Page 96 - Hamlet: The Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare

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

Kean dressed Hamlet with short hair, black clothes
with a handsome lace collar, and round his neck
the then traditional blue ribbon, meant for that of the
Order of the Elephant. The portraits of Macready as
Hamlet, as late as a dozen years after Kean's death,
suggest that staginess must have come back and swept
away all traces of the 'nature' which Kean, in his own
way, brought into the part. His black hat has a forest
of black feathers; his inky cloak trails on the ground. We
do not need the addition of 'black silk gloves much too
large for him,' and 'a dark beard close shaven to his
square jaws, yet unsoftened by a trace of pigment' to
complete a most depressing picture, which would more
than justify a suspicion that Lewes was right when he
called Macready's Hamlet 'lachrymose and fretful,' and
'too fond of a cambric handkerchief to be really affect-
ing.' And yet, after calling him 'positively hideous,'
Coleman goes on to say: 'But O ye gods, when he
spoke...!'; and from Lady Pollock (and would that all
critics of acting could make themselves as clear as she
did!) and from others it is plain that Macready's
Hamlet, ungraceful and laborious like nearly all his
work, was still a thing of intellectual beauty and dramatic
power. At Co vent Garden in 1837 he mounted the play
with the greatest care; and his diaries show how all
through his career he laboured at the character, con-
sistently exacting from himself more self-possession,
finish, tenderness, earnestness and dignity. Lewes, with
his head full of Wilhelm Meister and Fechter, may have
found Macready's Hamlet a thing of shreds and patches,
not a whole; but Bowes said that he was the only intel-
ligible Hamlet that he had ever seen, and Spedding that
it was easy to credit him with the thoughts that he
uttered. He saw Hamlet as an agreeable, tender-
natured prince, and a great lover of Ophelia before he
learned of his father's murder. There was no physical
fear in his meeting with the Ghost, only awe which was
dominated by tenderness. Like John Kemble, he knelt