3-082-135 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Mr. Henry Irving as King Arthur, 1895. London stage production. 'Of Mr. Irving's many successes at the Lyceum, his impersonation of King Arthur in Mr. Comyns Carr's drama is in some ways the most significant...Mr. Irving has but one scene which can be called dramatic, and that is when he hears the revelation of his wife's shame and Lancelot's perfidy. Here Mr. Irving gives one of those illuminating touches which make him so wonderful an artist. When the poisonous shaft of Mordred's malice goes home, the King utters an exclamation of pain with a gesture which, for an instant, seems to show the man's quivering soul; and then the habitual dignity and self-command wrap him once more in an armour less vulnerable than the mail in which he is clad...Mr. Irving is dramatically little more than a figure of lonely majesty; and yet his personal authority has rarely been more decisively asserted...[He] lays an imaginative spell upon his audience, and they see in his Arthur a most impressive embodiment of the regality of mind...There have been tragedians who were in a rhetorical sense more effective than Mr. Irving; but few, if any, have equalled him in that art of impersonation which surrounds a character with the atmosphere of absolute illusion...'. From "Illustrated London News", 1895.