Free English Literature Dissertations - Any Actor Was Bound To Obstruct A Clear Picture Of The Character As Envisaged
Any actor was bound to obstruct a clear picture of the character as envisaged by Shakespeare, as Lamb suggested:
It is difficult for a frequent playgoer to disembarrass the idea of Hamlet from the person and voice of Mr. K[emble]. We speak of Lady Macbeth, while we are in reality thinking of Mrs. S[iddons]
(in Bate 1997 p.112)
It is this abstract ‘idea’ of Hamlet, or Lady Macbeth, as distinct from the physical enacting of the role, that is a core concept of Shakespearean character study in the Romantic period, and the one behind the oft-cited remark in Henry Nelson Coleridge’s Table Talk (begun 1822) on Kean’s performance being akin to ‘reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning’ (in Bate 1997 p.160): the actor can only highlight moments in the play; to comprehend it in full it must be studied as a text. Likewise, in the case of King Lear, which will be returned to below, the full tragic-heroic scope of such a powerful character could only be appreciated by studying the text; in a theatre the necessity of depicting his age and physical infirmity would obstruct this notion of power.
The adaptations of Shakespeare by Restoration playwrights were now rejected, as much as their admiration of French neo-classicism, which had stimulated many of those adaptations, and which was now viewed as a mistaken devotion to classical mechanics. Some critics perhaps go too far in seeing the Romantic fixation with Shakespeare as ‘a form of cultural inertia’ (Taylor p.110), but certainly the critics of the Romantic period are markedly less willing to experiment with Shakespeare’s texts and at times appear to verge on bardolatry, as Coleridge does in Biographia Literaria (1817) with his eulogizing Shakespeare’s
stupendous power, by which he stands alone, with no equal or second in his class[he] becomes all things, yet for ever remaining himself
(in Hopkins p.112).
What is striking is that the playwright-critics of the Restoration sought to mould and alter Shakespeare in the aftermath of political upheaval. The poet-critics of the Romantic period sought to fix and preserve Shakespeare as the unassailable head of their literary pantheon in the ongoing aftermath of the French Revolution. The reasons for this are complex, and whilst the status of Shakespeare does not seem to alter, the reasons and motives for regarding him so highly do undergo a subtle shift. Unlike Dryden, the Romantics had always rejected the strictures that bound the French neo-classicists, praising instead the freedom from mechanical rules enjoyed by Shakespeare. In the period of absolute monarchy in France, prior to the Revolution, this had obviously carried a political weight: Shakespeare, like the English themselves, was free of rules, whilst the French, like Corneille, were restricted by them.
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