Macready’s testimony to Kean’s marvellous powers is nearly always highly favourable. Macready saw the great master act Richard III. at Drury Lane in his first season, 1814. ‘When,’ he tells us, ‘a little keenly-visaged man rapidly bustled across the stage, I felt there was meaning in the alertness of his manner and the quickness of his step.’ The progress of the play increased the admiration of the young actor in his box, who was studying the other young actor on the stage. He found mind of no common order in Edmund Kean. ‘In his angry complaining of Nature’s injustice to his bodily imperfections, as he uttered the line, “To shrink my arm up like a withered shrub,” Kean remained looking on the limb for some moments with a sort of bitter discontent, and then struck it back in angry disgust.’ To his father’s whisper, ‘It’s very poor,’ the son replied readily, ‘Oh, no! it is no common thing.’ Macready praises the scene with Lady Anne, and that in which Richard tempts Buckingham to the murder of the young princes. In the latter, he found Kean’s interpretation ‘consistent with his conception, proposing their death as a political necessity, and sharply requiring it as a business to be done.’ Cooke interpreted the scene in another way. In Cooke’s Richard, ‘the source of the crime was apparent in the gloomy hesitation with which he gave reluctant utterance to the deed of blood.’ If Cooke was more effective than Kean on one or two solitary points, Kean was superior in the general portraiture. As Macready remarks, Kean ‘hurried you along in his resolute course with a spirit that brooked no delay. In inflexibility of will and sudden grasp of expedients he suggested the idea of a feudal Napoleon.’