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    means of support ; when she can and does earn them , it is barbarism to treat her like a Russian slave whose titled master pockets the pence . If ever there have been people in the world whose money was their own , Mrs . Siddons was one ; and for the reversion of her own , law and custom made her a supplicant ! The true policy of society , and one of the surest means of bettering it ,

    by improving the condition of women , would be to afford them every facility for acquiring more strength of mind and character , by rendering them more independent in pecuniary matters . Men will never be free while women are servile . And servile they must be , while they are trained to look to marriage as furnishing them with the means of support in idleness , or as depriving them of means of support accumulated by their own industry .

    Mr . Campbell laments , and with reason , that in Mrs . Siddons ' g performances the characters sketched b y inferior dramatists were so much more frequent than those of Snakspeare . The responsibility , for this fact rests not with the actress , but with the managers the public , and that aristocratical legislation which upheld , and still upholds , the monopoly by which the theatre is degraded and the public taste corrupted . In such a state of things , preeminent

    honour belongs to any actor whose talent and influence are directed towards rendering the finest productions of the great bard , restored to their purity , more prominent at the large theatres . The passing away of the Kemble dynasty , whose last crowned one is said to have determined on depositing her regalia in the great republican receptacle of abdicated princes , has not left the boards without a qualified upholder of the really legitimate drama . Mr .

    Macready has of late enacted little but Shakspeare ; and little but Shakspeare should be enacted by a man of mind so philosophic , of conception so just , of taste so delicate ; with critical faculties so acute , and the sense of poetical appreciation so strong ; and whose powers of personation and expression ( though with some physical drawbacks ) are so vast and varied . His representations of King John , Henry IV ., Hamlet , Coriolanus , and Macbeth , well deserve

    the analysis of the finest criticism . Our memory is long enough to compare one point in the latter character with the acting of John Kemble . It occurs at the disappearance of the Ghost of Banquo . Kemble ' s acting went on the assumption that the ghost was altogether a phantom of the brain . He plucked up coura ge while it was yet before him , folded his arms , walked up t 0 it defyingly , and fairly drove it off the stage . Once he

    attempted to make the audience participate in his theory , by not allowing the ghost to rise at all , and addressing himself to the em pty chair ; but the audience thought a si ^ ht of the ghost was included in their bargain , and would have all they had paid for . Macready , on the contrary , supposes the external presence of the ? host ; he cannot bear the sight of it ; he covers his eyes in horror ; * nd when his fearful glance at the haunted spot only falls on

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    Campbell $ Life ofMrt . Siddotu . 549

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    No . 92 . ° 2 R

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Aug. 2, 1834, page 549, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2636/page/19/