Falstaff (opera) knight, Sir John Falstaff, to seduce two married women to gain access to their husbands' wealth. Verdi was concerned about working on a new opera at his advanced age, but he yearned to write a comic work and was pleased with Boito's draft libretto. It took the collaborators three years from mid-1889 to complete. Although the prospect of a new opera from Verdi aroused immense interest in Italy and around the world, "Falstaff" did not prove to be as popular as earlier works in the composer's canon. After the initial performances in Italy, other European countries and the US, the
Characters of Shakespear's Plays of Shakespeare's plays, placing Hazlitt with Schlegel and Coleridge as one of the three most notable Shakespearean critics of the Romantic period. On 26 January 1814, Edmund Kean debuted as Shylock in Shakespeare's "Merchant of Venice" at London's Drury Lane theatre. William Hazlitt, drama critic for the "Morning Chronicle" since the previous September, was in the audience. He wrote a stunning review, followed by several others applauding (but sometimes censuring) Kean's performances in other Shakespearean tragedies, including "King Richard II", "King Richard III", "Hamlet", "Macbeth", "Romeo and Juliet", and, what Hazlitt considered the best of Kean's performances, "Othello". (These were