SHAKESPEARE AT THE LYCEUM.
THROUGH all the din and clatter of the recent years, as noisy in the world of art as elsewhere, one quiet figure has come gradually to the front, and worthily won itself its niche in the varied gallery of English tragedians. Conspicuous by the absence of all the advertising feats of which we see so much—modest in his methods and diligent in his art—Mr. Forbes Robertson, bringing before us in three successive seasons Romeo and Hamlet and Macbeth, with no slavish respect for " traditions " on the one hand, but no exaggerated disregard of them on the other, has once more proved the enduring vitality of Shakespeare, and let in more light upon the infinite variety of interpretation of the Master's work, which no age can wither and no custom stale. Shakespeare may be read in endless ways. The secret of his impersonality depended on this, that he never mastered his characters, but let them master him. He did not set up a characteristic for a man, but depicted his men as all men are, creatures of many moods, changing and various, with a predominant note it may be, but never in a monotone. And as the true artist seizes on the characteristics that appeal to him the most, and studies the character from their standpoint, so many Hamlets may be all diverse and all true,—a Hamlet by Michael Angelo, like Fechter's with that fiery rush of his, which carried everything before it; or a Hamlet by Raphael, like Forbes Robertson's, with the clear-cut, pensive face suffering under its sense of doom,—one a Hamlet all of fretted nerve, the other of unsatis- fied love. There are no such uncertainties about Macbeth, which can be painted but in one colour, though with grads- tions of tone. The man is a brutal and a wholesale murderer, going from crime to crime, when once he has entered upon the path, with no remorse save what the fears of conscience bring. And the picture is the picture of a time, real or imagined, se completely as Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet are of theirs. It is probably with a view to this, being a painter as he is, that the youngest of our tragedians has chosen these three plays. The first was all medimval Italy,—faction, struggles, and love intrigues and poison. Hamlet breathes throughout a courtly atmosphere of learning and of Wittenberg College,—of philosophic disquisition and fencing bouts, and (heaven save the mark !) of private theatricals. Hamlet's reflections might have been inspired by Plato. Macbeth is a lawless and bloody picture of a lawless and a bloody time, brimming over with witchcraft, superstition, and murder, and charged with all the attributes of melodrama. It is useless to try to soften it. It must be presented as it is ; and as it is Mr. Robertson has presented it. Opinions must differ, however. " Nobody knows Macbeth, and what is to be done with it," wrote Charles Reade. "It wants a dramatist to rehearse it, and with authority." The production would have been a strange one, for Reade had the courage of his opinions about Shakespeare or anything. "Out out of McDuff's scene," he says, "all that preliminary and useless bosh where that young prig (Malcolm) pretends to be a scoundrel where he is only an ass all the time. In the next scene de-', bring on a stranger
to describe the battle,—that is the blu navies. Give
that business to McDuff." Music was • 1,o4;tuc.-d largely in the Reade edition, and "castles , os were to have no money spent on them. Mr, Robertson has only adopted Charles Reade's view, apparently, in the matter of pronunciation. For he makes his people speak of McBeth and McDuff in a manner that somewhat grates upon the ear. Macbeth and Macduff have long since passed into the common language, and, though Mr. Robertson is a good Scot and doubtless a sound authority, what has passed into language has passed into law.
It is in his double quality of actor and painter that Mr. Forbes Robertson has left his special mark upon the three plays which he has chosen. The time and place stand out conspicuously with him always, and in Macbeth most of all. For he has entirely dispensed with all the regal magnificence and elaborate appointments to which we have been accustomed, and if he has given much attention to his "castles and things," it is that they should be brought before us in all their abso- lute roughness and rudeness of fashion and construction. The Thanes banquet upon rude viands, seated upon rough stools. The State is the State of a guerilla chieftain, not of a civilised King. The dresses and the figures match the scene right well. Macbeth himself stands before us the ruddy, half- kempt chief, lawless of manner and rude of speech, going from bad to worse when once he has sold himself into the weird sisters' bondage—afraid of Banquo's progeny, afraid of all Macduff's race, shrinking from omens, and terrified by visions—a moral coward who has almost degenerated into physical fear—without the courage of his own evil convictions, yet to the last adding crime to crime, in the desperate hope of winning safety from isolation. In the scene where Banquo's spirit faces him in the banquet-hall, the utter loss of nerve, the paralysing and destroying fear, are by the actor's cunning brought vividly before us, in the masterful fashion which is apt to recur to the mind long and often after the experi- ence is over. The supernatural effects, always a dangerous thing, have been especially well-contrived. Assisted by his Banquo—himself a craftsman like his manager, and well-known as Bernard Partridge in another province of the art-world—Mr. Robertson has produced a ghostly illusion in the banquet-hall as simple as it is artistic. We remember it in many forms,—from the time when the pillar of the hall, in Charles Kean.'s version, became suddenly transparent and disclosed the dread apparition inside, to the day of Sarah Bernhardt's amazing production at the Porte St. Martin, where the fattest Banquo ever yet beheld got up as quickly as he could from under the table and sate most materially down, with a huge piece of red sealing-wax under his left eye. But we never remember to have been so well -satisfied before, either with the apparition of Banquo or with the mechanism of the witches,—with some exception, perhaps, in the matter of the spirits that appear in the cauldron, which almost baffles practical contrivance. With their infant voices and inevitable London twang, they never were, and they never can be, satisfactory Scotch phantoms, though they do say " McBeth." But that is a very small fault to find with a production by which Mr. Forbes Robertson has finally made good his claim and established his position. Macbeth is a savage and violent piece of work which can never be as great a favourite with the world as the incomparable Hanilet, a like proof though it may be that a play may be made great with the great master-passion of love introduced only as an acces- sory, when introduced at all. Nobody could play upon that theme so variously or so beautifully as Shakespeare in his Romeos and Orlandos when he chose, but none could dispense with it so completely.
It is a pleasant thing, before parting with Mr. Robertson's interesting work, to pay a cordial tribute to the graceful and gracious companion who, in Germany as well as in England, has been since his first Shakespearian essay still working by his side. When Mrs. Patrick Campbell first "flashed upon the town" as Mrs. Tanqueray—or at least upon that large portion of it who knew nothing of her early Adelphi acting, which had shown many of us that a very bright and original talent was growing up in our midst—she made at once the impression of a new and strong personality—vividly modern. vividly nervous—in many of its features recalling Aimee Desclee, the most typical modern actress of our time. If her welcome as Mrs. Tanqueray was universal, she has not pleased all her critics since. She may know to her comfort that personalities never do ; but that where they delight they delight especially. And no doubt this distinct " modernness " of hers, stirring and sympathetic in itself because so essentially human, places her at a disadvantage in the older drama, because it obliges us to think of " readings " to which we are not accustomed. And in purely artificial comedy, like the School for Scandal, it handicaps the actress heavily. But her Lady Macbeth was to us a revelation, and should be, to all who have eyes to see. All mannerisms and modernisms disappeared here ; and gave us back the impulsive, passionate, dramatic figure of Adelphi days softened and matured at once. Here was for once a lady who combined in herself as we never remembered to have seen, the soft and winsome, beautiful and almost girlish' woman with the determined partner of her husband's ambition and her husband's great first sin, who, after that, is never allowed to show that she is anything but "innocent of the knowledge" of all the guilt he bears. The regal bearing, the wifely devotion, the ascendency of the less wicked, and therefore stronger, spirit, the short and stern rebuke and eagerly watchful love, are all in Mrs. Campbell's acting turn by turn; and to us there was an infinite pathos in the famous sleep-walking scene, with a note in it of almost childlike for- lornness and repentance unutterable which remain deeply on the mind by the side of the terrified and furious Thane, a prey to terror and to passion, but not to true remol se. It was an. old and not a bad fashion with managers to divide their Shakespearian heroines into two classes. Gertrude and Emilia and Lady Macbeth fell to one hand, Ophelia and Desdemona, to the other ; while Beatrice and Portia would join hands with the first, and Viola and Imogen with the latter, with Rosalind on a kind of common ground. We think that Mrs. Campbell's Lady Macbeth makes it clear where her truest opportunities lie; and under the guidance of so scholarly a spirit and so clear an intellect as her manager's, we hope that this may be the earnest of many good things to come. For the work that he is giving us the best thanks of all Shakespearians are due to Mr. Forbes Robertson, who amongst Shakespearian actors has taken a high place indeed.
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