Evaluation
Macready's performances always displayed fine artistic perceptions developed to a high degree of perfection by very comprehensive culture, and even his least successful personal turns had the interest resulting from thorough intellectual study. He belonged to the school of Kean rather than of Kemble; but, if his tastes were better disciplined and in some respects more refined than those of Kean, his natural temperament did not permit him to give proper effect to the great tragic parts of Shakespeare, King Lear perhaps excepted, which afforded scope for his pathos and tenderness, the qualities in which he specially excelled. With the exception of a voice of good compass and capable of very varied expression, Macready had no especial physical gifts for acting, but the defects of his face and figure cannot be said to have materially affected his success.
When Macready retired, Alfred Tennyson dedicated to him the following verse:
| "Farewell, Macready, since to-night we part: Full-handed thunders often have contest Thy power well used to move the public breast. We thank thee with one voice, and from the heart. Farewell, Macready, since this night we part. Go take thine honours home; rank with the best; Garrick, and statelier Kemble, and the rest, Who made a nation purer through their art. Thine is it that the drama did not die. Nor nicker down to brainless pantomime. And those gilt gauds men-children swarm to see. Farewell, Macready, moral, grave, sublime, Our Shakespeare's bland and universal eye Dwells pleased, thro' twice a hundred years on thee." |
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