R370506B. Strafford.
The Court Journal, 6 May 1837, p. 281.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 3, 394–395.
Covent Garden.—The production of Strafford has not disappointed expectation. By an audience crowded in every part, and characterised by a general good taste and capacity to relish the higher and purer feasts of the drama—by an audience consisting of such educated persons as might be supposed to flock to the theatre on Mr Macready’s benefit night—the tragedy was listened to throughout with varying emotions, never with indifference; and, by their unanimous verdict, it was ranked at the close among the few tragic successes of modern times. The reputation of Mr Browning, the author of Paracelsus and of Strafford, will increase rapidly, and become a great one. His first poem is too metaphysical, the scope of it too ample, the interest too remote, to admit of its finding its way, like Don Juan’s cantos, “into families;” but the extraordinary ability of that work (the work, we believe, of a very young man) has been too clearly demonstrated, by an able writer in the “New Monthly Magazine,” to admit of a doubt of the author’s claims to poetical distinction, Strafford will carry a knowledge of his great power into places hitherto closed to Paracelsus; although, even in this tragedy, we feel that we have but a shadowing forth of what its author’s fine intellect and bold imagination are capable of conceiving.
Perhaps it is truly said of this play that it is one of action in character, rather than character in action. The author, moreover, has given his audience credit for a better acquaintance with the details of history than audiences in general possess; he has adhered with the utmost strictness to facts and characters, in keeping to which, as truths, he has sometimes missed the effect of a stage-fiction. His diction is also so close and condensed, so entirely divested of all false ornament, that if you miss a single word you lose the meaning of a sentence. The characters, however, even to the inferior agents in the events that preceded Strafford’s death, are all “true men”—living likenesses of the giants of that time; Vane, Hollis, Pym, whose spirit is grandly embodied—the King, to whom some thing short of full justice is rendered—the Countess of Carlisle, a sweet and tender creation of the poet’s fancy, a gentle vision, making us feel more intensely the reality of the rest;—Strafford himself, in whose purposes and in whose fate the interest is strongly concentrated. Here we concur with a critic who says:—“We cannot but feel the want of a stronger leading sympathy. The interest of the drama is concentrated in the character and conduct of Strafford: but that makes it rather the development of a philosophical question than an action upon the emotions of the audience. It is too cold and curious in interest for the theatre—more of appeal to the broad and elemental passions of humanity might, we apprehend, advantageously mingle with the intensely realized struggle of the public men of England in the seventeenth century.” Mr Macready’s performance of the great part—a great part indeed when fully embodied, but a terrible trial to any but the greatest powers—is magnificent. The audiences that have lately been startled by the variety and vividness of his representation of Richard, have now an opportunity of seeing him in the display of powers widely different, and in the working out of emotions strikingly opposite. He can scarcely be seen to greater advantage than in Strafford.
Reviewed:
Strafford (RB), London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, 1837.
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