The Hamlets of the Stage: Part I

IT was about three o’clock in the afternoon when fashionable people of the time of Queen Bess set out for the theatre. Even then they were too late to see the curtain drawn aside for the first act. Shakespeare’s plays had not yet been “ adapted to the stage,” and must begin in good season, that the epilogue might be spoken before sunset. For in those days the streets of London, abounding in mud-holes and dangerous pitfalls, were not lighted even by the dim oil lamps in vogue a century later ; and though the better class of people had link-boys bearing torches to guide the way, the poorer sort must go unlighted through the gathering darkness. Speedily, too ; for the Bankside was fruitful in broils and robberies and broken heads, and honest folk must get home, lest they be comprehended for vagrom men and villanous breakers of the peace.

The Globe Theatre — managers, William Shakespeare and Richard Burbage — was the most popular in London from 1597 to 1630. It was built near the Bankside, on the Surrey side of the Thames, by Burbage and his brother, from the materials of their father’s old theatre at Shoreditch, and was a brannew edifice with ‘‘All the world’s a stage ” inscribed over the front entrance in good scholarly Latin. It was a circular building, with high walls; the stage and the adjoining boxes, or side-rooms, were roofed, but the main part was uncovered. General admission, sixpence. For a reserved seat in one of the boxes, or, better still, for a stool upon the stage, one might pay as high as two shillings. Extravagant young gallants, who wished to display their brave new doublets and hose, often gave their shillings, after the stools were all taken, for the privilege of reclining upon the rush-strewn stage, and incommoding the crowded players with their outstretched legs.

The Globe was the summer theatre of “ her Majesty’s servants.” In winter they removed to Blackfriars, where the old cloisters resounded with the passionate speeches of the actors and the answering plaudits of the pit. Here Oueen Elizabeth, with her ladies and courtiers, sometimes lent to the production of a new piece the lustre of her royal presence. Here, perchance, my Lord of Essex, when not in disgrace, attended haughtily to the players ; or the splendid Raleigh, in his suit of white satin, “with his necklace of pearls each bigge as a robin’s egg,” whispered in the royal ear a good word for his friend Shakespeare. In the pit at the Globe, the noble Southampton, stately and courteous, may sometimes have greeted that rising star of philosophy, Francis Bacon; and Thomas Lodge, a flourishing physician who had done with playwriting, may have jostled elbows with Ben Jonson.

When Richard Burbage,leading actor at the Globe and Blackfriars, made his first appearance in Hamlet, he must have been about thirty, for Shakespeare was careful to fit the part to him in all respects. Though a great favorite with play-goers and his brother manager, he was physically far from our ideal of the pale, slender, melancholy Dane. He was certainly short, for in “ Jeronimo,” specially written for him, the author made him say : —

He was likewise stout, and Shakespeare, finding that he grew “ fat and scant of breath,” endowed his poetic Hamlet with the actor’s unpoetic physical characteristics.

Of Burbage’s quality as an actor Richard Flecknoe wrote in 1664 : “ He was a delightful Proteus, so wholly transforming himself into his part, and putting off himself with his clothes, as he never (not so much as in the tiringroom) assumed himself again until the play was done....He had all the parts of an excellent actor, animating his speech with action, his auditors being never more delighted than when he spoke, or more sorry than when he held his peace. Yet even then, he was an excellent actor still, never failing in his part when he had done speaking, but with his looks and gestures maintaining it still into the height.”

How Burbage dressed the part, the annals of the stage give little hint. It was then the custom of courtiers to present their cast-off suits to the players. When young Walter Raleigh got his cloak muddied under Elizabeth’s feet, the soiled garment probably went into the wardrobe of some company of actors. And Burbage, it is conjectured, played Hamlet in the same style of dress which Rutland or Southampton or Raleigh was wont to wear at court — the high cone-shaped hat with broad brim and long feather, velvet doublet slashed with silk, satin breeches enormously stuffed out with feathers, long rapier, stiff ruff, and flowing hair.

In middle life Burbage seems to have become too u fat and scant of breath” for Hamlet. At all events he won his later laurels in Richard III., and grew so identified with the character that his companions called him 11 King Dick.” There is an old story that one night he had an engagement after the theatre to sup with a mercer’s wife, and that Shakespeare, learning of the appointment, was, there before him, and deep in supper and converse with the dame when Burbage’s tap was heard upon the locked door. “Who is it?” asked the fair false one. “ Let me in,” replied the impatient actor. “Away! I know nothing of thee.” “Not know me! It is I, thy Richard III.” “Avaunt, crook-backed usurper! " interposed the dramatist; “ knowest thou not that William the Conqueror came before Richard the Third ? ”

Burbage, like many another, was painter as well as actor, and we find mention of a “ portrait of a lady from his brush. He died at about fifty, and our slender knowledge of his professional merit rests upon a few fervent eulogies. These are extracts : —

Joseph Taylor and John Lowen were both members of the Globe company in Shakespeare’s time, and both played Hamlet. It has been contended that Taylor was the original Prince of Denmark, but that is probably a mistake. “ King Dick ” was not the man to relinquish the leading business while still in his prime. All that remains of Taylor’s memory is the tradition that his person was better suited to the part than Burbage’s, and that he was an “ incomparable Hamlet.”

Lowen is the connecting link between this early epoch of the stage and the time of Betterton. He lived to be ninety years old, and died in the reign of Charles I. Rowe says : “ Betterton was instructed in his acting by Sir William Davenant, who had it from old Mr. Lowen, who had his instructions from Mr. Shakespeare himself.’’

Davenant likewise ought to have gleaned many useful hints upon acting and playwriting from Shakespeare, at the fireside of his father’s comfortable inn in Oxford, where the manager and poet was wont to stop on his journeys from London to Stratford. Mrs. Davenant was a buxom, handsome dame, much younger than her lord, and the times were full of scandal. The gossips shook their heads meaningly, when Shakespeare stood sponsor for the boy, and hinted at a nearer relationship. One day, when the lad was running eagerly to meet the favorite guest, a neighbor asked, “Whither so fast, little Will ? ” “ To meet my godfather.” “ Take care, my child,” returned the questioner, “ lest thou take the name of God in vain.”

In later years Sir William himself claimed that he was a natural son of the great dramatist. He lived to be poet-laureate after Ben Jonson, and to be knighted for his fidelity to the royal cause in the dark days of the Civil War. During the Commonwealth he escaped to France, was captured by a parliamentary cruiser while leading a company of French artisans to the Virginian Colony, and, after two years’ imprisonment in England, was released at the intercession of the poet Milton. After the Restoration, when Milton came near losing his liberty, if not his head, for his republicanism, it is said that Davenant’s influence secured his pardon from the crown. To Davenant was granted the patent for the “ Duke’s Playhouse,” and to him the stage was indebted for the introduction of better scenery and richer costumes than had ever been known before.

One August evening, just two hundred years ago, Samuel Pepys went home and made this entry in his diary : “ To the Duke of York’s Playhouse, and there saw Hamlet, which we have not seen this year before or more ; and mightily pleased with it, but above all with Betterton, the best part, I believe, that ever man acted.”

Thomas Betterton was the first great artist after Burbage in the character of the “mad lover.” Once, during Betterton’s day, Colley Cibber and Joseph Addison, sitting together in the pit, saw some robustious, periwig-pated fellow throw himself into a rage at the sight of the ghost, and the Spectator modestly asked his player companion if he thought it natural for Hamlet to fall into such a passion with his father’s spirit, “which, though it might have astonished, had not provoked him.” Both Cibber and Addison joined all contemporary writers in chanting Betterton’s praises. “Alas,”mourned Cibber, after his death, “ I never see Shakespeare’s plays played by any other, but it draws from me the lamentation of Ophelia, —

Yet Betterton is described by the preraphaelite pencil of old Anthony Aston as having “an ill figure, large head, short, thick neck, stooped shoulders, and long arms. He had little eyes, broad face, a little pock-marked, corpulent body, thick legs, and large feet. His actions were few, but just. His voice low and grumbling, yet he could tune it, by some artful device, so that it surprised universal attention even from fops and orange-girls.”

This was the Hamlet over whom all London went mad. Did ever so many imperfections come into one grace ? What genius must have lived in a man who could so transform and conceal such an array of disadvantages !

Betterton was the son of a cook in the service of Charles I. He went on the stage in 1659, when he was twentyfour years old. He first played Hamlet two years after his debut. His Ophelia was the charming Mistress¹ Sanderson, of whom he was known to be enamored, and the town was as much interested in the real as the mimic lovers. They were married shortly after, and the young Hamlet found in his Ophelia a sweet and devoted wife. She is said to have been the first woman who appeared on the public stage. Up to her time feminine parts were played by boys ; and as late as January 1661, Pepys records: “At the theatre, where was acted ‘ The Beggar’s Bush,’ it being very well done. And here the first time I ever saw women come upon the stage.”

Betterton’s power seems to have been greatest in counterfeiting or rather exhibiting the stronger emotions. The most impressive points of his Hamlet were in the closet scene, particularly where the prince sees the ghost. While he talked to his mother in tones of inexpressible tenderness, his horror and his eager desire to learn what the distressed spirit wished him to do “made the ghost equally terrible to the spectator as to himself.” Though his complexion was “ naturally ruddy and sanguine,” when his father’s shade appeared he turned instantly as “ pale as his neckcloth. His whole body seemed affected by a tremor inexpressible, which was felt so strongly by the lookers-on that the blood seemed to shudder in their veins likewise.” In the first scene with the ghost no ranting marred his tones, but they “seemed to rise from breathless amazement into the most tender impatience and the most touching pity, restrained all through by deep filial reverence.” But he omitted many beautiful and effective lines, as,

These were clearly injurious omissions, but that was the age in which Cibber patched up Richard III. for the stage, and Dryden rewrote the Tempest.

At first Betterton played Hamlet in the dress of a courtier of Charles II. Afterward, in the costume of William of Orange, with streaming shoulderknots, cocked hat, and enormous powdered wig, walked his short, portly, stooping figure, the “ glass of fashion, and the mould of form.” Yet he held spectators in tears, in awe, in breathless expectancy too intense for applause. “ And for my part,” he said, “ I think no applause equal to attentive silence.”

For many years he was manager as well as tragedian. When Colley Cibber first appeared before a London audience, he had the misfortune to annoy Betterton by some delinquency or act of carelessness. At the end of the performance Betterton inquired the name and salary of the offender, and learning that as yet the young actor was receiving no pay, he directed the business manager to put him down at ten shillings a week, and fine him five as a punishment. No wonder Colley always praised the ladder upon which he first climbed to fame. Betterton was notably kind and encouraging to young and obscure actors. When Robert Wilks went up to London to try his fortune on the stage at a salary of fifteen shillings a week, he was so overcome by the power and dignity of Betterton’s Melantius, in “ The Maid’s Tragedy,” that he trembled and stammered in his part. After the scene was over, Betterton taking his hand, said kindly: “ Young man, this fear does not ill become you ; a horse that sets out at the strength of his speed will soon be jaded.”

Even experienced actors were overpowered by the genius of Betterton. Barton Booth, on first attempting the part of the ghost, with Betterton for Hamlet, was struck “with such horror that he could not speak the part.”

For fifty years, Betterton adorned the stage, and raised it to higher repute than it had ever borne. He was frugal as well as generous ; and though his salary was never more than four pounds a week, he saved several thousand pounds for his declining years. But speculation was rife in those days, and he was induced to risk his property in a commercial venture to the East Indies. He lost it all, and old age found him needy. At seventy-four, a benefit was given him, and Mrs. Barry spoke an epilogue by Rowe. From her sweet lips rippled the lines : —

[Pointing to the top of the stage.”

The next year, 1710, he had another benefit, which yielded one thousand pounds, — an enormous sum for those days. He appeared in his favorite character of Melantius, and played almost with his youthful power, but he was suffering so much from gout that he was compelled to wear slippers. To lessen the swelling he used an application, which drove the disease to his head, and three days after, the grand old actor was dead. Mrs. Betterton was immediately allowed a pension from the crown; but she was quite crushed by her bereavement, after fifty years of happy wedded life, and did not survive to draw her pension. Betterton’s great genius, pure character, and devotion to his chosen art, rendered him worthy of a resting-place among the illustrious dead, and he was buried in Westminster Abbey. Steele describes the emotions he felt while waiting to witness the interment “of one from whose acting I had received more strong impressions of what is great and noble in human nature, than from the arguments of the most solid philosophers, or the descriptions of the most charming poets.....While I walked in the cloisters, I thought of him with the same concern as if I waited for the remains of a person who had, in real life, done all that I had seen him represent.”

Most eminent actors of those days aspired to be, like Shakespeare, authors as well. Betterton’s original plays did not win him much fame, but his alterations and adaptations of dramas were successful, and many men of letters were proud to take counsel of his taste and experience. So great was his veneration for the memory of Shakespeare, that he made a journey through Warwickshire to gather reminiscences of him ; and Rowe acknowledged himself indebted to Betterton for many incidents related in his life of the great poet. Dryden thanks him for “judiciously lopping twelve hundred lines from my tragedy of Don Sebastian,” — perhaps the only instance on record of an author’s being grateful to anybody for cutting him down. And Pope, who was a mere boy when he met the great actor, consulted him about his verses, and painted a portrait of him, which is said to be still in existence. It is a precious relic, — a picture of the greatest of England’s early actors, painted by the poet who stamped himself more deeply upon his own times than any other English poet has done.

For thirty-two years after the death of Betterton, the stage lacked a great Hamlet. Painstaking Robert Wilks won considerable reputation, principally in the scene with Ophelia, — which he played with less boisterousness than Garrick, his successor, —and in the scene with Queen Gertrude, in which he threw singular pathos, persuasiveness, and earnestness into the appeal, “Mother, for love of grace ! ” According to Davies, “he understood the tender passion in a superior degree, and had a tall, erect person, pleasant aspect, and elegant address.”

Wilks was born in Dublin, and his family intended him for the Church. But Greek and Latin were little to his taste, and he finally gave up his studies for a government clerkship in Dublin.

Here he fostered a lurking predilection for the stage, by frequenting the theatres, and eagerly discussing all the new plays. This might have proved a mere passing fancy, had he not made a clandestine marriage, which neither his own father nor the father of his bride could ever be persuaded to forgive. Exiled from home, and deprived of means and official position through the persecution of his father, he and his young bride became the subject of much talk and sympathy in Dublin. A warm-hearted, childless goldsmith and his wife took them in, and gave them a pleasant home for two years. Meanwhile Wilks went upon the stage, and the kindness of Betterton soon helped him to eminence. He ultimately became a successful manager of the Haymarket, in company with Colley Cibber, and lived to be over seventy. He was most famous in genteel comedy, and his Sir Harry Wildair was the best ever seen, till clever, versatile Peg Woffington surpassed it. Dick Steele says : “To beseech gracefully, to approach respectfully, to pity, to mourn, to love, are the places wherein Wilks may be said to shine with the utmost beauty.”

The clever and dissipated Powell was contemporary with Wilks. So was the elegant and scholarly Barton Booth, who was, like Wilks, designed for the pulpit, but ran away from Trinity College, Cambridge, at seventeen, to join a company of strolling players. His greatest parts were those of dignity and majesty. His Cato was superb. Even Addison could witness it without regretting the days of Betterton. But Booth does not seem to have won much reputation as the Prince of Denmark, though the ghost was one of his most famous characters, and he is said to have given it “ with an effect almost appalling.”

At forty-eight he was seized with incurable madness, which lasted, with a few lucid intervals, until his death, four years later. So much was his art nature, that he fancied himself the actual king or tyrant he had so often personated, and wore his crown of straw with all his wonted majesty. He was an accomplished gentleman, and more courted by the rich and noble than any other actor of his day.

But none of these Hamlets won the hearts of spectators. We find no one to dim the memory of Betterton till we come down to “ Little Davy,” — the idol of the public for thirty-five years. Garrick had French blood in his veins — the blood of noble Huguenots. His father was a captain in the British army, and David vras born at an inn in Hereford, while the captain was stationed there on recruiting service. When twelve .years old, the boy acted in plays, with great applause, in Lichfield Grammar School. Even heavy Samuel Johnson, who occupied a bench among the seniors, was charmed with the little fellow’s grace and vivacity, perhaps because he saw in him his own antipode. When Johnson himself opened a school for young gentlemen, Davy, then nineteen, was one of his pupils ; and a year later, when “ the academy ” proved a failure the two went up to London together, with one letter of introduction between them as their sole capital. They were a pair to be wondered at by any passer-by ;—the large, awkward schoolmaster, with scarred face, shambling gait, and ponderous manner; the airy, volatile youth, with the grace of a harlequin and the address of a prince.

Soon after they reached the metropolis, a distant relative of Garrick’s had the grace to die and leave him a thousand pounds. At first he tried to study law; afterwards he set up as a winemerchant. All the time he longed to go upon the stage, but the pride of his family opposed itself. At length the ruling passion triumphed, and he went into the country and appeared under an assumed name. Harlequin was his greatest success, and it was enough to decide him. He returned to London and wooed fortune boldly. Drury Lane and Covent Garden would have none of him ; but the little theatre in Goodman Fields gave him an opportunity.

The “strolling actor” and “pretender,” as the two prosperous managers had called him, was of quite another school from the majestic Betterton, buthe took the town by storm. The little man chose Richard III. for his first night; “ because,” said he, “ if I come forth in a hero or a part usually played by a tall fellow, I shall not get over forty shillings a week.” So many rumors of his capacity had been heard, that there was a good audience at the obscure theatre, and his Richard was received with wonder and delight. Instantly he became the rage. The leading theatres were deserted, and people of fashion trooped to see him. Even Pope, old, feeble, and querulous, was drawn from his Twickenham retreat, and praised him with enthusiasm. Quin, his own reputation paling before the rising star, said spitefully : “ Garrick is a new religion ; the people follow him like another Whitefield ; but they will soon come back to church again.” Garrick retorted in the goodhumored epigram : —

He had won green laurels in Richard, Lear, and many favorite comedies, and was in his twenty-seventh year, when he first appeared at Drury Lane, following the gorgeous court of Denmark, in his inky cloak and all the trappings and the suits of woe. Of small, delicate, well-shaped frame, with an exceedingly musical, though not very powerful voice, eyes full of fire and passion, and rapid and vehement changes of tone and attitude, — he was a striking contrast to the slow and stately Betterton. And, despite the tenacity with which old play-goers adhere to their early favorites, a few survivors, who remembered Betterton well, unhesitatingly pronounced Garrick the greater Hamlet. His picturesque attitudes, his wonderful mobility of face, the profound melancholy that weighed him down, his passionate rebuke of the Oueen, the marvellous play of his speaking eyes, which now flashed lightnings and now melted to liquid softness, are all descanted on by the writers of that day. The line,

made a very deep impression. “And when he beheld the ghost,” says one of his contemporaries, “his consternation was such that the emotion of the spectators, on looking at him, was scarcely less than if they had actually beheld a spirit. He stood a statue of astonishment ; his color fled, and he spoke in a low, trembling voice, and uttered his questions with the difficulty of extreme dread.”

It is a striking illustration of the inhumanity of former times, that the bitter anguish of Shylock, though expressed in the self-same words that now draw tears, was long regarded as mirth-provoking. Doggett, the comedian, had personated Shylock, in a red wig and false nose, while Kitty Clive, — the very incarnation of Thalia,— playing the disguised Portia in the trial scene, had drawn forth more pardonable roars of laughter, as she archly mimicked the leading lawyers of her time. Perhaps this coarseness and buffoonery of the stage had made Garrick unduly sensitive ; at all events, though himself an incomparable comedian, and even an incomparable harlequin, he not only cut out the part of Osrick, from Hamlet, but ruthlessly expunged the scene with the grave-diggers, lest it should mar the tragedy. Lord Campbell shows that the discussion, in this scene, as to whether Ophelia is entitled to Christian burial, turning upon the question whether she went to the water and drowned herself, or the water came to her and drowned her, is almost a verbatim copy ot the arguments in a famous law-case tried in the reign of Bloody Mary ; and that the poet’s purpose clearly was, to ridicule the counsel who argued that suit, and the judge who tried it. To Shakespeare’s fondness tor satirizing legal and judicial stupidity are we indebted for that immortal scene. How wonderful is its blending of pathos, wit, and shrewd philosophy ! Yet the great Garrick was blind to its merits, and he banished it altogether from the stage. Years after his death, a friend said to Jack Banister, who had ventured to restore it: “ If you ever meet Garrick in the next world, he will quarrel with you for bringing back the grave-diggers to Hamlet.”

Fortunately for us, Garrick’s acting edition of Hamlet did not long hold the stage. But the Romeo and Juliet played to-day is the same in which he, at old Drury, and “silver-tongued Barry,” at Covent Garden, vied with each other for twelve successive nights. On the thirteenth, Barry gave up the rivalry, leaving Garrick alone in the field. The contest, meanwhile, had wearied the town, and provoked the sally : —

“Had I been Juliet,” said a lady, “and Garrick my Romeo, I should have expected he would scale my balcony and come up to me. Had Barry been my Romeo, I should have gone down to him.”

It was in Richard, Lear, and Hamlet, that Garrick won his greatest Shakespearean triumphs. His low stature did not serve him well In Macbeth ; and Quin dared to laugh at his Othello. But when he played Hamlet, the town applauded to the echo. Can we ever forget honest Mr. Partridge’s criticism, when Tom Jones laughed at him for being afraid of the Ghost ? “ And yet,” he says, “if 1 was frightened, I was not the only person.” “Why, who, ” asks Jones, “ dost thou take to be so great a coward here besides thyself?” “Nay, you may call me coward if you will, but if that little man there upon the stage is not frightened, I never saw a man frightened in my life ! ” And when told the “little man ” was Garrick, and the best living actor, Mr. Partridge answers indignantly: " He the best player! Why, I could act as well as he myself. I am sure, if I had seen a ghost, I should have looked in the very same manner, and done just as he did. And then, to be sure, in that scene, as you called it, between him and his mother, where you told me he acted so fine, why, Lord help me ! any man, that is, any good man, that had such a mother, would have done exactly the same. .... The king, for my money; he speaks all his words so distinctly, half as loud again as the other.”

Garrick’s Hamlet wore a black court suit, (those were the times of George II. and George III.,) a bag wig, a cravat with streaming ends, silver shoe-buckles, and lace ruffles at his wrists; —doubtless a studied and elegant costume ; but it contrasts sharply with our usage, and the bag wig can hardly have added to its charms.

Garrick was an actor to the core. He used to say that he would give a hundred pounds if he could utter the single exclamation “ Oh ! ” with the miraculous effectiveness of Whitefield.² Yet he could almost have rivalled the elder Matthews in his wonderful powers of mimicry. When he played Bayes, in the Duke of Buckingham’s “Rehearsal,” there was hardly a living actor whom he could not take off to the life. It was said of John Kemble that he laid off all signs of his profession with the player’s dress; but Garrick mimicked in the green-room, at home, and on the street. This rare power, the vivacity which came from his French blood, and his exceeding cleverness, gave him powers of charming which few men have possessed. Pitt wrote him complimentary verses, Lyttelton praised him in his “ Dialogues of the Dead.” He belonged to the Literary Club, which numbered Johnson, Burke, and Reynolds among its members ; and Goldsmith and he bantered each other in brilliant epigrams, in which the actor was no whit over-shadowed by the poet. In the first, Garrick described Jupiter and Mercury as conspiring to make “an odd fellow,” in whom should be jumbled “ much gold and much dross,” and producing, as the result,

Goldsmith replied by an epitaph : —

Garrick retorted in four lines, one of which still lives in the quotationbooks : —

Before he was fifty, Garrick spent a year and a half on the Continent. In Paris, at a little party, he met Mademoiselle Clairon, then the queen of French tragedy. Both consented to divert the company, and Clairon began by reciting from Phèdre and Zaïre, and some other of the parts her genius had vivified. Garrick followed, and, as many of the guests did not understand English, his display to them was nearly all in pantomime. They shared with him the reverent horror of Hamlet at the sight of his father’s ghost; they shuddered with his Macbeth at the air-drawn dagger; and a moment afterward they roared with laughter at his grotesque imitation of a pastry-cook’s boy who had upset his tray of jeakes in the gutter. But when he showed them the grief-stricken Lear bearing in the dead Cordelia, every heart was stirred to its depths, and the impulsive Clairon, in a transport of admiration, caught him in her arms and kissed him.

Garrick modelled the action of his distraught Lear on the grief of an old man whose only child leaped from his arms out of an open window, and was dashed to pieces under his eyes. The wretched parent went mad, and was confined under a keeper in his own house, where the actor frequently visited him to study his madness. Grimm said truly, “Garrick’s studio is the street.”

Garrick had accumulated a hundred thousand pounds, a large fortune in his time, when, during the early months of the American Revolution, he retired from the stage to lead the life of an opulent private gentleman. At his final performance of his favorite character of Lear, Miss Younge was Cordelia. As the curtain fell, he led her silently to the green-room. There he said, feelingly, “ Well, Bess, this is the last time I shall ever be your father.” “ Then give me a father’s blessing,” she exclaimed, throwing herself on her knees before him. Extending his hands over her head, he said, with great emotion, “ God bless you, my child ” ; then looking at the actors who had gathered around, he added brokenly, “ God bless you all ; God bless you forever.”

In his luxurious villa at Hampton, he spent his last years in the society of his devoted wife. She had been Eva Maria Violette, renowned as one of the most graceful dancers in all Europe. She was the reputed daughter of the Earl of Burlington,—and this belief was strengthened by the Earl’s magnificent present of a casket of jewels and six thousand pounds on the day of her marriage. She outlived her husband, and remained constant to his memory until her own death, forty-three years later.

Garrick died at sixty-three, and was followed to his grave by a long train of men and women, eminent in the drama, literature, politics, and society. He was buried with great pomp beneath the monument of Shakespeare, “ I paid a melancholy visit to his coffin yesterday,” writes Hannah More, “where I found room for meditation till the mind burst with thinking. His new house is not so pleasant as Hampton, nor so splendid as the Adelphi, but it is commodious enough for all the wants of its inhabitant. Besides, it is so quiet that he will never be disturbed till the resurrection morning, and never till then will a sweeter voice than his own be heard. May he then find mercy.”

Seven years have passed since Garrick took leave of the stage. A new star rises upon Drury Lane. It is the 23d of September, 1783. The bills are out for Hamlet, and the critics whisper, buzz, buzz, buzz! How will this new comer, John Philip Kemble, stand in the still bright blaze of Garrick’s fame ? His family name is already full of histrionic associations. His father, Roger Kemble, now a little past middle life, has long been a wellknown actor and manager of provincial theatres. His sister Sarah,³ two years his senior, is now in the full blaze of her rare beauty. Though only twenty-eight, she has been Mrs. Siddons for ten years, and she is already the acknowledged head of the British theatre, a rank which she is destined to hold through an entire generation.

John Philip, educated at a Roman Catholic seminary in Staffordshire, and the English college at Douay, in France, has been familiar with the stage from boyhood. Will he play and dress Hamlet as Garrick did ? Probably not, for the bills announce the play “as originally written by Shakespeare.” Doubtless he will restore the text which Betterton, Garrick, and the rest have been wont to omit. It is also said that he will introduce new and daring readings of familiar lines. These are the rumors in pit and boxes before the curtain rises.

Kemble enters, every inch a Hamlet, with the irreproachable figure, the dark lustrous eyes, and the fine classic features of his family. Face and figure are well set off by the rich court dress of black velvet, itself an innovation, for of late the part has been dressed by the most celebrated actors in the Vandyck costume of black satin and bugles. Kemble wears on his breast the star and pendent ribbon of an order, a mourning sword, deep ruffles, and powdered hair which, in scenes of deep distraction, flows dishevelled in front and over his shoulders. He looks our ideal of the royal Dane, and acts it as well. His voice is less rich and musical than “little Davy’s,” but his elocution is slow, superb, finished. The spectators are forced to applaud. Yet something is missed. What is it ? Many declare it is the sudden paling of the cheek and shiver in the blood, which all felt who looked on Garrick. When he played, the actor was forgotten ; now, they forget Hamlet, to watch Kemble. He is so “scrupulously graceful,” so studiously elegant in speech and action, that no flaw is found in him, except that which Leigh Hunt suggests : “ He impairs what he makes you feel, by the want of feeling in himself.”

His innovations were, many of them, just and original. Garrick and all other actors, in following the ghost, had gone out with sword stretched toward the apparition, but Kemble extended his left hand to his father’s spirit, trailing his sword after him, the point on the ground. Even this was enough to make the theatre-goers, who remembered every motion of Garrick, stare in amazement.

Some of Kemble’s readings revealed delicate shades of meaning, and were readily accepted. When he addressed his “Good even, sir,” to Bernardo, and said to Horatio, “ Did you not speak to it?” there were more signs of approval than dissent. When he afterward consulted Johnson about the reading of this line, the sage gave approval in his gruff way. “To be sure, ‘you’ should be strongly marked. I told Garrick so long since, but Davy never could see it.” In going on, after “ I do not set my life at a pin’s fee,” Garrick uttered, with the greatest rapidity, “And, for my soul, what can it do to that?” But Kemble, in his measured way, rendered it, “ What CANit do to that ? ”

His manner to Ophelia was a model of courtly grace, and won many a feminine heart during that first London season. A young woman, no doubt fresh from some country home, thus writes to her relatives of Kemble’s Hamlet: “ He was so graceful at Ophelia’s feet, yet noting closely through the sticks of her fan the face of his unclefather. With his mother he did not rant, but spoke with indignation and energy. And he was indescribable when he said, 'He is gone even now out at the portal,’ throwing himself forward fondly and passionately, as if to detain his form....As for Ophelia, I won-

der, poor soul, she waited for her father’s death to go mad. She should have lost her wits when she lost such a lover.”

In the grave scene Kemble was less successful. Indeed he confessed that he could never please himself there. But his interview with his mother, though some of Garrick’s points were missed in it, was most dignified and tender.

was given with great effect, especially the last line, which often drew sympathetic tears. The whole scene won greatly upon public favor.

On the morning after the performance there was much debate about the successor of Garrick, for such the popular verdict was forced to find him. Two Hamlets more exactly opposite could hardly be imagined. The one all fire and impetuosity, the other stately, measured, and scholarly. Or, as sprightly Mrs. Spranger Barry expressed it,— she who had herself been a crowned queen of the drama, — “ The Garrick school is all fire and passion ; the Kemble school so full of purr and pause, that one often imagines they have forgotten their parts and is tempted to prompt them.” Doubtless this very difference between the two actors prevented many odious comparisons, and helped to assure Kemble’s success.

And never since Burbage played Hamlet, when it was brought out as the latest novelty at the Globe, had the success of any actor become more identified with the part. Boaden, I think it was, once objected to it as apt to be less popular, because more philosophic, than other Shakesperean characters ; but Kemble maintained that in all libraries where Shakespeare’s plays were found, or wherever else they were read, the play of Hamlet was sure to be the most bethumbed and dog’s-eared, and that more lines from it were familiar in our ears as household words than from any other play.

At thirty-two Kemble became manager of Drury Lane, and for nearly thirty years afterwards stood at the head of his profession. Once, for two months, he and his family endured every species of insult, and he suffered greatly in property by the “ Old-Price Riots,” caused by his raising the charges of admission to Covent Garden. He was finally compelled to compromise with the rioters. But he never forgot the indignity. Years after, when he made his last appearance, full of wealth and honors, a friend complimented him on the warm affection of his auditors. He replied, with a significant shrug of his shoulders: “True, but they are the same scoundrels who once wanted to burn my house.”

His management was distinguished by many splendid revivals of Shakespeare’s plays, and he stands in the memory of the English stage one of the four or five greatest Hamlets. His personal beauty remained untarnished by old age. George Colman, though he had quarrelled with him for spoiling the part of Sir Edward Mortimer, writes of him as