And this is the way to represent the shy, negligent, retiring Hamlet. It is true that there is no other mode of conveying a vast quantity of thought
and feeling to a great portion of the audience, who otherwise would never earn
it for themselves by reading, and the intellectual acquisition gained this way
may, for aught I know, be inestimable; but I am not arguing that Hamlet
should not be acted, but how much Hamlet is made another thing by being
acted. * * * The truth is, the Characters of Shakespeare are so much the objects of
meditation rather than of interest or curiosity as to their actions, that while
we are reading any of his great criminal characters,?Macbeth, Richard, even
Iago,?we think not so much of the crimes which they commit, as of the
ambition, the aspiring spirit, the intellectual activity, which prompts them to
overleap those moral fences. * * * But when we see these things represented,
the acts which they do are comparatively everything, their impulses nothing.
The state of sublime emotion into which we are elevated by those images of
night and horror which Macbeth is made to utter, that solemn prelude with
which he entertains the time till the bell shall strike which is to call him to
murder Duncan,7?when we no longer read it in a book, when we have given
up that vantage-ground of abstraction which reading possesses over seeing,
and come to see a man in his bodily shape before our eyes actually preparing
don of the mysteries of the human heart. 5. Thomas Betterton (1635??1710), acclaimed
4. Ottoman sultan; more than one dramatic char-tragedian. acter is based on this historical figure, but Lamb 6. Latin: 'with well turned speech' or, literally,
likely refers to a performance of Nicholas Rowe's 'with rounded mouth.' Tamerlane (first staged 1701). 7. Macbeth 2.1.
.
ON THE TRAGEDIES OF SHAKESPEARE / 495
to commit a murder, if the acting be true and impressive, as I have witnessed
it in Mr. K.'s performance of that part, the painful anxiety about the act, the
natural longing to prevent it while it yet seems unperpetrated, the too close
pressing semblance of reality, give a pain and an uneasiness which totally
destroy all the delight which the words in the book convey, where the deed
doing never presses upon us with the painful sense of presence: it rather seems
to belong to history,?to something past and inevitable, if it has any thing to
do with time at all. The sublime images, the poetry alone, is that which is
present to our minds in the reading. So to see Lear acted,?to see an old man tottering about the stage with a
walking-stick, turned out of doors by his daughters in a rainy night, has nothing
in it but what is painful and disgusting. We want to take him into shelter and
relieve him. That is all the feeling which the acting of Lear ever produced in
me. But the Lear of Shakespeare cannot be acted. The contemptible machin
ery by which they mimic the storm which he goes out in, is not more inade
quate to represent the horrors of the real elements, than any actor can be to
represent Lear: they might more easily propose to personate the Satan of Mil
ton upon a stage, or one of Michael Angelo's terrible figures. The greatness of
Lear is not in corporal dimension, but in intellectual; the explosions of his
passion are terrible as a volcano; they are storms turning up and disclosing to
the bottom that sea, his mind, with all its vast riches. It is his mind which is
laid bare. This case of flesh and blood seems too insignificant to be thought
on; even as he himself neglects it. On the stage we see nothing but corporal
infirmities and weakness, the impotence of rage; while we read it, we see not
Lear, but we are Lear,?we are in his mind, we are sustained by a grandeur
