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Untitled Article
affinities , before they decided on the quality of the whole , and with such schooling- go forth to watch an actor ' s process , especially in this character , there would be hundreds , thousands , ( nay , very few dissentients in the million , ) who , in spite of predilections , old likings , or ecstasies of admiration , would soon confess their acquiescence in what I here declare as a wellconsidered conviction , that there have been men of renown ' in
Hamlet who did not exhibit so much understanding of the true man , so much of his mind , or conception of his intellectual and physical organization , and power of thinking , so much of the true poetic spirit of dramatic life through the whole five acts , gathered in one mass , as Macready evinces in rocking his head , with such a volume of meaning , thought , feeling , and expectation
in his look , as he paces to and fro when the king , queen , and courtiers are assembling to witness the play ; or in a single passage in the short scene with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern after the play . Their old favourites were good somethings ; agreeable ,, interesting , delightful , may be , after a fashion—Hamlets they were not . But my present office is with King John .
From first to last—and I have surveyed the whole again and again , before I would permit the impressions which I took to be set down ; or suffered the impulses which then threw me onwards , to guide me in this , ere I had examined them and balanced each in the scales of calmer reason ,, to ascertain their origin and their value ;—from first to last there was not one glimmering of a
conventional acquiescence , no vague adoption of a prescripted form ; no tame yielding to the conceptions of predecessors in the part , however honoured they may have been by public applause , or the judgment of critics—there was not a twinkle of a reflection from memory : all was entirely conception—his conception—the flame of intellectual light which his own eye had thrown upon—into , the
character ; and the exhibition of that strong grasp , which imagination , creating a secondary existence , had taken upon his frame . When the curtain drew up and showed him sitting in state to receive the French embassy , to say < he looked the character' is poorly prating in conventional parlance . It was himself—John —in breathing corporeality . Of this completeness of personal
transmutation , the spectators must have been sensible ; and before he had spoken six lines , it was felt that the mind also of King John was working in that frame : moving under that selfish irritability which the poet has made a prominent feature in the character . I was so near that I could trace the quiver of the lip ,
and turn of the eye-lids , and I saw that thought had created the emotion which stirred them . The face flushed and paled in the coming , present , and passing sense ; and when the actor sprang from his attitude of assumed dignity , at the stronger dictates of his passion , to retort the defiance of Chatillon , it was at once perceived that he did not intend to curb himself by established
Untitled Article
JCirtg John . 115
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Feb. 2, 1834, page 115, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2630/page/31/
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