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Untitled Article
attempting to relieve himself by throwing the charges and he vast load of guilty terror on Hubert ; and that reeling joy , that very suffering of delight which shook through brain , hearty and every fibre of his frame , when , as he eagerly gasped , ' Doth Arthur live ? '&c . I cannot trace him on this paper , though every look and tone is as fresh in my memory as all were when the drop fell at the end of the act . There are of the play-goers who see nothing particularly great in Mr . Macready but his intenseness , his deep-boiling and clamorous outbursting in the terrible , the masses of passion . Oh ! that scene would have satisfied the utmost craving of such , and they might quote it daily as a
triumph of their judgment . And let those who estimate Macready in Shakspeare ' s characters by contrasting his illustrations with those of others whom they revere as the great masters , and only because they were told so , who bow to a custom , and laud as custom bids ; who honour a prescripted form because it is the fashion to honour it ,
and never dive with their own intellectual daring into the depths of Shakspeare ' wells and fountains of character and passion , hut may sometimes skim along the logical surface , and deem that a mere lo gical inference is a safe and full conclusion for all that lies within , and rolls , and boils , and streams through the channels of emotion , and the transfigurings of imagination . Let such an one bring all his prejudices , all his stubbornness of these baseless conclusions to aid him in resisting" the death scene of John ,
as it is given by Mr . Macready , and they shall be swept away into nothingness . Let him compare it and contrast it if he will , —if he can ;—his eye , his heart , his senses will confess the triumph of that scene over all others which he has looked upon , whatever he may compel his tongue to say . There was no
studied gradation , no lashing up to the required state of excitement ; every tortured tone and fibre was at the pitch , each was perfect in its time and place . The atmosphere grew sultry with the passionate fire : the conflict of pain , the commingling throes of suffering , all blending , but distinctly traceable , were so wondrously true to nature , that astonishment at , and admiration of skill and genius were lost in sympathy and commiseration with the sufferer . The very touch of the disordered garments was added misery to the fire which consumed the entrails . That scene baffles description . The voice is yet piercing and ringing in my ears ; the face , now blazing , now ashy pale , the eyes glittering with the internal heat , then set , fixed , as carbuncles , then Jis lead , deep in their sockets , the hard tension of the arms , as the hands gripped in life ' s last agony to the cushions of the couch , the stony death of the position in which the body sat for some seconds ere it fell back across the couch ; life or thought had no direction in that body ' s so falling ; it was a corpse ' s momentum ., —a weight let go . All are distinctly before me now .
Untitled Article
King John . Hi )
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Feb. 2, 1834, page 119, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2630/page/35/
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