Richard III: Edwin Booth as Richard III.

"The observer recognizes a man consistent with human nature and with himself - false, cruel, wicked, demoniac, yet a human being, with brain, heart, conscience, imagination, and not merely a stage ruffian... an actual, possible man, whose ambition is intelligible. whose conduct implies rational motive, the workings of whose conscience are visible even in the very pains he takes to avow his dissimilarity from other men, whose remorse treads close on the heels of his fearful crimes, and whose last hours are baleful with terrors and awful with warning. It is a portraiture of an infernal genius, playing a great part upon a great stage... The prevailing attribute of the external Gloster is a specious ingenuousness. Perfect craft takes on the air of perfect simplicity. The hypocrisy is so terribly well maintained by Booth that the effect is of almost hysterical mirth." New York Daily Tribune, April 9, 1880.