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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 January 2009
William Charles Macready was, except for Edmund Kean, the greatest and most influential actor of his time. He was distinguished not only for the energy, design, and command of his own acting, but also for the introduction of thorough rehearsal procedures and a concern for all aspects of production: a policy which led to the carefully unified production work of his disciple Samuel Phelps and the lavish Shakespearian productions of Henry Irving at the end of the century. Macready was demanding, disciplined, outspoken, and widely admired. He in fact helped to establish the actor-manager/company relationship typical of the period. In his youth, relationships between leading actors had been typically combative and coercive, and actors who had developed successful individual styles exacted company submission as their due. Kean, when he could, had refused to act with other men of quality, and Macready himself had been kept from Shakespearian roles at Covent Garden by Charles Mayne Young, J. B. Booth, and Charles Kemble. In the face of such divisive factors, Macready, with continual hard work and a bustling dictatorial manner, rose to a position of such power and respect that twice he was able to gather around him some of the most respected actors of his time to form a company unequalled for the beauty and finish of its productions.
1. Macready, William Charles, Macready's Reminiscences, and Selections from His Diaries and Letters, ed. SirPollock, Frederick (London, 1875), I, p. 55.Google Scholar
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid., II, p. 424.
4. Marston, Westland, Our Recent Actors (London, 1888), I, p. 99.Google Scholar
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26. Ibid.
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42. Unless otherwise specified, all line references come from Cibber, Colley, The Tragical History of King Richard III, in Spencer, Christopher, ed., Five Restoration Adaptations of Shakespeare (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1965), pp. 275–344.Google Scholar
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46. Theatrical Inquisitor, XV, No. 5 (11 1819), p. 274Google Scholar. Something of Macready's gloating impetuousness and his stage business may perhaps be seen in the remarkable film which the English actor-manager Frank Benson and his company in 1911 at the Stratford Theatre made of what is essentially the Cibber scenario. Benson, a wiry, athletic actor who had worked with Irving, was a smiling and agile villain. At the height of a verbal battle that could be indicated only by gestures, he leaped upon Henry VI suddenly and stabbed him. At what would have been the line,
What, will the aspiring blood of Lancaster
Sink in the ground? – I thought it would have mounted.
(1.3.61–62)
he shook his dagger free of blood and then stabbed the king a second time. Benson, who took every opportunity for action, especially, one imagines, in a silent film, afterward dragged the body from the room. The total impression was of a confident, gloating, remorseless prince, much like that whom Macready is said to have portrayed, though perhaps more active physically than Macready and lacking in his menace.
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48. His Henry V, for example, was to woo Katherine later in 1819 with ‘gallantry, dignity, frankness, sprightliness, and irony, so skillfully interwoven as to form a most harmonious and agreeable whole’. (Literary Gazette, and Journal of the Belles Lettres, No. 142 [9 10 1819], p. 653.Google Scholar) Such a complex of qualities, turned to another purpose, to be sure, was certainly of use in Richard's very different courtship.
49. Theatrical Inquisitor, XV, No. 5 (11 1819), p. 274Google Scholar; Rice, , London Theatre, p. 34, 3 04 1837.Google Scholar
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51. Ibid., p. 15.
52. Ibid.
53. Morning Chronicle, 1819Google Scholar, in Macready, , Reminiscences, I, p. 197Google Scholar. See also: New Monthly Magazine, XII, No. 71 (1 12 1919), p. 584.Google Scholar
54. Times, 26 10 1819Google Scholar; Rice, , London Theatre, p. 34, 3 04 1837.Google Scholar
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56. Rice, , London Theatre, p. 34, 3 04 1837.Google Scholar
57. Theatrical Inquisitor, XV, No. 5 (11 1819), p. 274.Google Scholar
58. Ibid.
59. Macready, , King Richard IIIGoogle Scholar, Macready, W. C., 1821, p. 32.Google Scholar
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61. Theatrical Inquisitor, XV, No. 5 (11 1819), p. 275.Google Scholar
62. Anon., Critical Examination of … Mr Kean and Mr Macready, p. 34.Google Scholar
63. Ibid.
64. Theatrical Inquisitor, XV, No. 5 (11 1819), p. 275.Google Scholar
65. Ibid.
66. Even Macready could not dispense with some rewriting.
67. Times, 13 03 1821Google Scholar, in Macready, , Reminiscences, I, p. 224, fn.Google Scholar
68. Shakespeare, , Richard IIIGoogle Scholar, Macready post-1821 promptbook, pp. 36–7.Google Scholar
69. Ibid., p. 37.
70. British Stage and Literary Cabinet, V, No. 52 (04 1821), p. 116.Google Scholar
71. Shakespeare, , Richard IIIGoogle Scholar, Macready post-1821 promptbook, p. 37.Google Scholar
72. New Monthly Magazine, n.s., III, No. 4 (1 04 1821), p. 167.Google Scholar
73. Ibid.
74. Morning Herald, 13 03 1821Google Scholar, in Macready, , Reminiscences, I, p. 224, fn.Google Scholar
75. British Stage and Literary Cabinet, V, No. 52 (04 1821), p. 116.Google Scholar
76. Morning Herald, 13 03 1821Google Scholar, in Macready, , Reminiscences, I, p. 224, fn.Google Scholar
77. Shakespeare, , Richard IIIGoogle Scholar, Macready post-1821 promptbook, pp. 37–8.Google Scholar
78. British Stage and Literary Cabinet, V, No. 52 (04 1821), p. 116.Google Scholar
79. Authorship of these lines is unclear.
80. Rice, , London Theatre, p. 34, 3 04 1837.Google Scholar
81. Ibid.
82. Theatrical Inquisitor, XV, No. 5 (11 1819), p. 275Google Scholar. At its best, this must have been one of those moments of abandon planned by the actor and fostered by an innately-sensed audience sympathy – an abandon that Macready is unique in writing about in the period before Stanislavsky. At such moments there was, he wrote, ‘an air of unpremeditation to every sentence, one of the highest achievements of the histrionic art’. (Macready, , Reminiscences, I, p. 238.)Google Scholar He marvelled at the consistency of such abandon in Mrs Siddons: ‘forgetfulness of self was one of the elements of her surpassing power’. (Ibid., p. 149.) This was also, he thought, Kean's gift at his greatest, and the gift of the singer Wilhelmine Schroder-Devrient, whose acting in Fidelio he described: ‘It was as tender, animated, passionate and enthusiastic as acting in opera could be – she quite abandoned herself to her feelings; she was admirable.’ (Macready, , Diaries, I, p. 30, 6 05 1833.)Google Scholar Much later in the century, Stanislavsky devoted his life to establishing the disciplines necessary to achieve such artistic liberation, which he saw in the actor Salvini. Macready, in a more limited way, tried constantly to establish the psychological setting for the same flowering, as his diaries show. When he could, with complete sureness, act with perfect abandon, forgetting himself, he was satisfied. When he was at his best, the transformation seemed, indeed, complete: ‘He ceases to be Mr. Macready’, said a critic, ‘and is pro tempore the person he represents.’ (Drama; or Theatrical Pocket Magazine, VI, No. 8 [09 1824], p. 338.)Google Scholar
83. Shakespeare, , Richard IIIGoogle Scholar, Macready, post-1821 promptbook, p. 44.Google Scholar
84. Anon., Critical Examination of … Mr Kean and Mr Macready, p. 35.Google Scholar
85. Shakespeare, , Richard IIIGoogle Scholar, Macready, post-1821 promptbook, p. 44.Google Scholar
86. Macready, , Reminiscences, I, p. 96.Google Scholar
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88. Macready, , Reminiscences, I, p. 196.Google Scholar
89. Rice, , London Theatre, p. 35, 3 04 1837.Google Scholar
90. Macready, , Reminiscences, I, p. 196.Google Scholar
91. ‘Richard’ is ‘Gloster’ in Macready's scripts.
92. Macready, , Reminiscences, I, p. 196.Google Scholar
93. Theatrical Inquisitor, XV, No. 5 (11 1819), p. 275.Google Scholar
94. Anon., Critical Examination of … Mr Kean and Mr Macready, p. 36.Google Scholar
95. Theatrical Inquisitor, XV, No. 5 (11 1819), p. 275.Google Scholar
96. Rice, , London Theatre, p. 35, 3 04 1837.Google Scholar
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98. Ibid.
99. Rice, , London Theatre, p. 35, 3 04 1837.Google Scholar
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101. Rice, , London Theatre, p. 35, 3 04 1837.Google Scholar
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103. Shakespeare, , Richard IIIGoogle Scholar, Macready, post-1821 promptbook, p. 63Google Scholar. See also: Rice, , London Theatre, p. 35, 3 04 1837.Google Scholar
104. Macready's envisioning of the ghost of Banquo was reputed to be even more powerful than Kean's. Macready did not ‘bully the ghost of his deceased friend Banquo out of the supper-room’ as had been the custom, but
retreated, instead of advancing … trembling and shuddering at the past and the present – endeavouring to shield his eyes from a vision that almost seared them with horror; his manly nature peeping out a little from the cloud of fear and remorse that enveloped it, but sinking back at last exhausted and dismayed.
(Literary Gazette, and Journal of the Belles Lettres, No. 178 [17 06 1820], p. 397.)Google Scholar
105. Rice, , London Theatre, p. 35, 3 04 1837.Google Scholar
106. Theatrical Inquisitor, XV, No. 5 (11 1819), p. 276).Google Scholar
107. Times, 26 10 1819Google Scholar; Mirror of the Stage, or, New Dramatic Censor, I, No. 11 (30 12 1822), p. 163.Google Scholar
108. Macready's occasional violence became legendary. At the climax of his greatest contemporary success, Virginius, for example, ‘every vein in his body seem[ed] about to burst with suppressed rage’ (Theatrical Journal, III, No. 125 [7 05 1842], p. 146)Google Scholar, and in another scene he more than once left bruises on the neck of his adversary, Appius. (Marston, , Our Recent Actors, I, pp. 11–12.)Google Scholar
109. Examiner, No. 379 (31 10 1819), pp. 699–700Google Scholar, in Houtchens, , ed., Leigh Hunt's Dramatic Criticism, pp. 220–1.Google Scholar
110. Rice, , London Theatre, p. 35, 3 04 1837.Google Scholar
111. Ibid.
112. Macready, , Reminiscences, I, pp. 197–8.Google Scholar
113. Ibid., p. 196.
114. Theatrical Inquisitor, XV, No. 5 (11 1819), p. 276.Google Scholar
115. Rice, , London Theatre, p. 35, 3 04 1837.Google Scholar
116. Anon., Critical Examination of Mr Kean. and Mr. Macready, p. 39.Google Scholar
117. ‘Memoir of Macready’, inserted in the extra-illustrated edition of Matthews, and Hutton, , Actors and Actresses of Great Britain and the United States, IV, Pt. IGoogle Scholar, Harvard Theatre Collection, quoted in Downer, Alan S., The Eminent Tragedian, William Charles Macready (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), p. 58CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Energetic effort was something Macready provided throughout his career. Years before his London debut, Charles Mayne Young told him that half of Macready's energy and fire would be more than sufficient for the most arduous role, a lesson that Macready took to heart only later as he realized that an economy of force increased his effect. (Macready, , Reminiscences, I, pp. 84–85.)Google Scholar His diaries are full of self-chastisement for excessive force, both on and off stage.
118. Drama, or Theatrical Pocket Magazine, VI, No. 8 (09 1824), p. 339Google Scholar. In ‘precision of detail and the truth of general effect Kean was thought generally superior even to Macready’. (Critical Examination of … Mr. Kean and Mr. Macready, p. 39.)Google Scholar Macready, like Kean, was careful to devise a different death agony for every character. As Hamlet, his death from poison was brilliantly illustrative without ‘trespass[ing] … on the physically disgusting’, and a ‘signal dramatic triumph’. (New Monthly Magazine, n.s., III, No. 7 [1 07 1821], p. 333.)Google Scholar In The Gamester, again poisoned, Macready looked ‘haggard, ghastly …. his sentences were broken by suffering … he expired with a dreadful but correct resemblance of the last mortal agony’. (Theatrical Inquisitor, IX [12 1816], p. 438.)Google Scholar When he died as John, King, ‘the groans … burst from him’ and the death ‘was a picture of horrible reality’. (Theatrical Journal, III, No. 151 [5 11 1842], p. 357).Google Scholar
119. Rice, , London Theatre, p. 35, 3 04 1837.Google Scholar
120. ‘Memoir of Macready’, in Downer, , Eminent Tragedian, p. 58.Google Scholar
121. Macready, , Reminiscences, I, p. 196.Google Scholar