Adelaide Neilson, with her uncommon graces of person, found it easy to
make the chamber scene and the cave scenes pictorial and charming. Her
ingenuous trepidation and her pretty wiles, as Fidele, in the cave,
were finely harmonious with the character and arose from it like odour
from a flower. The innocence, the glee, the feminine desire to please,
the pensive grace, the fear, the weakness, and the artless simplicity
made up a state of gracious fascination. It was, however, in the revolt
against Iachimo's perfidy, in the fall before Pisanio's fatal
disclosure, and in the frenzy over the supposed death of Leonatus that
the actress put forth electrical power and showed how strong emotion,
acting through the imagination, can transfigure the being and give to
love or sorrow a monumental semblance and an everlasting voice. The
power was harmonious with the individuality and did not mar its grace.
There was a perfect preservation of sustained identity, and this was
expressed with such a sweet elocution and such an airy freedom of
movement and naturalness of gesture that the observer almost forgot to
notice the method of the mechanism and quite forgot that he was looking
upon a fiction and a shadow. That her personation of Imogen, though more
exalted in its nature than any of her works, excepting Isabella, would
rival in public acceptance her Juliet, Viola, or Rosalind, was not to
be expected: it was too much a passive condition--delicate and
elusive--and too little an active effort. She woke into life the
sleeping spirit of a rather repellant drama, and was "alone the Arabian
bird."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account