Page 91 - Hamlet: The Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare

kxxiv H A M L E T

Lewis at Covent Garden each made a bid for his honours
in Hamlet; but the largest measure of them (and none
too great at that) went to Henderson, who had been
acting the part at Bath and brought it to London* first to
the Haymarket in June, 1777, and then, promptly en-
gaged by R. B. Sheridan, to Drury Lane in September.
Henderson, like Barry, was a graceful actor with a
beautiful voice, and a very good speaker of verse. In the
scene with the Ghost he differed from Garrick in en-
deavouring to subdue his terror and to address the Ghost
calmly and firmly; and at Ophelia's funeral he showed
singular tenderness and regret. But he had little great-
ness, and Bannister, junior, who sometimes took his
place (he claimed to be the first to bring back the Graven
diggers, and his Hamlet 'was always done twenty
minutes sooner than anybody else'), had less. The play
—like the theatre in general—had to wait for due con-
sideration till the coming of John Philip Kemble.
The famous portrait by Lawrence would alone be
enough to show that with Kemble comes a different sort
of Hamlet from the vivacious, 'enterprising' Hamlet of
Betterton or the bustling, histrionic Hamlet of Garrick.
The romantic movement is upon the Theatre, and the
keynote of the character is now an almost sepulchral
melancholy. A fixed and sullen gloom was what Hazlitt,
writing of John Kemble's later appearances, accused him
of, and probably his earlier rendering differed little from
his later. We may believe, too, that he was stiff, formal,
deficient in the 'yielding flexibility' of Hamlet's cha-
racter, and that, more even than his Coriolanus or his
Macbeth, his Hamlet, with its little personal oddities,
'particular emphases, pauses and other novelties,' showed
traces of Kemble's intense intellectual study and calcu-
lated art. But Scott thought his Hamlet equal to Gar-
rick's. Lamb praised the 'playful court-bred spirit in
which he condescended to the players' (at his first per-
formance in London he left out the 'advice' through