection. But Miss Helen Faucit, led, it should seem, by that intuitive sympathy of genius which has guided her happy embodiment of other Shakespearian creations, upon which the great actress of the Kemble school had not so powerfully set her stamp, has courageously but wisely disregarded theatrical prescription in the matter, has followed steadily the unsullied light of Shakespeare's words, and so has found for herself, and shown to her audience, that feeling, not pride, is the mainspring of the character.* It would, therefore, be most interesting to see this rising actress exercise her unbiassed judgment and her flexible powers upon the personation of Lady Macbeth, in lieu of that mistaken interpretation which, in Mrs. Siddons's hands, however objectionable as an illustration of Shakespeare, was grand and noble in itself, but which, in those of her later imitators, has become merely harsh and disgusting. Nor would it be interesting only; it would be highly important towards disabusing the public mind of that vitiated moral with which the corrupt representation of this play has so long infected it. Herein we see the truly national importance of * See "Female Characters in 'King John,'-Acting of The Lady Constance," pp. 26 to 37 of this volume. |