Page 100 - Hamlet: The Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare

S T A G E - H I S T O R Y xciii

and feeling which had long been lacking. Between
his first appearance as Hamlet at the Lyceum in 1874
and his own production of the play in December,
1878, Salvini had shown tremendous dramatic power
and considerable beauty of idea in a performance
which in its signs of physical terror had gone back
to Garrick, and generally had escaped all influence from
the psychological analysis with which the critics for
something like a century had been making Hamlet more
and more difficult to act to the satisfaction of the educated
classes. Irving's dramatic power and beauty were alto-
gether different from the robust Salvini's. He had the
many-sidedness, the 'yielding flexibility,' as Hazlitt
would have called it, of Edwin Booth's Hamlet, with a
poetry of aspect and an intensity of passion all his own.
One critic, Edward Russell, credited him with a stroke
of genius: he had discovered that Hamlet 'fosters and
aggravates his own excitements'; and hence came his
moments of 'vivid, flashing, half-foolish, half-inspired,
hysterical power.' He cut out Fortinbras, the Ambas-
sadors, the Dumb Show, and the soliloquy during the
King's prayer—followed in the main, in fact, the
traditional cuts; he very much shortened the plotting
between the King and Laertes, and he ended the
play at 'The rest is silence.' But he was not afraid of the
wild and whirling words after the Ghost's departure and
was frantic with excitement after the Play. Yet he never
overacted; and at first some at least among his audience
wondered at his quiet in certain scenes—a quiet which
thrilled with the intensity behind it. In the production of
1874 his Ophelia was Isabel Bateman; in that of 1878
the matchless Ellen Terry. In both productions Miss
Pauncefort played the Queen, Chippendale Polonius
and Mead the Ghost. The staging in 1878 was beautiful
(the scene of the cemetery was especially admired); but
it was not so elaborate as to demand more cutting of the
play than was usual. In costume he made no attempt at