Page:Coriolanus (1924) Yale.djvu/179

The Tragedy of Coriolanus drama than that of either author separately.' Kemble's first three acts are wholly from Shakespeare, though much condensed; in acts four and five there is a predominance of Thomson. This piece was many times repeated. Kemble's Coriolanus and the Volumnia of his sister, Mrs. Siddons, are rated among their greatest parts; and it was in Coriolanus that Kemble took his leave of the stage on June 23, 1817.

On June 24, 1820, Coriolanus, with Shakespeare's text restored (as was a little falsely asserted), was performed at Drury Lane by Edmund Kean, whose success in this too statuesque rôle did not equal that of Kemble. Rival performances were given at Covent Garden (beginning November 29, 1819) with the title-rôle in the hands of W. C. Macready, who long continued to act the part. John Vandenhoff (from 1823) gave many successful performances of the play throughout England and Scotland, and Samuel Phelps (from 1848) at the Sadler's Wells Theatre in London. Other productions of some note in England have been those of James Anderson (from 1851), Sir Henry Irving (1901), and Sir F. R. Benson; but since the middle of the nineteenth century Coriolanus has had no such significance on the British stage as it enjoyed before. It was the special degree in which this play (particularly with the interpolated borrowings from Thomson) fitted the statuesque acting of Kemble and Mrs. Siddons which gave it its impetus. Its stage value suffered when the Kemble ideal of acting gave place to more romantic and perhaps more subtle conceptions.

Thomson's Coriolanus was played at the Southwark Theatre, Philadelphia, on June 8, 1767. The Shakespearean play—that is, presumably, the Kemble version—was first acted in the United States by the Philadelphia Company, June 8, 1796. During the latter half of the nineteenth century the American