Read Online Macbeth by William Shakespeare - Free Book Online

but too obviously open to the Scotch sneer of presenting ‘a very respectable gentleman in considerable difficulties;’ so studied is it in all its parts, and subdued into commonplace by too much artifice; fretfulness, moreover, substituting high passion in the fifth act. The straightforward and right-earnest energy of Mr Phelps’s acting, on the contrary, made all present contemplate the business as one of seriousness and reality; while the occasional pathos of his declamation thrilled the heart within many a rude bosom with unwonted emotion. 10
    The London
Times
’s reviewer was impressed by the originality of the staging and praised the production as a whole: “There is a spirit of freshness diffused over it.” 11 Phelps’s most distinguished Lady Macbeth was Isabella Glyn, described by one reviewer as “the very heroine of crime—the guardian demon of the crowned assassin—the weird-like accessory and human agent of the mysterious spirits that wait on Nature’s mischief.” 12
    Charles Kean specialized in spectacular, supposedly historically accurate productions. His
Macbeth
, which opened at Covent Garden in 1840, enjoyed popular success, but while Ellen Kean’s Lady Macbeth was favorably reviewed, his Macbeth failed:
    In Charles Kean’s Macbeth all the tragedy has vanished; sympathy is impossible, because the mind of the criminal is hidden from us. He makes Macbeth ignoble—one whose crime is that of a common murderer, with perhaps a tendency towards Methodism. It is not, however, so much the acting as the ‘getting up’ of
Macbeth
which will attract the public. 13
    Nineteenth-century actors generally humanized Lady Macbeth, making her feminine and womanly, a good wife, if somewhat misguided. Adelaide Ristori, though, domineered over Tesibaldo Vitaliani’s Macbeth in an Italian production at the Lyceum in 1857, which successfully toured Europe and the United States. Edwin Booth played the role successfully in New York in numerous productionswith Charlotte Cushman, and also with the Polish-born Helena Modjeska, who, like Helen Faucit, emphasized Lady Macbeth’s femininity.
    Henry Irving’s productions at the Lyceum were spectacular and enormously successful. His dark costumes and subdued lighting for
Macbeth
“blended together to compose a dark, massive, dangerous world.” 14 However, his reading of Macbeth as “a bloody-minded hypocritical villain” 15 failed to convince all the critics:
    A Macbeth less luxurious than is now seen cannot be readily conceived. Yet the word is apt, and furnishes a clear indication of the character. Against the over-intellectuality of Macbeth the imaginative power and the marvellous mobility of feature of the actor cannot prevail. The ingenuity, subtlety, picturesqueness, and power of the performance may be granted, but the new Macbeth will not replace the old. 16
    It is clear from the notes that Ellen Terry, Irving’s Lady Macbeth, scribbled in the margins of her working script that she shared the prevailing notions about the nature of women. Lady Macbeth’s tragedy, as Ellen Terry saw it, lay in an essentially feminine ambition, a misplaced and afterward disillusioned faith in a husband devoid of the stuff of kings: “A woman (all over a woman) who believed in Macbeth with a lurking knowledge of his weakness, but who never found him out to be nothing but a brave soldier and a weakling, until that damned party in the parlor—‘The Banquet Scene’ as it is called.” 17 Ellen Terry judged it right to keep Mrs. Siddons’s cold determination while discarding the fiendish aspects of her nature that would have so disturbed Victorian beliefs about the nature of women. Many critics could not accept this “enchanting being” as Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth:
    So exquisite a creature is she as by the flickering firelight she reads her husband’s letter, so radiant in robes of indescribable beauty, and with such rhapsody of passionate longing does she lean back to wait