Saturday, February 19th [1814]
Just
returned from seeing Kean
in Richard. By Jove, he is a soul! Life—nature—truth without exaggeration or diminution. Kemble's Hamlet is perfect;—but Hamlet is not Nature. Richard is a man; and Kean is Richard. Now to my own concerns.
Went to Waite's. Teeth are all right and white; but he says that I grind them in my sleep and chip the edges. That same sleep is no friend of mine, though I court him sometimes for half the twenty-four.
Footnote 1:
Edmund Kean (1787-1833), after acting in provincial theatres, appeared at the Haymarket in June, 1806, as "Ganem" in
The Mountaineers
, but again returned to the country. His performance of "Shylock" in the
Merchant of Venice
, at Drury Lane, on January 26, 1814, made him famous. He appeared in "Richard III" on February 12, and still further increased his reputation.
In the
Courier
, February 26, 1814, appears this paragraph:
"Mr. Kean's attraction is unprecedented in the annals of theatricals—even Cooke's performances are left at an immeasurable distance; his first three nights of Richard produced upwards of £1800, and on repeating that character on Thursday night for the fourthth (sic) time, the receipts were upwards of £700."
On March 1 the same paper says,
"Drury Lane Theatre again overflowed last night, at an early hour. Such is the continued and increasing attraction of that truly great actor Mr. Kean."
After the retirement of John Kemble (June 23, 1817), he had no rival on the stage, especially in such parts as "Othello," "Lear," "Hamlet," "Sir Giles Overreach," and the two already mentioned. His last appearance on the stage was in "Othello" at Covent Garden, March 25, 1833.
"To see Kean act," said Coleridge, "is like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning."
"Garrick's nature," writes Leigh Hunt, in the Tatler, July 25, 1831, "displaced Quin's formalism; and in precisely the same way did Kean displace Kemble. ... Everything with Kemble was literally a personation—it was a mask and a sounding-pipe. It was all external and artificial.... Kean's face is full of light and shade, his tones vary, his voice trembles, his eye glistens, sometimes with a withering scorn, sometimes with a tear."
It was the realism and nature of Kean which so strongly appealed to Byron, and enabled the actor, to the last, in spite of his drunken habits, poor figure, and weak voice, to sway his audiences. The same qualities at first repelled more timid critics, and perhaps justified Hazlitt's saying that Kean was "not much relished in the upper circles." Miss Berry, for example, who saw him in all his principal parts in 1814—in "Richard III," "Hamlet," "Othello," and "Sir Giles Overreach"—remained cold.
"His 'Richard III.' pleased me, but I was not enthusiastic. His expression of the passions is natural and strong, but I do not like his declamation; his voice, naturally not agreeable, becomes monotonous"
(
Diary
, vol. iii. p. 7). Of his "Hamlet" she says,
"To my mind he is without grace and without elevation of mind, because he never seems to rise with the poet in those sublime passages which abound in Hamlet"
(
ibid.
, p. 9). Miss Berry's criticism is supported by good authority. Lewes (
On Actors and the Art of Acting
, pp. 6, 11), while calling him "a consummate master of passionate expression," denies his capacity for representing "the intellectual side of heroism."
Kean preferred the Coal-Hole Tavern in the Strand, and the society of the Wolf Club, to Lord Holland's dinner-parties. Though he never fell so low as Cooke, his recklessness, irregularities, eccentricities, and habits of drinking, in spite of the large sums of money that passed through his hands, made his closing days neither prosperous nor reputable.
Such effect had the passionate energy of Kean's acting on Byron's mind, that, once, in seeing him play "Sir Giles Overreach," he was so affected as to be seized with a sort of convulsive fit. Some years later, in Italy, when the representation of Alfieri's tragedy of
Mirra
had agitated him in the same violent manner, he compared the two instances as the only ones in his life when "any thing under reality" had been able to move him so powerfully.
"To such lengths," says Moore, "did he, at this time, carry his enthusiasm for Kean, that when Miss O'Neil appeared, and, by her matchless representation of feminine tenderness, attracted all eyes and hearts, he was not only a little jealous of her reputation, as interfering with that of his favourite, but, in order to guard himself against the risk of becoming a convert, refused to go to see her act. I endeavoured sometimes to persuade him into witnessing, at least, one of her performances; but his answer was (punning upon Shakspeare's word, 'unanealed'), 'No—I am resolved to continue un-Oneiled.'"
In his
Detached Thoughts
(1821) Byron says,
"Of actors Cooke was the most natural, Kemble the most supernatural, Kean the medium between the two. But Mrs. Siddons was worth them all put together."
