Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/180

170 passionate abandon which should characterize it. It is a difficult speech to render, and the actors used to omit it.

But, indeed, how rare and wonderful are the qualities necessary for a successful Hamlet—in whom imagination, philosophy, strange observation, keen sensibility, deep sorrow, yearning aspiration, subtle speculation, melancholy brooding, masculine passions, feminine delicacy, are all united!

Having spoken so much of Mr. Booth's Hamlet, let us say a word about Mr. Forrest's. We must take Forrest's Hamlet through the ear, and not the eye. Do not look at him, but hear him only. He acts the part very quietly; in fact scarcely acts it at all; he simply reads it delightfully. His rendering of the soliloquies is a study. Forrest in his Gladiator, his Damon, his Cade is far from agreeable; but he is great in a few parts, and in those, it so happens, in which he is the least popular. His Richelieu is much more artistic, complete, finished and satisfactory than Booth's. His Coriolanus is also a finished, and, barring some of his peculiar mannerisms, a very fine, performance. As for the charge of ranting commonly brought against him, he is at times burly and rough, but in fact does not rant any more than Booth. Mr. Forrest, with all his sins, would never render a part as Booth does Shylock, in which there is a loud strain of the voice from the beginning to the end. When Dawison, the great German artist, was playing Othello here last Winter, some of the critics highly commended his rendering of what is known as the "handkerchief scene," which he uttered with subdued pathos and agonizing apprehension, instead of in the boisterous manner most of the actors render it. The critics did not seem to know that Dawison's method of acting the scene is not new, Mr. Forrest having long since presented it.

Among our careful, earnest, and satisfactory actors is Mr. Davenport. He began his career at the Old Bowery in comic Yankee parts; was taken up by Mrs. Mowatt to play leading parts with her; went to England, and gained much reputation. His manner is hard, and there is something of the Yankee twang yet in his utterance; still, few of our actors have sounder judgment, or a more thorough mastery of his art. I passed over the Wallack company without alluding to excellent Mrs. Vernon, one of the relics of the old Park. She is so nearly blind now that, though her familiarity with the stage renders it quite possible for her to get through her part when once on it, it is necessary to guide her to the entrance and receive her as she exits. She hardly suits some of the new parts in which she is cast; but in the Malaprops and lively widows of the old comedy, she is unapproachable. Mrs. Vernon was an elderly lady twenty-five years ago, and it is sometimes jocosely stated that the record of her birth was lost in the deluge. And in this same company is Holland, the