" MACBETH " AT THE LYCEUM THEATRE.

WHEN it became known that Miss Terry was about to appear as Lady Macbeth, there was a good deal of speculation as to whether she would endeavour to conform to the traditional reading of the character, or invest it with the qualities associated with the roles in which she has achieved the greatest success. The result has justified the predictions of those who assumed the latter view ; and the central figure of the magnifiently mounted revival at the Lyceum is not the femme d'une corruption colossale, dissimul6e, hypocrite, as conceived by Ristori, but a genial, impulsive, and loving wife who, though displaying a more than Jesuitical indifference to means, never once excites the repugnance of the spectator. Even in the murder scene, when she returns to finish the task left half-done by her irresolute husband, the feeling is not so much one of horror as of incongruity and surprise. What on earth is this graceful, amiable, and picturesque woman doing in these shambles ? is the question that rises most naturally to our lips. How did she get there ? And being there, why doesn't she faint or go off into hysterics ? For the conception, from beginning to end, is as modern as it well can be. Miss Terry never suppresses her characteristic traits of voice or gesture throughout. It is rather Lady Macbeth adapted and modified to suit the peculiar individuality of the actress, than Miss Terry sinking that individuality in Shakespeare's creation. The deformed is transformed. Of the relentless, Agrippina-like creature whose motto was Occidat dun& imperet, or, it may be, dum imperem, there is not a trace. Conjugal sympathy and self-sacrifice are the key-notes of her character. So womanly is she, that even at the most critical moments she never forgets, but is always conscious of such little impedi- ments as a braid of hair or a fold of her robe. The figure that is presented to us, though eminently picturesque and winning, is, save in one scene, wanting in the dignity of repose or statuesqueness. There is a superfluity of gesture in Miss Terry which in many of the scenes amounts to restless- ness. Every word is emphasised by a movement. The element of queenliness is lacking, notably in the banqueting scene, where the attention of the spectator is distracted by the feverish efforts she makes to divert the attention of her guests. If Lady Macbeth has been really so much maligned by commentators and actresses, how then, it will be asked, are we to explain those passages in which she seems to reveal that malignity with such unequivocal frankness ? Viewed in the light of Miss Terry's general conception of the whole character, they sound utterly unmeaning and incomprehensible. But the requisite clue will be found in Mr. Comyns Carr's opportune brochure. "Macbeth and Lady Macbeth," which corresponds in its estimate of the two chief characters so closely with the impersonations of Miss Terry and Mr. Irving, that we may be excused for assuming that this coinci- dence of opinion is not merely fortuitous, but that the pamphlet is a more or less authoritative exposition of the aims which Mr. Irving and Miss Terry have consciously striven to realise. How favourable to Lady Macbeth is the view advanced by Mr. Comyns Carr, may be gathered from the following passage :— "But it needed not his coming to enable her to divine his thoughts or to force her to confess her own. His written message to her contains no hint of murder, and yet the words she utters, as she holds his letter in her hand, have no meaning unless we suppose that the violent death of Duncan had long been the sub- ject of conjugal debate. She has watched the working of the poison in his breast, and has already anticipated the hesitation which he afterwards displays. How far her generous interpreta- tion of his halting action accords with the real character of the man we shall presently see for ourselves : but for the moment her speech suffices to afford the clearest evidence that he had already imparted to her his guilty purpose

Yet do I fear thy nature; It is top full o' the milk of human kindne.is,

To catch the nearest way : thou wouldst be great ;

Art not without ambition : but without The illness should attend it. What thou wouldst highly, That thou wouldet holly; wonldst not play false, And yet woaldst wrongly win.'

And that we may be in no doubt as to the original source from which this diabolical plot proceeded, Shakespeare makes the truth doubly plain to us in a subsequent passage. When the hesita- tion which she had feared threatens to wreck their cherished scheme of crime, she reminds him that in its inception the idea was hie, not hers :—

'What beast was't, then, That made you break this enterprise to me ?

Nor time nor place Did then adhere, and yet you would make both :— They have made themselves, and that their fitness now Does unmake you.'

Nor, indeed, would the conduct of either be humanly explicable unless we clearly grasp the situation as it is here plainly stated by Shakespeare. Her superlative strength in executive resource is only consistent with the assumption that she has accepted without questioning a policy that was none of her own devising : his apparent weakness, on the other hand, is the inevitable attitude of an imaginative temperament, which feels all the responsibilities, and forecasts the consequences of the crime it has conceived."

Again, let us take Mr. Comyns Carr's description of Lady Macbeth on the eve of Duncan's murder :— " From the moment that she perceives his wavering resolution, she takes the yoke of action on to her own shoulders. She contrives and schemes every detail of the crime, and with ever-increasing impetuosity urges his failing footsteps towards the goal he now fears to reach. But the precious moments are speeding onward, and her passionate arguments seem powerless to lift his sickened spirit ; till at the last, with all the rhetoric of despair, she pre- sents to his affrighted gaze a blackened image of herself, thinking, as well she may, that such a vision will prove more potent than curses to fan into flame the dying embers of his resolve :- 'I I have given suck, and know How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me: I would, while it was smiling in my face, Hare pinek'd my nipple from his boneless gums, And dash'd the brains out, had I so sworn as you Have done to this,'

It seems almost incredible, but it is nevertheless true, that this frenzied appeal has over and again been accepted as Laxly Mac- beth's judicial report upon her own character. A speech which is conceived in the most daring spirit of dramatic fitness, and which bears in every word the stamp of the special purpose for which it is uttered, is transformed into a prosaic statement of fact."

In fine, Lady Macbeth was not designed by Shakespeare to

excite pity and terror, but pity alone. It follows, too, that Mrs. Siddons and Ristori were wrong, if Mr. Comyns Carr and Miss Terry are right. The theory has a certain plausibility when propounded academically on paper, but it only needs to see it realised on the boards to feel how hopelessly unsatisfactory it is. It is plain to us that an effort has been made to prove that the new reading is the sight one, because a gifted and popular actress is not endowed with the peculiar tragic force requisite for the adequate interpretation of the character on the old lines. This method, if it became a precedent., might lead to dangerous results. Imagine Mr. Arthur Roberts consumed with a desire to play Hamlet What could be easier than to show that the Dane was really a person of a drily humorous tendency, with an inveterate fondness for practical joking, by which he frightened

Ophelia out of her wits? Why should not Mr. Arthur Cecil and Mrs. John Wood give us their version of Romeo and Juliet ? No; it will not do to admit that because an actor or actress, no matter how popular, can only play a part in one way, that therefore that way alone is the right one.

Although it was shorn of the uncanny element with which Ristori and other actresses managed to invest it, the sleep- walking scene was Miss Terry's best effort, and impressed the audience greatly by its picturesque pathos. The long-drawn, almost whining utterance, and the breaking-up of words into their syllables, are, we are assured, true to life, though the speech of most somnambulists is incoherent and rapid. To us, Miss Terry's delivery seemed here to lack variety. Ristori managed to produce an extraordinary effect in this scene by keeping her eyes wide open with unwinking lids throughout —a piece of realism which cost her dear, as she mentions in her recently published Memoirs (p. 197). It was indeed a terrible picture of remorse. Miss Terry, on the other hand, remains sympathetic to the last, and this final scene in her hands remains the most effective argument for Lady Macbeth's rehabilitation.

Of Mr. Irving's performance, it may be said that it has beaux moments, but also mauvais quarts d'heure. He is never commonplace, but he is oftener, and for longer periods, grotesque in this part than in any other save Romeo. Two of his "new readings," noticed by a correspondent to the St. James's Gazette on the opening night, have since been

corrected ; but he still says :—

"If it were done when 'tis done, than 'twere well. It were done quickly if the assassination," &c.

And on hearing of Lady Macbeth's death:—

" She would have died hereafter," instead of should.

Liszt once told one of his pupils not to play as if she was making an omelette. Borrowing a Lisztian image to describe one often repeated gesture of Mr. Irving's, we may be allowed to express a wish that he would not shampoo his head so frequently. At times he was quite unintelligible, and in the last scene of all, presented a repulsive picture of the usurper, unbraced, undignified, and wholly demoralised and hysterical. Of the other characters, Mr. Alexander, as Macduff, was quite the best, and in his outburst on hearing the news of the butchery of his wife and children, struck a very genuine note. Banquo was excellent as his own ghost, and the wounded serjeant spoke his lines well.

The mounting of the play, as we remarked at the outset, is truly magnificent. A finer spectacle has never been seen before even at the Lyceum. But the splendour of the accessories cannot reconcile us to a reading of the two principal characters in which their traditional relations are inverted. We are asked to believe that Shakespeare, when he created Lady Macbeth, had in his mind an amiable but foolish woman who "accepted without questioning a policy "—and such a policy !—" that was none of her own devising." Unfortunately, the same theory demands that she should be simultaneously regarded as a mistress of resource, prompt and unflinching in action, and skilled in the "rhetoric of despair." The internal evidence on which this view is based is of the flimsiest nature. If we accept it, what can be more unmeaning or gratuitous than the invocation ?—

"Come, you spirits

That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full Of direst cruelty ! make thick my blood : Stop up the access and passage to remorse, That no compunctious visitings of nature Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between The effect and it ! Come to my woman's breasts And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,

Wherever in your sightless substances

You wait on nature's mischief !"

Why should Lady Macbeth thus libel herself when she is alone? But the practical test of seeing the new theory carried out is the most destructive of all. The old Lady Macbeth may have been an abnormal type of womanhood, but she was at least intelligible and consistent. With all its charm, the new Lady Macbeth is neither.