[Illustration: Rather mixed. Mr. Irving as "Ophe-Lear."]
Sure such a _King Lear_ was never seen on any stage, so perfect in appearance, so entirely the ideal of SHAKSPEARE'S ancient King. It must have been a vision of IRVING in this character that the divinely-inspired poet and dramatist saw when he had a _Lear_ in his eye. For a moment, too, he reminded me of BOOTH--the "General," not the "particular" American tragedian,--and when he appeared in thunder, lightning, hail, and rain, he suggested an embodiment of the "_Moses_" of MICHAEL ANGELO.
A strange weird play; much for an audience, and more for an actor, all on his own shoulders, to bear. A one-part play it is too, for of the sweet _Cordelia_,--and sweet did ELLEN TERRY look and so tenderly did she play!--little is seen or heard. With _Goneril_ and _Regan_, the two proud and wicked sisters,--associated in the mind of the modernest British Public with Messrs. HERBERT CAMPBELL and HARRY NICHOLLS, as is also _Cordelia_ associated either with _Cinderella_ or with _Beauty_ in the story of _Beauty and the Beast_--we have two fine commanding figures; and well are these parts played by Miss ADA DYAS and Miss MAUD MILTON. The audience can have no sympathy with the two wicked Princesses, and except in _Goneril's_ brief Lady-Macbethian scene with her husband, neither of the Misses LEAR has much dramatic chance. Pity that Mrs. LEAR--his Queen and their mother, wasn't alive! Let us hope she resembled her youngest daughter _Cordelia_, otherwise poor _Lear_ must have had a hard life of it as a married man.
Why should not Mr. IRVING give the first part of this play reconsideration? Why not just once a week try him as a different sort of _Lear_? For instance, suppose, to begin with, that he had had a bad time of it with his wife, that for many years as a widower he had been seeking for the opportunity of disposing of his daughters, handing over to them and to their husbands the lease and goodwill of "The Crown and Sceptre," while he would be, as King, "retired from business," and going out for a lark generally. Thus jovially would he commence the play, a rollicking, gay, old dog, ready for anything, up to anything, and, like old Anchises, when he jumped on to the back of Æneas, "a wonderful man for his years." In fact, _Lear_ might begin like an old King Cole, "a merry old soul," a "jolly old cock!" And then--"Oh, what a difference in the morning!"--when all his plans for a gay career had been shipwrecked by _Cordelia's_ capricious and unnatural affectation.