length of periods, and an extravagance of passion in this part, not to be found in any other for so many successive scenes, to which Barry appeared peculiarly suitable: with equal happiness he exhibited the hero, the lover, and the distracted husband. He rose, through all the passions, to the utmost extent of critical imagination, yet still appeared to leave an unexhausted fund of expression behind. In the characters of Anthony, Varanes, and in every other, indeed, in which the lover is painted with the most forcible colouring, we shall not look upon his like again[1]
"I can hardly conceive that any performer of antiquity could have excelled the action of Barry in the part of Othello. The wonderful agony in which he appeared when he examined the circumstance of the handkerchief; the mixture of love that intruded upon his mind, upon the innocent answers which Desdemona makes, betrayed in his gesture a variety and vicissitude of passions sufficient to admonish any man to be afraid of his own heart, and strongly convince him, that by the admission of jealousy into it, he will stab it with the worst of daggers. Whoever reads in his closet this admirable scene, will find that he cannot, except he has as warm an imagination as Shakspeare himself, perceive any but dry, incoherent, and broken sentences; a reader who has seen Barry act it, observes, that there could not have been a word added; that longer speeches would have been unnatural, nay, impossible, in Othello's situation."
- ↑ The celebrated Tom Davies speaking, among other characters, of Barry's Alexander, says, "The vanquisher of Asia never appeared to more advantage in representation, I believe, than in the person of Spranger Barry. He looked, moved, and acted the hero and the lover in a manner so superior and elevated that he charmed every audience that saw him, and gave new life and vigour to a play which had not been seen since the death of Delany. His address to his favourite queen was soft and elegant, and his love ardently passionate. In the scene with Clytus, in his rage he was terrible; and in his penitence and remorse excessive. In his last distracting agony, his delirious laugh was wild and frantic; and his dying groan affecting."—Dramatic Miscellanies, vol. iii.
