Page:Coriolanus (1924) Yale.djvu/178

166 little the Shakespearean figures were known to the English public of the day.

Thomson's Coriolanus was first acted January 13, 1749, and was repeated some ten times by a very notable cast. The famous Quin took the title-rôle and Ryan the hardly less prominent or heroic part of Attius Tullus, while Peg Woffington played Coriolanus' mother and Mrs. Bellamy his wife. Thomson was the first capable English poet to touch the theme of Coriolanus since Shakespeare. His rhetorical tragedy, presenting various types of nobly sensitive souls as the eighteenth century liked to fancy them, seems to us lacking in reality and in dramatic force; but it is a worthy poem of its peculiar kind. It nowhere challenges comparison with Shakespeare, and would hardly come into the history of the latter's play, if the taste of later producers had not brought upon the stage several strange blends of Shakespeare and Thomson.

The earliest of these is ascribed to Thomas Sheridan, manager of the Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin, From thence it was transferred to Covent Garden in London, where it was produced first on December 10, 1754. There was more of Thomson than of Shakespeare in this, and Thomson's names of characters were retained. Coriolanus was played by Sheridan; Attius Tullus, Veturia, and Volumnia by the same distinguished performers who had supported those parts in the 1749 production of Thomson's tragedy. The blend of Shakespeare and Thomson, which had proved decidedly successful in Sheridan's version, became yet more so when John Philip Kemble staged at Drury Lane, February 7, 1789, another adaptation in which the greater part of the material was drawn from Shakespeare. 'In this alteration,' the European Magazine said at the time, 'the best parts of Shakespeare and Thomson are retained, and compose a more pleasing