Cymbeline - eTheses Repository - University of Birmingham

142.
Helen Panelt was a playgoer's memory of a past generation
of actors as much as an ideal of womanhood. The Drury
Lane revivals, which were an attempt to reclaim the great
theatre for legitimate drama, were a return to the
standards of the early Macready, and of the Kenibles.
^-ven the sets were identified by the Times and the Saturday
Review as being those used under liacready's regime, which
in the case of Cyiabeline meant that the scenery was twentyone
years old, last used in 1843.
William Bodham Donne, connoisseur and censor, writing
the obituary of Charles Kemble in Eraser's Magazine.
December 1854, had renarked of the "old school" that they
were "more ideal" -
They were jiot content with a succession of
fragmentary efforts; they aiiied at unity of
effect; they were not disposed to accept of
occasional bursts of passion as a compensation
for the neglect of harmony and repose which
enter so largely into ever.} work of art. They
estimated the performance rather by its total
veracity than by its spasmodic and irregular
strength - even as they would have preferred
the chastised grace of Reynolds to the exuberant
and capricious fancy of Turner. ^
This, Donne explains, is the classicism of Macready's
earlier style, as opposed to the "naturalism" of his
later methods. Acting is, of course, discussed in
pictorial terms. Donne uses the analogy well, but the
Saturday Review has an approach to classicism which combines
the dn termini sir. of phreru.lOoT v/ith the mysticism of
the Sunday-school: hew will aetherial acting be accepted
by
a modern audience of a very mixed kind,...
in whom the organ of veneration has been
but slightly cultivated?
The hint of scientific ambition is developed more fully: