The Winter's Tale by William Shakespeare Read Free Book Online Page B

the stage in 1802 at Drury Lane and later Covent Garden. While restoring the first three acts, with minor alterations, Kemble still omitted the figure of Time, a practice continued by several subsequent producers. The reviewer in
The Gentleman’s Magazine
details with disapproval the eclectic mix of props and costumes used by Kemble, describing them as “The usual perloinings [
sic
] from the fashions of James I, Charles I, and Oliver’s courts, and the common country garb of our own time.” He goes on to comment that “It remains for our classical managers to inform us, how this association of scenes, dresses, and decorations, of different ages, times, and places, could,with any degree of propriety, probability, or consistency, be brought together in one point of view; leaving it to them to fix their own data, architecture, customs, or manners.” 5 Most critics, however, were impressed. The theater historian Dennis Bartholomeusz argues in his study of the play in performance that, in combining Gothic and Grecian settings, Kemble was responding, “whether consciously or not, to the different levels of time in the play.” 6 Kemble’s Leontes was generally admired, while his sister Sarah Siddons’ Hermione was regarded as one of her greatest roles: “
Kemble
, in Leontes, evinced a perfect knowledge of his author, and displayed a judgment and feeling which justly place it among his most successful parts. The agonies of extreme jealousy with which his mind is tortured, were admirably depicted … The Hermione of Mrs. Siddons towers above all praise.” 7
    Actor-manager William Charles Macready also produced the play and played Leontes at Drury Lane and Covent Garden. Critics were still carping about the play’s form and structure. They compared Macready unfavorably to Kemble. His most distinguished Hermione was Helen Faucit, who wrote a detailed account of her experience:
    My first appearance as Hermione is indelibly imprinted on my memory by the acting of Mr Macready as I have described it in the statue scene. Mrs Warner [formerly the actress Mary Amelia Huddart, widely admired for her own performance as Hermione] had rather jokingly told me, at one of the rehearsals, to be
prepared
for something extraordinary in his manner, when Hermione returned to life. But prepared I was not, and could not be, for such a display of uncontrollable rapture … It was the finest burst of passionate speechless emotion I ever saw, or could have conceived. My feelings being already severely strained, I naturally lost something of my self-command, I looked as the gifted Sarah Adams afterwards told me, “like Niobe, all tears” [
Hamlet
, 1.2.149]. Of course, I behaved better on the repetition of the play, as I knew what I had to expect and was somewhat prepared for it; but the intensity of Mr Macready’s passion was so real, that I never could help being moved by it, and feeling much exhausted afterwards. 8
    Samuel Phelps’ production at Sadler’s Wells achieved critical and popular success with an interpretation of Leontes based on Coleridge’s assessment of the character as a tormented man prone to jealousy. An innovation was the setting of the play in ancient Greece:
    Mr Phelps, though occasionally given to over-vehemence in his renderings of emotion, plays with genuine feeling always. The torments of his jealousy as Leontes are unmistakeable, his pathos strikes home … The scenery is entirely new, for the most part consisting of felicitous representations of classical interiors, decorated in the polychromatic style. The famous scene of the statue is so managed as to produce a most beautiful stage effect. The light is so thrown, and the drapery is so arranged, that the illusion is all but perfect, the stately figure of Mrs Warner, who looks the statue admirably, contributing in no small degree to the beauty of the picture. The moment the curtain was removed, and