LEAR. WHAT audacity of genius, or what ignorance of the greatness of the task could have induced Mr. Booth, at the age of twentythree, to study and represent the character of Lear, we need not now inquire. His success in the personation is a fact of dramatic history. Hazlitt says, under date of April, 1820: "We have seen Mr. Booth's Lear with great pleasure. Mr. Kean's is a greater pleasure to come (so we anticipate).” But the critic has left it on record, that these "expectations were very considerably disappointed;" and he goes on in his brilliant way, through several pages, descanting on the grandeur of the character, and marking in scene after scene, "the deficiency and desultoriness of the interest excited" by Mr. Kean's performance of it. This sounds like implicit testimony from an unwilling witness to the superiority of Booth's Lear. At any rate, it sets the absurd question of imitation a question first put by prejudice, and since repeated by dullness entirely at rest; as Booth's performance came first in order of time, took place when he was very young, and when Kean was in the full maturity of his powers. Indeed, as the public mind was preoccupied by Booth's admired personation, there was danger that Kean himself, when he came to play the part, might be regarded as the imitator. And this consideration led him into perverse readings, which are duly scored by Hazlitt's caustic pen. The critic, however, could not dismiss his favorite without giving Booth one disparaging touch, in the following sentence: "In a subsequent part Mr. Kean did not give to the reply of Lear· 'Ay, every inch a king!' the same vehemence and emphasis that Mr. Booth did, and in this he was justified; for, in the text, it is an exclamation of indignant irony, not of conscious superiority; and he immediately adds with deep disdain, to prove the nothingness of his pretensions 'When I do stare, see how the subject quakes.' From this sentence, judicially pronounced, we appeal to the judgment of the thoughtful reader. Lear has just entered on the scene, fantastically dressed with flowers; and with the exclamation "No, they cannot touch me for coming: I am the king himself." No irony here, but downright mad earnest. Directly after, in reply to Gloster's question'Is 't not the king ?" the sense of outraged majesty, which, complicated with filial ingratitude, was the very occasion of his madness, comes back on him in a full tide of consciousness, as he exclaims "Ay, every inch a king! Hazlitt infers the irony from the line which follows "When I do stare, see how the subject quakes." To sustain his view there should be some 66 subject" present who pays the king no respect. There is none. The only other occupants of the scene are Edgar and his blind father, who stand by filled with grief and reverence. Edgar. “O, thou side-piercing sight!" Lear is talking to the shadows of his distem pered fancy, which become realities to him. He goes on "I pardon that man's life," etc. In the year 1835, fifteen years after these first performances in London, it was our privilege, in early youth, to see Mr. Booth enact Lear, at the National Theatre in Boston. We saw him then for the first time. The blue eye; the white beard; the nose in profile, keen as the curve of a falchion; the ringing utterance of the names, "Regan," "Goneril;" the close-pent-up passion, striv-· ing for expression; the kingly energy; the affecting recognition of Cordelia in the last act made a deep impression on our boyish mind. We saw and heard all this, but we did not see Lear. We were not old enough. A closet study of the great poet, coupled with the reading of Charles Lamb's refined and ingenious strictures on the capacity of the stage, conspired to prevent our attendance on a representation of either Hamlet or Lear, during the lapse of many years. The grandeur and subtlety of Mr. Booth's performance in other characters, however, led us one night to dare his Hamlet. We found the atmosphere of the play-house not stifling to the imagination, provided there was genius on the stage. Lamb's fantastic theory vanished. The illumination which accompanied Booth's Hamlet, filled us with eagerness to witness his Lear. We hold the just representation of this character to be the sublime of the actor's art. "There be players that we have seen play, and heard others praise, and that highly," who, whether developed among us, or arriving from over sea with their budget of literary credentials, did little else in Lear, but show us the choler or the querulousness of an old king, abused and abandoned of his children. They yielded to the temptation of rendering the stormier passages with melodramatic fury, and the milder ones with the peevish feebleness of age. Mr. Kean seems to have overdone the part in both these respects. But overdoing, on the stage, is usually the result of under-thinking. And if there be one character in Shakespeare which requires in an actor fullness of thought, delicacy and subtlety of apprehension, and beyond these, the imaginative and identifying power, it is the character of Lear. Mr. Macready gave us a scholastic per |