Shakspeare. There is much in this part of the performance which is entirely out of the reach of the mere actor. The solution by the action with the toilet-glass of the difficult passage “It is the cause,” and the explanation of the story of the Turk and the Venetian by the seizure of Iago. are not triumphs of acting; they are marvels of critical sagacity. Such things the Kembles and Youngs, who established our stage traditions, could never have grasped in their conceptions. They could as easily have written Johnson’s character of Polonius, or the critique on “Hamlet” in Wilhelm Meister.
We cannot leave the performance at the Princess’s without a few words about two of the other actors.
Mr. Ryder renders Iago as it has probably never been rendered before. He looks the sardonic remorseless Ancient to the life. The diabolical sneers behind the back of his master, the brutal coarseness to his wife, the cajolery and banter with Roderigo, the hypocritical tenderness for Desdemona, and the bursts of virtuous indignation at the assault on Cassio, are all pourtrayed with incomparable vividness and spirit. Where all is so excellent, it is clearly hypercriticism to suggest any improvement; but perhaps the contrast should be a little more marked between the manner in conversation and the manner when uttering soliloquy. We cannot help thinking that the speech, after he has filched the handkerchief from Emilia, when he sees his way in a moment to the whole plot, should be given with a fierce abandonment to the evil demon that possesses him; and we fancy that flinging up the lace embroidered toy, which is to be the instrument of so much woe, and catching it again in his hand as it flutters down with a gesture of malignant gaiety, would enhance the effect of the lines:—
Are, to the jealous, Trifles, light as air,
Are, to the jealous, confirmations strong
As proofs of holy writ.
On the whole, however, this character is far superior to any which this veteran of the London stage has undertaken. It is superior to his Buckingham or to his Hubert, both of which were admirable, and it atones for the vulgar Transpontine manner in which for seventy-two nights he persisted in acting Claudius, in Hamlet.
Mr. Jordan’s Cassio does not quite satisfy us. Throughout he lacks gentlemanly ease. In the drunken scene he does not get intoxicated soon enough; and he gets sober too soon. The sentence—“I pray you pardon me—I cannot speak,” was uttered by the late Charles Kemble (incomparably the best Cassio that ever lived), with the slippery uncertainty of one overtaken in his cups. Mr. Jordan, in spite of Mr. Fechter’s stage direction, is restored to complete sobriety by the entrance of Othello.
This article has already exceeded the limits we prescribed to ourselves, yet our readers will be sure to anticipate some allusion to the foreign cadence (for it is a cadence, not an accent) which still impairs the effect of Mr. Fechter’s delivery of English blank verse. It is certainly not so perceptible now as it was when Mr. Fechter first came to London, and we conceive that when this paper is in the hands of the readers of Once a Week, it will be even less noticeable than it is when we write. The cadence is most injurious in the long speeches, which are, owing to this defect, cut up into fragments by numerous pauses, and in more than one instance subjected to unjustifiable curtailment and monstrous excisions. Of course we cannot tell what parts Mr. Fechter proposes to undertake in time to come, but we cannot help thinking that the three plays which are left us in Shakspeare’s later manner—“Coriolanus,” “Julius Cæsar,” “Antony and Cleopatra,” would afford large scope for his peculiar talents; and as the dialogue is far more broken and the speeches are shorter, all deficiencies of pronunciation would be completely lost. The last of these plays would afford ample opportunities for picturesque action and wealth of fancy, and has the advantage of being almost new to the present generation of play-goers. But the faithfulness of Mr. Fechter’s tongue to his native pronunciation is after all a secondary matter—we think of it as little as we did of the Swedish accent in which Jenny Lind sung “John Anderson My Jo,” or “On mighty pens;” and we are sure, if Shakspeare himself were to witness his Othello at the Princess’s, he would say as his own Henry said to Katherine:
“If you will love me soundly with your French heart, I will be glad to hear you confess it brokenly with your English tongue.”
Though we have in the previous pages freely commented on his readings and innovations, we cannot take leave of Mr. Fechter without assuring him of our entire sympathy and hearty admiration—nor without pointing him out to all our actors as the great master of gesture and expression—as the most consummate and careful observer of minute points of detail and niceties of characterisation,[1] and as a man profoundly sensible of the high responsibilities of his Art.
ROSAMOND, QUEEN OF THE LOMBARDS.
Her long black hair came curling down
Above her shoulders bare,
Upon her brow a jewelled crown,—
And o’er her violet eyes a frown,
And a look of lone despair.
- ↑ As illustrations of Fechter’s greatness in trifles, observe in “Hamlet” the gradations of courtesy with which he greets Horatio, his fellow student and friend, Marcellus, his acquaintance, and Bernardo, a stranger. In “Othello,” the indication of thorough honesty and manliness in sharply and decisively turning the key in the house-door, when craftily solicited by Iago to act as though guilty, and shun “the raised father and his friends,” the gesture of command with which he waives back the servants of Brabantio, who, presuming on the probable fall in his fortunes, attempt to precede him, and the reality of his occupation with his papers in act iii. when, instead of glancing at one stage letter, held in both hands as nobody ever reads a letter in real life, he peruses, endorses, annotates, and throws aside, as though each paper claimed a distinct consideration and required a different treatment. May we hint that the banner of the “valiant Moor” should not be a gaudy ensign like the flags in a Lord Mayor’s Show, but a tattered and smoke-begrimed standard like those which we recall in the entry of the victors of Agincourt in Mr. Kean’s “Henry the Fifth,” and, further, that the house with illuminated windows at the back of the stage (act iv., scene 3) must be the dwelling of Bianca, not Iago, and that the tinkling of a lute from that direction, stopping just before Cassio enters, would be suggestive and natural.
