14 February 1838, John Forster on W. C. Macready as King Lear at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, London from The Examiner, 14 February, reprinted in Dramatic Essays by John Forster, George Henry Lewes, ed. William Archer and Robert W. Lowe (1896), PP· 48-54.

Abstract

Abstract John Forster (1812-76) was theatre critic of The Examiner from 1833 to 1838, and later became its editor. He was a close friend of Charles Dickens, to whom this review has often been mistakenly attributed (for example, by Edgar and Eleanor Johnson in their The Dickens Theatrical Reader (1964), J. C. Trewin, in his Theatre Bedside Book (1974), and Gamini Salgado in Eyewitnesses of Shakespeare (1975) ). John Forster’s authorship is conclusively demonstrated in an article by W. J. Carlton, The Dickensian, September 1965, who shows that Forster copied into it long passages from two earlier reviews of King Lear which he had published in the Weekly True Sun, 26 January 1834, of an actor called Samuel Butler as Lear, and in the New Monthly Magazine, June 1834, of Macready’s first London performances as Lear, at Drury Lane and Covent Garden.