Of course no commonly intelligent actor could fail to indicate--for the play itself indicates it a hundred times--how much Macbeth is separated from these, originally; but it does need some such a deep understanding of the character as seems to be Irving’s, to indicate, as time goes on, the gradual sinking to that level of theirs--the fact that the distance that divided the one from the others at the time that the one would ponder regretfully that he ‘could not say “Amen”’ when the grooms ‘said “God bless us,”’ had shrunk to well-nigh nothing by the time when Macbeth’s first greeting to an arriving messenger must needs, in his desperation, be no milder than-- ‘The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon’-- words which recall the purposeless and exaggerated angers of impending frenzy--and when his final and bloody resolution-- ‘Yet I will try the last,’ is spoken to his foe with a savage hopelessness akin to the murderers’ own. And it is at least a suggestive and worthy, if not at every point a complete; stage performance that can display the half-repenting pathos of the first, and the savagery of the last, and the passages from crime to crime by which the transition is accomplished. (_Academy_, 23rd December 1876.) ‘THE DUCHESS OF MALFI’ The Independent Theatre has pleased a few, and, it is to be feared, displeased many, by its production of Mr. Poel’s version of _The Duchess of Malfi_. But it is the ill-advised whom on one account or another it has now vexed; it is the wisest whom it has at last done something to satisfy. I said ‘at last.’ That was ungrateful. For, once, at least, before, the Independent Theatre--eschewing mere eccentricity and the ‘experimental’ drama (a pretty word, very, for the dull or the unseemly)--once before was it occupied with work of genius and high literary art, or with work at all events by a writer whose genius, here and there, is not to be gainsaid. Did it not give us, for a change, what is at all events the lucid realism of M. Zola?