Glo'ster. What, naught to do with mistress Shore ? I tell thee, fellow, He that doth naught with her, excepting one, Were best to do it secretly, alone, Brackenbury. What one, my Lord? Glo'ster,—Her husband, knave :-Would'st thou betray me?' We think, if any thing could give additional effect to the fine taunting irony of these lines, it would be Mr. Kean's mode of delivering them. He is almost the only actor who does not spoil Shak speare. Again, a very spirited scene of a different description, which is an astonishing mixture of violence and duplicity, occurs when Glo'ster rushes into the apartment where the Queen's friends are assembled, to complain of their taking advantage of his meekness and simplicity:Glo'ster. They do me wrong, and I will not endure it. Who are they that complain unto the king, That I, forsooth, am stern, and love them not? By holy Paul, they love his Grace but lightly, That fill his ears with such dissentious rumours ! Because I cannot flatter, and speak fair, Smile in men's faces, smooth, deceive, and cog, Duck with French nods, and apish courtesy, I must be held a rancorous enemy. Cannot a plain man live, and think no harm, By silken, sly, insinuating Jacks? Grey.-To whom in all this presence speaks your Grace? A plague upon you all!' This is certainly an admirable conclusion to so modest an introduction. Any one who reads this passage, and who has seen Mr. Kean acquit himself in similar situations, must, we think, feel with us a desire to see him in this. We might multiply these instances of characteristic traits in the adroit and high-spirited Richard. We shall give one more, which is so fine in its effect, and besides, conveys so striking a picture of the outward demeanour which an actor, to fulfil the poet's conception, ought to assume in the part, that we cannot resist giving it entire. It is the scene where he entraps the unsuspecting Hastings : Hastings. His grace looks cheerfully and smooth this morning : I think, there's ne'er a man in Christendom, For by his face straight shall you know his heart. By any likelihood he show'd to-day? Hastings.-Marry, that with no man here he is offended; Re-enter Glo'ster and Buckingham. 'Glo'ster.-I pray you all, tell me what they deserve Upon my body with their hellish charms ? Hastings. The tender love I bear your grace, my lord, To doom the offenders: whosoe'er they be, I say, my lord, they have deserved death. Glo'ster. Then be your eyes the witness of their evil; Is, like a blasted sapling, wither'd up; And this is Edward's wife, that monstrous witch, That by their witchcraft thus have marked me. Hastings. If they have done this deed, my noble lord- Talk'st thou to me of ifs !—Thou art a traitor : Off with his head! Now by St. Paul I swear, I will not dine until I see the same. Lovell and Catesby, look that it be done. The rest, that love me, rise and follow me.' Now this is despatching business in the true dramatic style. Poets cannot take the same bold licenses, with their characters on the stage, till kings are reinstated in their former plenitude of power. The incident which is here omitted in the acting play of Richard III. has been transferred to Rowe's Jane Shore. We should like to see it restored to its original place, and justice done it by Mr. Kean's distorted gestures, and smothered voice, suddenly bursting on the ear like thunder. of her performance of the part. There is in the character itself an extreme spirit, and at the same time an extreme delicacy, which it is not easy to unite. Miss Brunton went through the different scenes, however, with a considerable degree of grace, vivacity, and general propriety, never falling below, and seldom rising above mediocrity. She does not 'Snatch a grace beyond the reach of art;' nor, according to another line of the same poet, which seems to convey a perfect idea of female comic acting, 'Catch ere she falls the Cynthia of the minute.' We have already objected to this young lady's recitation, a certain didactic, monotonous twang, and we cannot upon the present occasion recant our criticism. Miss Foote was Violante's friend, Donna Isabella, and looked and lisped the part very mincingly. Charles Kemble's Don Felix is one of his best parts. He raves, sighs, starts, frets, grows jealous, and relents, with all the characteristic spirit of an amorous hero; and in the drunken scene with old Don Lopez, where he produces his pistol as the marriage-contract, is particularly excellent and edifying. Fawcett played Lissardo as he plays almost every thing he chattered like a magpie, and strutted like a crow in a gutter. But Emery's Gibby was the thing: the genius of Scotland shone through his Highland plaid and broad bluff face: he seemed evidently afraid neither of having his voice heard, nor his face seen. In person he resembled the figure of the Highlander which we see stuck up as a sign at tobacconists' windows. We never see nor wish to see better acting than this. Emery's acting is indeed the most perfect imitation of common nature on the stage. Abbott was respectable as Colonel Briton. Mrs. Gibbs's Flora was what every waitingwoman ought to be. : VENICE PRESERVED The Times.] [October 10, 1817. DRURY-LANE THEATRE. OTWAY'S noble tragedy of Venice Preserved was produced here last night. The effect upon the whole was not satisfactory. The novelties of the representation were Mr. H. Johnstone as Pierre, and Miss Campbell (from the Dublin Theatre) as Belvidera. Of Mr. Johnstone's Pierre, after having seen Mr. Kemble in it, or even Mr. Young, we cannot speak in terms of applause. The character is not one of blunt energy, but of deep art. It is more sarcastic than fierce, and even the fierceness is more calculated to wound others than to shake or disturb himself. He is a master-mind, that plays with the foibles and passions of others and wields their energies to his dangerous purposes with conscious careless indifference. Mr. Johnstone was boisterous in his declamation, coarse in his irony, pompous and common-place in his action. Mr. Rae (as Jaffier), in the famous scene between these two characters, displayed some strong touches of nature and pathos. Miss Campbell, as Belvidera, did not altogether realize our idea of Otway's heroine; one of the most replenished sweet works of art or nature.' Her face, though not handsome, is not without expression; but its character is strength, rather that softness. In her person she is graceful, and has a mixture of dignity and ease in her general deportment. Her voice is powerful, but in its higher tones it rises too much into a scream, and in its gentler ones subsides into a lisp, which is more infantine than feminine. In her general style of acting she put us sometimes in mind of Mrs Fawcit, sometimes of Miss Somerville, and more than once of Miss O'Neill. Her delineation of the part, if not sufficiently tender or delicate, was however forcible, impassioned, and affecting. We thought the last scene, in which she goes mad, and digs for her murdered husband in the grave, the best. We should indeed give her the preference over Miss O'Neill in this very trying scene. Her expression of the disordered wanderings of the imagination, and of the last desperate struggles of passion in her bosom, both by the intonations of her voice, and the varying actions of her body, were more natural, and less repulsive than the mere physical violence of Miss O'Neill in the same passage. The play was given out for repetition with some marks of disapprobation from a part of the audience. The Times.] SHE STOOPS TO CONQUER [October 15, 1817. COVENT-GARDEN THEATRE. GOLDSMITH'S comedy of She Stoops to Conquer was played at this theatre last night: its reception was highly favourable. It bears the stamp of the author's genius, which was an indefinable mixture of the original and imitative. His plot, characters, and incidents, are all new, and yet they are all old, with little variation or disguise—that is, the writer sedulously avoided common-place, and sought for singularity, but found it rather in the unhackneyed and out-of-the-way inventions of those who had gone before him than in his own stores. His Vicar of Wakefield, which abounds more than any of his works in delightful and original traits, is still very much borrowed from Fielding's Joseph Andrews. Again, the characters and adventures of Tony Lumpkin and his mother in the present comedy are a counterpart, even to the incident of the theft of the jewels, of those of the Widow Blackacre and her booby son in Wycherley's Plain Dealer. The change of character and the rustic d'isguise of Miss Hardcastle, by which she gains her lover, are also a faint imitation of Letitia Hardy in The Belle's Stratagem. This sort of plagiarism, which gives us a repetition of what are comparatively new and eccentric pictures of human life, is much to be preferred to the dull routine of trite, vapid, every-day common-places: but it is also more dangerous, as the stealing of pictures or family plate, where the goods are immediately identified, is surer of detection than the stealing of bank-notes or the current coin of the realm. Johnson's 's sarcasm against some writer that his singularity was not his excellence,' cannot be applied to Goldsmith's works in general: but we do not know whether it might not in severity be applied to She Stoops to Conquer. The incidents and characters are, some of them, exceedingly amusing; but it is a little at the expense of probability and bienseance. Tony Lumpkin is certainly a very essential, and unquestionably comic personage; and his absurdities or his humours were very effectually portrayed by Liston. His impenetrability and unconscious confusion of mind and face in reading and spelling out the letter was admirable. Charles Kemble's bashful scene with his mistress was irresistibly ludicrous, and excellently well played but still it did not quite overcome our incredulity as to the existence of such a character in such circumstances. It is a highly amusing caricature, a ridiculous fancy, but no more. One of the finest and most delicate touches of real acting we ever witnessed was in the transition of this modest gentleman's manner to the easy and agreeable tone of familiarity with the supposed chambermaid, which was not total and abrupt, but exactly such in kind and degree as such a character of natural reserve and constitutional timidity would undergo from the change of circumstances. Miss Brunton's Miss Hardcastle was a very correct and agreeable piece of acting. Mrs. Davenport's Mrs. Hardcastle was like her acting in all such characters, as good as it could possibly be. :: KEAN'S MACBETH The Times.] [October 21, 1817. DRURY-LANE THEATRE. MACBETH (with Matthew Lock's music) was played here last night. Mr. Kean was Macbeth, Miss Campbell Lady Macbeth. We never saw the former to such advantage in the part, Mr. Kean's Macbeth |