Reviews

R530430I.  Colombe’s Birthday.

The Leader, 30 April 1853, p. 429.

As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 19, 387.

Robert Browning’s very charming dramatic poem, Colombe’s Birthday, the daintiest of legends, clad in delicatest language, has been dragged through the rude ordeal of a stage murder; all the noble feeling, the bright-piercing purity, the chivalrous tenderness, the subtle thought and gentle fancy of the poet, weighed in the balance of a Haymarket audience, and found wanting—in those qualities which a Haymarket audience naturally prefers. Colombe’s Birthday, to be enjoyed as it deserves to be enjoyed, demands audience and actors the most cultivated and refined. On this occasion, with the exception of Mr. Howe, who played with good sense and judicious propriety, and of Miss Helen Faucit, who with all her fine sympathetic intelligence, cannot be said to have improved in her art, (she needs repose, gradation, harmony, a little less consciousness, and a little more continuity of expression,) the play was condemned by its interpreters.

Reviewed:

Colombe’s Birthday (RB), performance, London, 25 April 1853.

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