The casual sight of an old Play Bill, which I picked up the other
day--I know not by what chance it was preserved so long--tempts me to
call to mind a few of the Players, who make the principal figure in
it. It presents the cast of parts in the Twelfth Night, at the old
Drury-lane Theatre two-and-thirty years ago. There is something very
touching in these old remembrances. They make us think how we _once_
used to read a Play Bill--not, as now peradventure, singling out a
favorite performer, and casting a negligent eye over the rest; but
spelling out every name, down to the very mutes and servants of
the scene;--when it was a matter of no small moment to us whether
Whitfield, or Packer, took the part of Fabian; when Benson, and
Burton, and Phillimore--names of small account--had an importance,
beyond what we can be content to attribute now to the time's best
actors.--"Orsino, by Mr. Barrymore."--What a full Shakspearian sound
it carries! how fresh to memory arise the image, and the manner, of
the gentle actor!
Those who have only seen Mrs. Jordan within the last ten or fifteen
years, can have no adequate notion of her performance of such parts as
Ophelia; Helena, in All's Well that Ends Well; and Viola in this play.
Her voice had latterly acquired a coarseness, which suited well enough
with her Nells and Hoydens, but in those days it sank, with her steady
melting eye, into the heart. Her joyous parts--in which her memory now
chiefly lives--in her youth were outdone by her plaintive ones. There
is no giving an account how she delivered the disguised story of her
love for Orsino. It was no set speech, that she had foreseen, so as to
weave it into an harmonious period, line necessarily following line,
to make up the music--yet I have heard it so spoken, or rather _read_,
not without its grace and beauty--but, when she had declared her
sister's history to be a "blank," and that she "never told her love,"
there was a pause, as if the story had ended--and then the image of
the "worm in the bud" came up as a new suggestion--and the heightened
image of "Patience" still followed after that, as by some growing (and
not mechanical) process, thought springing up after thought, I would
almost say, as they were watered by her tears. So in those fine
lines--
Write loyal cantos of contemned love--
Hollow your name to the reverberate hills--
there was no preparation made in the foregoing image for that which
was to follow. She used no rhetoric in her passion; or it was nature's
own rhetoric, most legitimate then, when it seemed altogether without
rule or law.
Mrs. Powel (now Mrs. Renard), then in the pride of her beauty, made
an admirable Olivia. She was particularly excellent in her unbending
scenes in conversation with the Clown. I have seen some Olivias--and
those very sensible actresses too--who in these interlocutions have
seemed to set their wits at the jester, and to vie conceits with him
in downright emulation. But she used him for her sport, like what
he was, to trifle a leisure sentence or two with, and then to be
dismissed, and she to be the Great Lady still. She touched the
imperious fantastic humour of the character with nicety. Her fine
spacious person filled the scene.
The part of Malvolio has in my judgment been so often misunderstood,
and the _general merits_ of the actor, who then played it, so unduly
appreciated, that I shall hope for pardon, if I am a little prolix
upon these points.
Of all the actors who flourished in my time--a melancholy phrase
if taken aright, reader--Bensley had most of the swell of soul,
was greatest in the delivery of heroic conceptions, the emotions
consequent upon the presentment of a great idea to the fancy. He had
the true poetical enthusiasm--the rarest faculty among players. None
that I remember possessed even a portion of that fine madness which he
threw out in Hotspur's famous rant about glory, or the transports of
the Venetian incendiary at the vision of the fired city. His voice had
the dissonance, and at times the inspiriting effect of the trumpet.
His gait was uncouth and stiff, but no way embarrassed by affectation;
and the thorough-bred gentleman was uppermost in every movement. He
seized the moment of passion with the greatest truth; like a faithful
clock, never striking before the time; never anticipating or leading
you to anticipate. He was totally destitute of trick and artifice. He
seemed come upon the stage to do the poet's message simply, and he
did it with as genuine fidelity as the nuncios in Homer deliver the
errands of the gods. He let the passion or the sentiment do its own
work without prop or bolstering. He would have scorned to mountebank
it; and betrayed none of that _cleverness_ which is the bane of
serious acting. For this reason, his Iago was the only endurable one
which I remember to have seen. No spectator from his action could
divine more of his artifice than Othello was supposed to do. His
confessions in soliloquy alone put you in possession of the mystery.
There were no by-intimations to make the audience fancy their own
discernment so much greater than that of the Moor--who commonly stands
like a great helpless mark set up for mine Ancient, and a quantity of
barren spectators, to shoot their bolts at. The Iago of Bensley did
not go to work so grossly. There was a triumphant tone about the
character, natural to a general consciousness of power; but none of
that petty vanity which chuckles and cannot contain itself upon any
little successful stroke of its knavery--as is common with your small
villains, and green probationers in mischief. It did not clap or crow
before its time. It was not a man setting his wits at a child, and
winking all the while at other children who are mightily pleased at
being let into the secret; but a consummate villain entrapping a noble
nature into toils, against which no discernment was available, where
the manner was as fathomless as the purpose seemed dark, and without
motive. The part of Malvolio, in the Twelfth Night, was performed by
Bensley, with a richness and a dignity, of which (to judge from some
recent castings of that character) the very tradition must be worn out
from the stage. No manager in those days would have dreamed of giving
it to Mr. Baddeley, or Mr. Parsons: when Bensley was occasionally
absent from the theatre, John Kemble thought it no derogation to
succeed to the part. Malvolio is not essentially ludicrous. He becomes
comic but by accident. He is cold, austere, repelling; but dignified,
consistent, and, for what appears, rather of an over-stretched
morality. Maria describes him as a sort of Puritan; and he might have
worn his gold chain with honour in one of our old round-head families,
in the service of a Lambert, or a Lady Fairfax. But his morality and
his manners are misplaced in Illyria. He is opposed to the proper
_levities_ of the piece, and falls in the unequal contest. Still his
pride, or his gravity, (call it which you will) is inherent, and
native to the man, not mock or affected, which latter only are the
fit objects to excite laughter. His quality is at the best unlovely,
but neither buffoon nor contemptible. His bearing is lofty, a little
above his station, but probably not much above his deserts. We see no
reason why he should not have been brave, honourable, accomplished.
His careless committal of the ring to the ground (which he was
commissioned to restore to Cesario), bespeaks a generosity of birth
and feeling. His dialect on all occasions is that of a gentleman, and
a man of education. We must not confound him with the eternal old, low
steward of comedy. He is master of the household to a great Princess;
a dignity probably conferred upon him for other respects than age or
length of service. Olivia, at the first indication of his supposed
madness, declares that she "would not have him miscarry for half of
her dowry." Does this look as if the character was meant to appear
little or insignificant? Once, indeed, she accuses him to his face--of
what?--of being "sick of self-love,"--but with a gentleness and
considerateness which could not have been, if she had not thought
that this particular infirmity shaded some virtues. His rebuke to the
knight, and his sottish revellers, is sensible and spirited; and when
we take into consideration the unprotected condition of his mistress,
and the strict regard with which her state of real or dissembled
mourning would draw the eyes of the world upon her house-affairs,
Malvolio might feel the honour of the family in some sort in his
keeping; as it appears not that Olivia had any more brothers, or
kinsmen, to look to it--for Sir Toby had dropped all such nice
respects at the buttery hatch. That Malvolio was meant to be
represented as possessing estimable qualities, the expression of the
Duke in his anxiety to have him reconciled, almost infers. "Pursue
him, and entreat him to a peace." Even in his abused state of chains
and darkness, a sort of greatness seems never to desert him. He
argues highly and well with the supposed Sir Topas, and philosophises
gallantly upon his straw.[1] There must have been some shadow of worth
about the man; he must have been something more than a mere vapour--a
thing of straw, or Jack in office--before Fabian and Maria could have
ventured sending him upon a courting-errand to Olivia. There was some
consonancy (as he would say) in the undertaking, or the jest would
have been too bold even for that house of misrule.
Bensley, accordingly, threw over the part an air of Spanish loftiness.
He looked, spake, and moved like an old Castilian. He was starch,
spruce, opinionated, but his superstructure of pride seemed bottomed
upon a sense of worth. There was something in it beyond the coxcomb.
It was big and swelling, but you could not be sure that it was hollow.
You might wish to see it taken down, but you felt that it was upon an
elevation. He was magnificent from the outset; but when the decent
sobrieties of the character began to give way, and the poison of
self-love, in his conceit of the Countess's affection, gradually to
work, you would have thought that the hero of La Mancha in person
stood before you. How he went smiling to himself! with what ineffable
carelessness would he twirl his gold chain! what a dream it was! you
were infected with the illusion, and did not wish that it should be
removed! you had no room for laughter! if an unseasonable reflection
of morality obtruded itself, it was a deep sense of the pitiable
infirmity of man's nature, that can lay him open to such frenzies--but
in truth you rather admired than pitied the lunacy while it
lasted--you felt that an hour of such mistake was worth an age with
the eyes open. Who would not wish to live but for a day in the conceit
of such a lady's love as Olivia? Why, the Duke would have given his
principality but for a quarter of a minute, sleeping or waking, to
have been so deluded. The man seemed to tread upon air, to taste
manna, to walk with his head in the clouds, to mate Hyperion. O! shake
not the castles of his pride--endure yet for a season bright moments
of confidence--"stand still ye watches of the element," that Malvolio
may be still in fancy fair Olivia's lord--but fate and retribution say
no--I hear the mischievous titter of Maria--the witty taunts of Sir
Toby--the still more insupportable triumph of the foolish knight--the
counterfeit Sir Topas is unmasked--and "thus the whirligig of time,"
as the true clown hath it, "brings in his revenges." I confess that I
never saw the catastrophe of this character, while Bensley played it,
without a kind of tragic interest. There was good foolery too. Few now
remember Dodd. What an Aguecheek the stage lost in him! Lovegrove, who
came nearest to the old actors, revived the character some few seasons
ago, and made it sufficiently grotesque; but Dodd was _it_, as it
came out of Nature's hands. It might be said to remain _in puris
naturalibus_. In expressing slowness of apprehension this actor
surpassed all others. You could see the first dawn of an idea stealing
slowly over his countenance, climbing up by little and little, with
a painful process, till it cleared up at last to the fulness of a
twilight conception--its highest meridian. He seemed to keep back
his intellect, as some have had the power to retard their pulsation.
The balloon takes less time in filling, than it took to cover
the expansion of his broad moony face over all its quarters with
expression. A glimmer of understanding would appear in a corner of his
eye, and for lack of fuel go out again. A part of his forehead would
catch a little intelligence, and be a long time in communicating it to
the remainder.
I am ill at dates, but I think it is now better than five and twenty
years ago that walking in the gardens of Gray's Inn--they were then
far finer than they are now--the accursed Verulam Buildings had not
encroached upon all the east side of them, cutting out delicate green
crankles, and shouldering away one of two of the stately alcoves
of the terrace--the survivor stands gaping and relationless as if
it remembered its brother--they are still the best gardens of any
of the Inns of Court, my beloved Temple not forgotten--have the
gravest character, their aspect being altogether reverend and
law-breathing--Bacon has left the impress of his foot upon their
gravel walks--taking my afternoon solace on a summer day upon the
aforesaid terrace, a comely sad personage came towards me, whom, from
his grave air and deportment, I judged to be one of the old Benchers
of the Inn. He had a serious thoughtful forehead, and seemed to be
in meditations of mortality. As I have an instinctive awe of old
Benchers, I was passing him with that sort of subindicative token of
respect which one is apt to demonstrate towards a venerable stranger,
and which rather denotes an inclination to greet him, than any
positive motion of the body to that effect--a species of humility and
will-worship which I observe, nine times out of ten, rather puzzles
than pleases the person it is offered to--when the face turning
full upon me strangely identified itself with that of Dodd. Upon
close inspection I was not mistaken. But could this sad thoughtful
countenance be the same vacant face of folly which I had hailed so
often under circumstances of gaiety; which I had never seen without
a smile, or recognised but as the usher of mirth; that looked out
so formally flat in Foppington, so frothily pert in Tattle, so
impotently busy in Backbite; so blankly divested of all meaning, or
resolutely expressive of none, in Acres, in Fribble, and a thousand
agreeable impertinences? Was this the face--full of thought and
carefulness--that had so often divested itself at will of every trace
of either to give me diversion, to clear my cloudy face for two or
three hours at least of its furrows? Was this the face--manly, sober,
intelligent,--which I had so often despised, made mocks at, made merry
with? The remembrance of the freedoms which I had taken with it came
upon me with a reproach of insult. I could have asked it pardon. I
thought it looked upon me with a sense of injury. There is something
strange as well as sad in seeing actors--your pleasant fellows
particularly--subjected to and suffering the common lot--their
fortunes, their casualties, their deaths, seem to belong to the scene,
their actions to be amenable to poetic justice only. We can hardly
connect them with more awful responsibilities. The death of this fine
actor took place shortly after this meeting. He had quitted the stage
some months; and, as I learned afterwards, had been in the habit of
resorting daily to these gardens almost to the day of his decease. In
these serious walks probably he was divesting himself of many scenic
and some real vanities--weaning himself from the frivolities of the
lesser and the greater theatre--doing gentle penance for a life of no
very reprehensible fooleries,--taking off by degrees the buffoon mask
which he might feel he had worn too long--and rehearsing for a more
solemn cast of part. Dying he "put on the weeds of Dominic."[2]
If few can remember Dodd, many yet living will not easily forget the
pleasant creature, who in those days enacted the part of the Clown
to Dodd's Sir Andrew.--Richard, or rather Dicky Suett--for so in
his life-time he delighted to be called, and time hath ratified the
appellation--lieth buried on the north side of the cemetery of Holy
Paul, to whose service his nonage and tender years were dedicated.
There are who do yet remember him at that period--his pipe clear and
harmonious. He would often speak of his chorister days, when he was
"cherub Dicky."
What clipped his wings, or made it expedient that he should exchange
the holy for the profane state; whether he had lost his good voice
(his best recommendation to that office), like Sir John, "with
hallooing and singing of anthems;" or whether he was adjudged to lack
something, even in those early years, of the gravity indispensable to
an occupation which professeth to "commerce with the skies"--I could
never rightly learn; but we find him, after the probation of a
twelvemonth or so, reverting to a secular condition, and become one
of us.
I think he was not altogether of that timber, out of which cathedral
seats and sounding boards are hewed. But if a glad heart--kind and
therefore glad--be any part of sanctity, then might the robe of
Motley, with which he invested himself with so much humility after
his deprivation, and which he wore so long with so much blameless
satisfaction to himself and to the public, be accepted for a
surplice--his white stole, and _albe_.
The first fruits of his secularization was an engagement upon the
boards of Old Drury, at which theatre he commenced, as I have been
told, with adopting the manner of Parsons in old men's characters. At
the period in which most of us knew him, he was no more an imitator
than he was in any true sense himself imitable.
He was the Robin Good-Fellow of the stage. He came in to trouble all
things with a welcome perplexity, himself no whit troubled for the
matter. He was known, like Puck, by his note--_Ha! Ha! Ha!_--sometimes
deepening to _Ho! Ho! Ho!_ with an irresistible accession, derived
perhaps remotely from his ecclesiastical education, foreign to
his prototype of,--_O La!_ Thousands of hearts yet respond to the
chuckling _O La!_ of Dicky Suett, brought back to their remembrance by
the faithful transcript of his friend Mathews's mimicry. The "force of
nature could no further go." He drolled upon the stock of these two
syllables richer than the cuckoo.
Care, that troubles all the world, was forgotten in his composition.
Had he had but two grains (nay, half a grain) of it, he could never
have supported himself upon those two spider's strings, which served
him (in the latter part of his unmixed existence) as legs. A doubt
or a scruple must have made him totter, a sigh have puffed him down;
the weight of a frown had staggered him, a wrinkle made him lose his
balance. But on he went, scrambling upon those airy stilts of his,
with Robin Good-Fellow, "thorough brake, thorough briar," reckless of
a scratched face or a torn doublet.
Shakspeare foresaw him, when he framed his fools and jesters. They
have all the true Suett stamp, a loose and shambling gait, a slippery
tongue, this last the ready midwife to a without-pain-delivered jest;
in words, light as air, venting truths deep as the centre; with idlest
rhymes tagging conceit when busiest, singing with Lear in the tempest,
or Sir Toby at the buttery-hatch.
Jack Bannister and he had the fortune to be more of personal
favourites with the town than any actors before or after. The
difference, I take it, was this:--Jack was more _beloved_ for his
sweet, good-natured, moral pretensions. Dicky was more _liked_ for
his sweet, good-natured, no pretensions at all. Your whole conscience
stirred with Bannister's performance of Walter in the Children in the
Wood--but Dicky seemed like a thing, as Shakspeare says of Love, too
young to know what conscience is. He put us into Vesta's days. Evil
fled before him--not as from Jack, as from an antagonist,--but because
it could not touch him, any more than a cannon-ball a fly. He was
delivered from the burthen of that death; and, when Death came
himself, not in metaphor, to fetch Dicky, it is recorded of him by
Robert Palmer, who kindly watched his exit, that he received the
last stroke, neither varying his accustomed tranquillity, nor tune,
with the simple exclamation, worthy to have been recorded in his
epitaph--_O La! O La! Bobby!_
The elder Palmer (of stage-treading celebrity) commonly played Sir
Toby in those days; but there is a solidity of wit in the jests of
that half-Falstaff which he did not quite fill out. He was as much too
showy as Moody (who sometimes took the part) was dry and sottish. In
sock or buskin there was an air of swaggering gentility about Jack
Palmer. He was a _gentleman_ with a slight infusion of _the footman_.
His brother Bob (of recenter memory) who was his shadow in every thing
while he lived, and dwindled into less than a shadow afterwards--was
a _gentleman_ with a little stronger infusion of the _latter
ingredient_; that was all. It is amazing how a little of the more or
less makes a difference in these things. When you saw Bobby in the
Duke's Servant,[3] you said, what a pity such a pretty fellow was only
a servant. When you saw Jack figuring in Captain Absolute, you thought
you could trace his promotion to some lady of quality who fancied
the handsome fellow in his topknot, and had bought him a commission.
Therefore Jack in Dick Amlet was insuperable.
Jack had two voices,--both plausible, hypocritical, and insinuating;
but his secondary or supplemental voice still more decisively
histrionic than his common one. It was reserved for the spectator; and
the dramatis personas were supposed to know nothing at all about it.
The _lies_ of young Wilding, and the _sentiments_ in Joseph Surface,
were thus marked out in a sort of italics to the audience. This secret
correspondence with the company before the curtain (which is the
bane and death of tragedy) has an extremely happy effect in some
kinds of comedy, in the more highly artificial comedy of Congreve
or of Sheridan especially, where the absolute sense of reality (so
indispensable to scenes of interest) is not required, or would rather
interfere to diminish your pleasure. The fact is, you do not believe
in such characters as Surface--the villain of artificial comedy--even
while you read or see them. If you did, they would shock and not
divert you. When Ben, in Love for Love, returns from sea, the
following exquisite dialogue occurs at his first meeting with his
father--
_Sir Sampson._ Thou hast been many a weary league, Ben, since I saw
thee.
_Ben._ Ey, ey, been! Been far enough, an that be all.--Well, father,
and how do all at home? how does brother Dick, and brother Val?
_Sir Sampson._ Dick! body o' me, Dick has been dead these two years. I
writ you word when you were at Leghorn.
_Ben._ Mess, that's true; Marry, I had forgot. Dick's dead, as you
say--Well, and how?--I have a many questions to ask you--
Here is an instance of insensibility which in real life would be
revolting, or rather in real life could not have co-existed with the
warm-hearted temperament of the character. But when you read it in the
spirit with which such playful selections and specious combinations
rather than strict _metaphrases_ of nature should be taken, or when
you saw Bannister play it, it neither did, nor does wound the moral
sense at all. For what is Ben--the pleasant sailor which Bannister
gives us--but a piece of satire--a creation of Congreve's fancy--a
dreamy combination of all the accidents of a sailor's character--his
contempt of money--his credulity to women--with that necessary
estrangement from home which it is just within the verge of
credibility to suppose _might_ produce such an hallucination as is
here described. We never think the worse of Ben for it, or feel it as
a stain upon his character. But when an actor comes, and instead
of the delightful phantom--the creature dear to half-belief--which
Bannister exhibited--displays before our eyes a downright concretion
of a Wapping sailor--a jolly warm-hearted Jack Tar--and nothing
else--when instead of investing it with a delicious confusedness of
the head, and a veering undirected goodness of purpose--he gives to it
a downright daylight understanding, and a full consciousness of its
actions; thrusting forward the sensibilities of the character with a
pretence as if it stood upon nothing else, and was to be judged by
them alone--we feel the discord of the thing; the scene is disturbed;
a real man has got in among the dramatis personæ, and puts them out.
We want the sailor turned out. We feel that his true place is not
behind the curtain but in the first or second gallery.
[Footnote 1:_Clown_. What is the opinion of Pythagoras concerning wild
fowl?
_Mal_. That the soul of our grandam might haply inhabit a bird.
_Clown_. What thinkest thou of his opinion?
_Mal_. I think nobly of the soul, and no way approve of his opinion.]
[Footnote 2: Dodd was a man of reading, and left at his death a choice
collection of old English literature. I should judge him to have been
a man of wit. I know one instance of an impromptu which no length of
study could have bettered. My merry friend, Jem White, had seen him
one evening in Aguecheek, and recognising Dodd the next day in Fleet
Street, was irresistibly impelled to take off his hat and salute him
as the identical Knight of the preceding evening with a "Save you,
_Sir Andrew_." Dodd, not at all disconcerted at this unusual address
from a stranger, with a courteous half-rebuking wave of the hand, put
him off with an "Away, _Fool_."]
[Footnote 3: High Life Below Stairs.]