Garrick, Kemble, Siddons, Kean: Great Shakespeareans: Volume II 9781472554925, 9780826471529

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Series Preface

What is a ‘Great Shakespearean’? Who are the ‘Great Shakespeareans’? This series is designed to explore those figures who have had the greatest influence on the interpretation, understanding and reception of Shakespeare, both nationally and internationally. Charting the effect of Shakespeare on cultures local, national and international is a never-ending task, as we continually modulate and understand differently the ways in which each culture is formed and altered. Great Shakespeareans uses as its focus individuals whose own cultural impact has been and continues to be powerful. One of its aims is to widen the sense of who constitute the most important figures in our understanding of Shakespeare’s afterlives. The list is therefore not restricted to, say, actors and scholars, as if the performance of and commentary on Shakespeare’s works were the only means by which his impact is remade or extended. There are actors aplenty (like Garrick, Irving and Olivier) and scholars too (Bradley, Greg and Empson) but our list deliberately includes as many novelists (Dickens, Melville, Joyce), poets (Keats, Eliot, Berryman), playwrights (Brecht, Beckett, Césaire) and composers (Berlioz, Verdi and Britten), as well as thinkers whose work seems impossible without Shakespeare and whose influence on our world has been profound, like Marx and Freud. Deciding who to include has been less difficult than deciding who to exclude. We have a long list of individuals for whom we would wish to have found a place but whose inclusion would have meant someone else’s exclusion. We took long and hard looks at the volumes as they were shaped by our own and our volume editors’ perceptions. We have numerous regrets over some outstanding figures who ended up just outside this project. There will, no doubt, be argument on this score. Some may find our choices too Anglophone, insufficiently global. Others may complain of the lack of contemporary scholars and critics. But this is not a project designed to establish a new canon, nor are our volumes intended to be encyclopedic in scope. The series is not entitled ‘The Greatest Shakespeareans’ nor is it ‘Some Great Shakespeareans’, but it will, we hope, be seen as negotiating

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and occupying a space mid-way along the spectrum of inclusivity and arbitrariness. Our contributors have been asked to describe the double impact of Shakespeare on their particular figure and of their figure on the understanding, interpretation and appreciation of Shakespeare, as well as providing a sketch of their subject’s intellectual and professional biography and an account of the wider context within which her/his work might be understood. This ‘context’ will vary widely from case to case and, at times, a single ‘Great Shakespearean’ is asked to stand as a way of grasping a large domain. In the case of Britten, for example, he is the window through which other composers and works in the English musical tradition like Vaughan Williams, Walton and Tippett have a place. So, too, Dryden has been the means for considering the beginnings of critical analysis of the plays as well as of the ways in which Shakespeare’s plays influenced Dryden’s own practice. To enable our contributors to achieve what we have asked of them, we have taken the unusual step of enabling them to write at length. Our volumes do not contain brief entries of the kind that a Shakespeare Encyclopedia would include nor the standard article length of academic journals and Shakespeare Companions. With no more than four Great Shakespeareans per volume – and as few as two in the case of Volume X – our contributors have space to present their figures more substantially and, we trust, more engagingly. Each volume has a brief introduction by the volume editor and a section of further reading. We hope the volumes will appeal to those who already know the accomplishment of a particular Great Shakespearean and to those trying to fi nd a way into seeing how Shakespeare has affected a particular poet as well as how that poet has changed forever our appreciation of Shakespeare. Above all, we hope Great Shakespeareans will help our readers to think afresh about what Shakespeare has meant to our cultures, and about how and why, in such differing ways across the globe and across the last four centuries and more, they have changed what his writing has meant. Peter Holland and Adrian Poole

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Notes on Contributors

Michael Dobson is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. His publications include The Making of the National Poet (Oxford, 1992), The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare (with Stanley Wells, Oxford, 2001, revised 2005, 2009), England’s Elizabeth (with Nicola Watson, 2002) and Performing Shakespeare’s Tragedies Today (Cambridge, 2006), together with articles and chapters in Shakespeare Survey, The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies, Redefining British Theatre History, Performance Research and elsewhere. He reviews regularly for the BBC and the London Review of Books, and has written programme notes for Shakespeare’s Globe, the Royal Shakespeare Company, Peter Stein and others. Peter Holland is McMeel Family Professor in Shakespeare Studies in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre and Associate Dean for the Arts at the University of Notre Dame. From 1997 to 2002 he was Director of the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon and Professor of Shakespeare Studies in the University of Birmingham. He is editor of Shakespeare Survey, co-editor (with Stanley Wells) of the series Oxford Shakespeare Topics (Oxford University Press), and editor of Redefining British Theatre History (Palgrave Macmillan). He has published widely on Shakespeare in performance, including English Shakespeares and Shakespeare, Memory and Performance (both for Cambridge University Press), as well as editing a number of Shakespeare editions (including A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the Oxford Shakespeare). He is currently completing an edition of Coriolanus for the Arden Shakespeare. He wrote the entry on Shakespeare for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, the longest entry in the entire work. Russ McDonald is Professor of English Literature at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and the author of the widely adopted Bedford Companion to Shakespeare: An Introduction with Documents. A specialist in early

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modern poetics, he published his most recent book, Shakespeare’s Late Style, with Cambridge in 2006. In the field of theatre history, he has written Look to the Lady: Sarah Siddons, Ellen Terry, and Judi Dench on the Shakespearean Stage (Georgia, 2005), which originated as the Averitt Lectures at Georgia Southern University. Peter Thomson is Emeritus Professor of Drama at the University of Exeter. He is a Research Associate of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, editor of the journal Studies in Theatre and Performance and General Editor of the three-volume Cambridge History of British Theatre. His books include Shakespeare’s Theatre, Shakespeare’s Professional Career, The Cambridge Introduction to English Theatre, 1660 to 1900 and a study of Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children. He has written about Edmund Kean in his book of essays, On Actors and Acting, and provided the substantial biographical entry in the DNB. In retirement, he continues to play cricket, a game at which he was offered a trial by Warwickshire in the 1950s. If his next book is not about theatre, it is likely to be about cricket.

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Introduction Peter Holland

It always seems to have been better in the past, whatever ‘it’ may be. As Shute Barrington, Bishop of Durham, wrote to a friend, Nothing more palpably shows that we are miserably lost to a sense of true delicacy, and refinement, than the success of our new, and wretched, dramatick productions. By the ignorance, and impertinence of some theatrical criticks, KEMBLE has, in our days, been preferred to GARRICK.1 It does not seem entirely ridiculous for someone – or, indeed, for an entire theatregoing public – to prefer the new to the old, to refuse to allow the increasingly roseate glow of memories of the past to overwhelm the excitement of the present. After all, as Michael Dobson explores in his chapter on Kemble, John Philip Kemble was triumphant in a narrow range of roles, most potently as Shakespeare’s Roman patricians Brutus and Coriolanus, parts which Garrick never acted. But the bishop’s apoplectic incredulity is not really at the comparison at all but a conjuring up of an iconic name as the obvious stick with which to beat the present. ‘Garrick’ stands for something much more powerful than the details of Garrick’s or Kemble’s performances and productions. Ask a theatre-lover now about the great actors of the past and three at least of the four actors whose careers are the subject of this volume are quite likely to be named (John Philip Kemble being the probable exception), even though, as with so much in our construction of memories of theatrical performances, their work is too far in the past to be in any conventional sense ‘remembered’. If, like many clichés, the notion of theatre as an ephemeral art has a great deal of truth within it, then theatre history is always made out of memory, memories either of what has just been seen or of what was watched long ago, memories of continuities or of breaks, of the ways in which the succession of theatre performances and productions

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is the creation of a tradition or of ways in which the sequence is seen as a series of exhilarating fractures of the past or an unstoppable decline from its brilliance. What the bishop describes in such horrified tones is a culture believing it is marked by progress, where, for him, its choices can only be marked as a rapid collapse in a couple of decades from that standard of taste and critical judgement on which culture should be based. And, of course, it is Shakespeare’s place as the foundational basis of the theatres’ repertory that allows for the comparisons of like with supposed like, the recognition, in the critic’s eye and ear, of what is better or worse, what is built on the foundations of the past and what is construed as a fundamental shift of the modes of performance. What is known of these past performers and performances, of their Shakespeare then as well as that Shakespeare in the ever-shifting now with which they are compared, depends for the theatre historian in large part on the materials that create the illusions of transmission, of the completely unwarrantable belief that what happened on stage when Garrick played Romeo, Kemble Brutus, Siddons Lady Macbeth or Kean Richard III can be known well enough, remembered clearly and documented convincingly to make the comparison fair. Of course it cannot. Yet, even before the seismic shift into liveness,2 the materials out of which these four actors may be both described and analysed are startlingly greater than for any of their predecessors. Though, as David Roberts shows in his new biography of Thomas Betterton (1635–1710), the greatest actor of his time,3 we can discover much more about him than we might think, the total pales beside Garrick and his successors. There are printed accounts in reviews and pamphlets, the evidence in editions of Shakespeare’s plays as performed and in commentaries to other editions, the documents in playbills and advertisements; there are letters to and from fellow-actors and patrons, friends and enemies, fans and sharp critics; there are diaries of playgoers and some detailed transcriptions of what an actor did on stage noted down by a member of the audience; there are numerous surviving promptbooks and other playhouse materials; there are the play manuscripts submitted for censorship and piles of plays never produced; and there is the visual evidence of paintings, from miniatures to more than life-size canvasses, engravings and drawings, sculptures and ceramics, showing over and over again how artists responded to society’s thirst for images of these actors on stage and off, performing their most famous roles and out of stage costume but still performing as, for instance, a wealthy gentleman in his country estate or seated as the muse of tragedy. In the new commerce of print-making, it was possible for many to own their own pictures of the stage’s celebrities.

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Beyond this array of material evidence, there are further ways of knowing the actors’ social and intellectual worlds. My chapter on Garrick and Dobson’s on Kemble turn to the details of the two actors’ libraries4 and it is equally significant how few books there were in the sales of the effects of Edmund Kean: Arnott’s facsimiles of the sale catalogues of Garrick’s library, finally sold when his widow died, nearly 50 years after his death, take up over 200 pages, even without the vast collection of English plays which Garrick had bequeathed to the infant British Library; those for Kemble run to 140 pages, while the catalogues of the two sales for Edmund Kean, covering the contents of his houses in Richmond and on the Isle of Bute, are fewer than 20 pages in total. But even for Kean, the cataloguer noted the ‘Eighteen vols. of plays, including most of Mr. Kean’s favorite Characters, bound and lettered, many of them containing memoranda by Mr. Kean, respecting the Stage business’, which sold for 8 shillings a volume, the copies of the Shakespeare first and fourth folios,5 the ‘Macbeth Sword, worn by Mr. Kean in this Tragedy’, sold for 8 guineas, two different swords he wore ‘in the character of Othello’, one Turkish and one Venetian, sold for a guinea each, various decorations once worn by Garrick which Mrs Garrick gave Kean, and, as lot 147, the odd assembly of ‘Part of the desk Shakespeare first wrote upon, Shylock’s knife, and a buffalo’s skin’.6 Some of these objects speak eloquently of an actor’s success, like the silvergilt ice-pail and cup, ‘most elaborately chased with masques’ of Shakespeare, Massinger and the muses of tragedy and comedy, presented to Kean in June 1816 by Robert Palmer, ‘Father of the Drury Lane Company’, in the names of Byron and 57 others ‘[i]n testimony of their admiration of his transcendent Talents’, especially as Sir Giles Overreach in Massinger’s A New Way to Pay Old Debts.7 It is just as intriguing that Arnott notes that the 1831 sale catalogues of Siddons’s possessions ‘lump together books and furniture, objets d’art and costumes’.8 Whatever rich treasure troves of evidence the libraries, archives and art galleries of the world reveal – and the reach of evidence can genuinely be seen as global when one of the great paintings of Garrick as Macbeth is in Baroda in India – the analysis of the material is part of our understanding of the ways in which actors became celebrities. If the cult of celebrity now is intimately bound up with the fantasy of cinema, for no other kind of celebrity is as inevitably starry as being a film-star, then eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century theatre is a recognizable early version of the same thing. These actors participate in a culture of the commerce of celebrity, the wish to buy up and buy into the star’s life, through the images and memorabilia that the market creates but also through something

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beyond the artefacts: the experience or illusion of connection, the ‘public intimacy’ which Joseph Roach has so brilliantly defined.9 Garrick, Siddons and Kean are all centrally part of that development of celebrity and all earn their place in any account of theatre as the locus for the creation of celebrity.10 All are beneficiaries of the aura of significance that the celebrity of Thomas Betterton created and which Roach saw as pinpointed in the extraordinary event of Betterton’s funeral.11 But there is something beyond the conventional trappings of celebrity in the charisma that was generated by all four of the actors here. Whatever public focus of social meaning Betterton had earlier acquired, there is a new language surrounding them. It makes excellent sense for Jeffrey Kahan’s study of Kean to be called The Cult of Kean, a cult as idolatrous as that for any star, just as Hazlitt could legitimately speak of having been ‘brought up . . . in the Kemble religion’.12 No actress before Siddons could have been painted as the tragic muse, as Reynolds chose to do. Michael Dobson writes of the ‘air of vatic solemnity’ surrounding Kemble and Russ McDonald points to the way in which Reynolds ‘borrow[ed Siddons’s] posture from Michelangelo’s representation of the prophet Isaiah on the Sistine ceiling’.13 If such quasi-religious language and iconography was not usually used for Garrick, even though he became in effect the priest looking after the temple he erected to Shakespeare in his Thames-side home, Richard Cumberland’s account of a historical leap stands for a different kind of moment at which celebrity metamorphoses into something more extensive, more powerful than simply the latest in a line of stars: when after long and eager expectation I first beheld little Garrick, then young and light and alive in every muscle and in every feature, come bounding on the stage . . . – heavens, what a transition! – it seemed as if a whole century had been stept over in the transition of a single scene.14 Garrick, the most frequently painted non-royal of the century, became iconic in a fuller than usual sense of the word, someone venerated as imbued with a more than human ability. It seems only right that the word ‘star’ to mean a theatre celebrity should, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), have been first used of Garrick: ‘The little stars, who hid their dimished rays in his presence’.15 If Garrick is the first star, the man who moved theatre on by a century, he also becomes an originating point of a tradition: Edmund Kean, on his deathbed, tries to pass on to his son Charles details of Garrick’s performance as King Lear; Charles Matthews, in his parodic performances,

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‘imitates Kemble imitating Garrick imitating Richard III’.16 Knowing what an actor did becomes itself an industry, as with the publication of Shakespeare’s plays in the performing editions used at the Theatres Royal in Drury Lane and Covent Garden that John Bell published in 1773–1774, complete with annotation by Francis Gentleman that commented on what the theatres did do, might do or should not have done.17 Alongside the great line of eighteenth-century editions of Shakespeare, the succession of scholarship from Rowe through Capell and Johnson to Malone, emerges a second strand of editing, equally significant, one far less concerned with what Shakespeare wrote or his theatres played than with the immediacy of what is being played now in London and also on the provincial circuits across the country. But Garrick originates something beyond a moment of acting. At one moment in Peter Barnes’s play Jubilee about Garrick’s celebration of Shakespeare in his birthplace,18 three figures from the future appear to Garrick in his dream. Sir Peter Hall explains, on behalf of the other two, Trevor Nunn and Terry Hands, We’re future directors of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratford. We’ve entered your dreams to thank you. From this Jubilee there’ll spring a worldwide Shakespeare industry. It’s a million-dollar enterprise . . . If you don’t say ‘yes’, there’ll be no Shakespeare Jubilee, no Memorial Theatre, no plays, no money and no prestige . . . Everything depends on you. You lit the flame that blazoned Shakespeare across the world stage . . . As Nunn clarifies, Those plays’re our bread and butter. We’d be lost. The state spends millions promoting Shakespeare every year. He’s on the school curriculum so he has a guaranteed audience, which he wouldn’t have if he wasn’t part of our national heritage. 19 Overstated as any such moment in a celebratory play should be, Barnes’s point is fair. Thanks to Garrick, Shakespeare is heritage, cash, fame and status for the industry he generated and for those who thrive within it. Their roles in Shakespeare were not the only parts that made this volume’s actors famous. Garrick’s most frequently performed role, apart from the walk-on part of Benedick in the pageant at the end of his own play The Jubilee, was as Ranger in Benjamin Hoadly’s The Suspicious Husband and, after Benedick in Shakespeare’s play, a role he played at least once

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every season for 28 years, came Sir John Brute in Vanbrugh’s The Provoked Wife, Archer in Farquhar’s The Beaux’ Stratagem and Bayes in his own adaptation of The Rehearsal. It was Massinger, not Shakespeare, who gave Kean the role in which he scored such a triumph as to be given the silver icepail. Siddons’s definition for her age of the figure of pathos and emotional excess (whether grief, fear or rage) was created in a long series of roles in non-Shakespearean plays, as McDonald traces, while Kemble’s domination of the London stage was to a significant extent built on his performance of the title role in Jephson’s The Count of Narbonne (1780).20 But it was now not possible for an actor to be a star, to dominate the stage, to be sought after as celebrity, without towering success in Shakespeare roles. That demand was new, something that Thomas Betterton had not needed to accomplish for, though he was a great Hamlet, he was not great because he was a great Hamlet. There was no shortage of Shakespeare in the repertory of London theatre before Garrick and there would be no shortage of new plays and of other stock drama in the repertory of the theatres of Kemble, Kean and Siddons.21 Yet Shakespeare had come to occupy a special place in the culture, through the careful editing of his works, the beginnings of Shakespeare scholarship and the start of the long line of accounts of his life and his society, as well as through the excitement that would be generated by the new styles of performance, the new approaches to character and to production that all four would participate in and lead. Perhaps it is going too far yet to call it ‘bardolatry’ – and the word would not be coined until George Bernard Shaw used it first in 1901 and frequently thereafter – but there was a qualitative difference in the significance given to Shakespeare, in the reverence for his works, and in the use of the plays as the standard measure of an actor’s talents. Across the period, the text of Shakespeare as performed would change, sometimes radically with Restoration adaptations discarded in favour of something nearer to Shakespeare as first printed, sometimes through small changes of a line or two, sometimes through further adaptation. Kemble may have been famous as Coriolanus but there was a great deal not by Shakespeare in the text he produced and starred in. Kean’s Richard III was still essentially Cibber’s version of 1700, in some ways adjusted back towards Shakespeare’s play, of course, but still a long way from being unaltered. Garrick’s King Lear was not a pure production of Nahum Tate’s adaptation but it was still one in which neither Lear nor Cordelia died. What was viable in the theatre may have been changing – and the essays that follow all engage with how the audience’s taste was altering and what they wanted

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or were prepared to tolerate – but there was no search for an authentic Shakespeare, if by that we mean performances of the quarto or folio texts unaltered. At the very least all the plays were heavily cut, as the demands of productions with spectacular scenery which took time to shift had to be balanced with the comparative brevity required of a main-piece or a two or three act afterpiece fitted into the variety bill of an evening’s entertainment in the theatre. Even as the stars made their contributions to the transformation of a role or the entire form of production, they had to negotiate with the limits of audience receptivity, to serve their time in provincial theatres before conquering London, to gain acceptance (some faster than others), to maintain audience approval, to develop the iconic status that their greatest achievements warranted. If no subsequent Lady Macbeth has ever been as acclaimed as Siddons, no Coriolanus as patrician as Kemble’s, no Shylock as energized and energizing as Kean’s and no Lear as capable of reducing the audience and other actors to tears as Garrick’s, each had worked hard to overcome critical resistance. Garrick and Kean also had the problem of being short and Kean’s driven self found in alcohol such a ready response that he was often – far too often – drunk on stage. Kemble’s odd and muchmocked pronunciation was an individual eccentricity but Siddons had to overcome the automatic association of female actors and prostitution, striving always for a dignity and approval that women were rarely accorded. As they moulded their careers as best they could, they also remoulded Shakespeare, making their favourite characters into the figures the age would accept and leaving behind them exhilarating legacies in the new ways of seeing and hearing Shakespeare they made possible. They initiated new ways of thinking about him and understanding him that have continued to influence the cultural meanings of Shakespeare ever since and stretched his plays’ capabilities for infinite reworking in directions that previous generations would have found unthinkable but which we cannot do without. It is those transformations that have made Garrick, Kemble, Siddons and Kean necessary candidates for inclusion in Great Shakespeareans and that mark the impact on the history of Shakespeare that these chapters all point towards.

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Chapter 1

David Garrick Peter Holland

Statues There are many well-known events with which my consideration of Shakespeare and David Garrick might begin: with the extraordinary impact of Garrick’s first performances in Shakespeare roles in London in 1741, for example, or with Dr Johnson’s manifesto-prologue at the opening of the Drury Lane season in Garrick’s first year as co-manager and -patentee with James Lacy in 1747, or with the Shakespeare Jubilee in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1769. All are potent moments in the history of the cultural shift in the understanding and significance of Shakespeare that Garrick so powerfully helped to effect; all will appear later in this chapter. But I begin instead with a moment of cultural tourism, a sightseeing trip by three sisters visiting London from Bristol, their home town. Hannah More, the brilliant young playwright, spent the winter of 1773– 1774 in London with her two sisters, Sarah and Martha, the first trip to the capital for all of them. Among the trips they made from their flat near Covent Garden, one was along the Thames to Hampton to see the villa, set in six acres, that David Garrick had bought in 1754 and which, for more than 20 years, would be altered, extended and decorated on the advice of the innovative architect and designer Robert Adam. When the sisters visited, the house was yet again undergoing building work but Hannah was pleased ‘infinitely’ by the gardens and by the ‘grateful temple to Shakespeare’ as Horace Walpole called it,1 that Garrick had had Adam design, about 40 yards away from the house, on the river frontage. The small octagonal brick building with Ionic columns for the portico contained some of Garrick’s greatest treasures. ‘Here’, wrote Hannah to a friend in Bristol, ‘is the famous chair, curiously wrought out of a cherry tree’ – she should have written ‘a mulberry tree’ – which really grew in the garden of Shakespeare at Stratford. I sat in it, but caught no ray of inspiration. But what drew, and deserved, my attention

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was a most noble statue of this most original man, in an attitude strikingly pensive – his limbs strongly muscular, his countenance strongly expressive of some vast conception, and his whole form seeming the bigger from some immense idea [with] which you suppose his great imagination pregnant.2 The statue had been commissioned by Garrick in 1757 from the sculptor Louis François Roubillac at a cost, Hannah More noted, of ‘five hundred pounds’ (other accounts suggested only £315 but that was still a huge sum). Garrick’s fame was established on his special bond with Shakespeare and his plays but the statue was marked by a more particular identification than a quasi-religious adoration mixed with gratitude for Shakespeare’s part in Garrick’s successful career and the wealth it had brought him, the (good) fortune that had enabled him to buy the Hampton villa, build the temple and commission the statue: a widespread contemporary rumour suggested that the statue was not only for Garrick but also of him, that Garrick was the model as well as the patron, that Garrick was here performing or becoming Shakespeare. For Garrick, respect for Shakespeare was akin to an act of faith and the temple was not only jokingly the appropriate place in which to worship a divine being. As he wrote to a French friend, the translator and journalist Jean Suard, in 1765, ‘I will not despair of seeing you in my temple of Shakespeare, confessing your infidelity, and bowing your head to the god of my idolatry, as he himself so well expresses it’ and, anticipating a visit to Hampton by other French gentlemen, Garrick looked forward to a day ‘when we shall throw all dramatic critics and critical refinements into the Thames, and sacrifice to Shakespeare’.3 As Juliet encourages Romeo to swear ‘by thy gracious self, / Which is the god of my idolatry’ (Romeo and Juliet, 2.2.113–14), so Garrick’s friend must bow to Shakespeare – and Garrick, like a high priest, was Shakespeare’s earthly ‘representative’: in 1758, the London Magazine published some verse, supposedly ‘dropt in Mr. Garrick’s Temple of Shakespeare’, in which Shakespeare’s voice identifies Garrick anew: Unnotic’d long thy Shakespeare lay, To dullness and to time a prey; But lo! I rise, I breathe, I live In you, my representative!4 Roubillac’s statue was certainly not the first monument of and to Shakespeare. The bust in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon was in place by 1623. The recognition of Shakespeare as a national figure

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was signalled in 1735 by his being placed, along with Milton and Pope, as the representative British poets among the sixteen figures in the Temple of the British Worthies created for Viscount Cobham in his gardens at Stowe. But there were already signs of a campaign to have Shakespeare appropriately memorialized in marmoreal form in Westminster Abbey, a movement that gathered force once a bust of Milton had been placed there in 1737. The author of one of the first elegies on Shakespeare, William Basse, had argued that Shakespeare should be placed beside Chaucer, Spenser and Beaumont in the Abbey, a proposal that Ben Jonson strongly resisted, proclaiming, in his elegy on Shakespeare printed in the First Folio, that Shakespeare did not need such a memorial: ‘Thou art a Moniment, without a tombe, / And art alive still while thy Booke doth live.’ But others were not so sure and were determined that a monument would be exactly what Shakespeare would have. With benefit performances of Julius Caesar and Hamlet to raise money (and with Shakespeare seen in the prologues to those shows as the ghosts of both Caesar and Old Hamlet, as some rightful king or aspirant to kingship murdered), the statue by Peter Scheemakers could be unveiled in 1741 and later revised when the blank scroll towards which Shakespeare gestured and which contemporary satirists mocked for its blankness was fi lled by inaccurately quoted lines from The Tempest. Often reproduced, soon available as a small porcelain souvenir and, in the twentieth century, eventually placed on the £20 note, the Abbey monument was a sign of Shakespeare’s cultural value. Clearly the words of Shakespeare’s voice about his being ‘Unnotic’d long’ hugely overstated the case for seeing the playwright as neglected before Garrick’s arrival on London’s theatrical and social scene and I shall come back to how much Shakespeare was being noticed soon. But the myth continued, finding its place at the end of the century in an inscription on the plinth of another statue: a contemporary described the statue of Garrick put up in Westminster Abbey in 1797 as showing Garrick ‘throwing aside a curtain, which discovers a medallion of the great Poet . . . The curtain itself is designed to represent the Veil of Ignorance and barbarism, which darkened the drama of the immortal bard till the appearance of Garrick’, while the inscription explains the meaning further: Tho’ sunk in death the forms the Poet drew, The Actor’s genius bade them breathe anew. Tho’, like the Bard himself, in night they lay, Immortal Garrick call’d them back to day.5

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Visit Garrick’s Shakespeare temple now to admire its 1990s restoration and you will not find the Roubillac statue, only a reproduction of it. In his will, as the symbolically placed second item, after the disposition of the Hampton estate, Garrick left the statue to the British Museum where it stood in the King’s Library until the opening of the new British Library where, instead, it stands at the foot of the library’s main staircase. Garrick plainly wished to have it seen as occupying a different kind of space from the temple; no longer part of religious fervour but instead as part of the national collection of the genius of the country that the new museum and its central feature, the library, were intended to symbolize.

Collecting Books When the statue came to stand in the Museum’s Bloomsbury home surrounded by the great collection of the monarch’s books, the centrepiece of the library’s holdings, Garrick had also contributed to that scholarly resource more practically but no less symbolically. On his death, Garrick had also willed to the British Museum his collection of English drama, the ‘Collection of Old Plays’ as it was known, amounting to about 1300 plays, carefully catalogued and bound in 242 volumes. Supplemented by subsequent purchases and bequests, the Garrick collection is still the most remarkable demonstration of the range of accomplishment of early modern English drama, of the plays, some famous, many forgotten, that underpinned the history of the theatre in which Garrick starred. As early as the 1750s, when the collection was already substantial, widely known and equally widely admired, Garrick had indicated his intentions for its final destination. In collecting on this scale, Garrick was not primarily forming a library for his own use, nor indulging in one of the signs of the gentleman he saw himself as having become, nor only making a statement for future scholars; it was especially a way of defining a canon and generously aiding the creation of a discipline of textual editing and literary criticism, for the library was used by many scholars and critics whom Garrick knew and to whom he generously gave access. Shakespeare editors like George Steevens and Edward Capell (who compiled the catalogue of Garrick’s collection and helped find ways of filling the gaps to make it as complete as possible), Shakespeare scholars like Peter Whalley, critics interested in Shakespeare’s contemporaries like Bishop Thomas Percy and Thomas Warton, all made extensive use of Garrick’s holdings. As Percy wrote in his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), ‘In Mr. Garrick’s curious collection of old plays

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are many scarce pieces of ancient poetry, with the free use of which he indulged the Editor, in the politest manner,’,6 identifying precisely which scarce pieces he had found there by the shelf-marks of the bound volumes Garrick owned. When Percy was working on a new key to the parodies and quotations in The Rehearsal by the Duke of Buckingham and others, a play still in the repertory in revised form and in which Garrick starred as Bayes the poet, he wrote to Lord Hailes that Mr Garrick very politely gave me access to his collection for that purpose. I have accordingly read over every play therein, which was published between the year 1660, and 1672 when the Rehearsal was first printed: the number is little less than 200 . . .7 In 1771, when Warton introduced to Garrick another scholar, Thomas Hawkins, Garrick wrote back, ‘if he is in town he shall with pleasure collate any plays, &c. in my collection’. Hawkins’s plan was to publish a collection of early English drama, a revision, in effect, of the multi-volume Select Collection of Old Plays that Robert Dodsley had published in 1744. Garrick thought Dodsley’s work ‘might have been better’ but he also wondered, ‘Does not Mr. Hawkins think that the old plays are in general more matters of curiosity than of merit?’8 Dodsley, a bookseller as well as editor, playwright and Garrick’s publisher (and good friend, at least until Garrick refused to produce one of Dodsley’s plays in 1758), had been the source of many of Garrick’s holdings, plays which Dodsley had acquired as part of the dispersal of the Harleian Library, the great collection of the Earls of Oxford. In this complex social network for the transmission of books through the culture of acquisition and dispersal, of collecting and library-formation, as in so many other aspects of the organization of mid-eighteenth century society, Garrick had come to occupy a position at the heart. As Dr Johnson commented after Garrick’s death, ‘his profession made him rich and he made his profession respectable.’ Garrick, with his villa on the Thames with its temple and statue, with his books and his estates, had achieved all this unprecedented status for a theatre professional through his brilliance as an actor, his effectiveness as a manager and his commercial eye as a dramatist. All of it, as he profoundly knew, had its origins in and its continued dependence on his engagement with Shakespeare. Statues will figure again much later in this account of his work, but I shall move from the books and pamphlets Garrick collected to the ones he published or was the cause of being published before focusing on some of his encounters with Shakespeare’s plays rather than with his representation in marble.

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Editor and Commentator When in 1766 George Steevens published a Prospectus for his updating of Dr Johnson’s edition of Shakespeare, he indicated a heavy reliance on Garrick. Steevens would complete Johnson’s inadequate collation of early texts and supplement the notes, explaining obscure passages by referring to other early modern works, both tasks which heavily depended on his using Garrick’s play collection, and he would ask Garrick for comments about Shakespeare to add to the notes so that Garrick could ‘transmit some part of that knowledge of Shakespeare to posterity, without which, he can be his best commentator no longer than he lives’.9 In a poem Steevens wrote ‘on the report of [Garrick’s] intending to leave the stage, 1775’, he mockingly portayed Shakespeare oppressed by his critics and editors: Shall equal wrong attend his publish’d lays, Where critick ivy choaks poetic bays? . . . Shall final ruin Johnson, Steevens, bring, Who clog with notes of lead his active wing . . .? But he saw Garrick as Shakespeare’s defender precisely through his incisive understanding of Shakespeare’s meaning, a comprehension communicated through the details of his performances in Shakespeare roles: Garrick ’tis thine his suffering worth to shield, Bestride the vanquishd and regain the field; One meaning glance of eyes like thine can show What labouring criticks boast in vain to know . . .10 Questioned by Boswell, who was troubled by Dr Johnson’s refusal to mention Garrick in his edition of Shakespeare, Johnson replied that Garrick ‘cannot illustrate Shakespeare’,11 but that function of illustrator, precisely as the person who clarifies by acting as editor and commentator, is exactly what others saw Garrick as performing: as an anonymous poet put it in writing to Garrick ‘upon his dedication of a temple to Shakespear’, Dull menders of a Syllable, a learned, motley Train, The Page with vague Conjectures fill; and puzzle, not Explain: In thy Expression Shakespeare’s Meaning shines, Thou finest Commentator on his Lines!12

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John Bell’s edition of Shakespeare published in 1773–1774, dedicated to Garrick and reprinting the plays ‘as they are now performed at the Theatres Royal in London; regulated from the prompt-books of each house’, including, in later version, prints of actors in character, was prefaced by equal size portraits of Shakespeare and Garrick and praised the latter as ‘the best illustrator of, and the best living comment, on Shakespeare, that has ever appeared’.13 Garrick was certainly willing to think of himself as an editor in many of the senses current at the time. In his advertisement to the third edition of his version of Romeo and Juliet, Garrick referred to himself as ‘the present editor’,14 where the modern concept would have been of Garrick as adaptor or reviser or transformer. Garrick edited Shakespeare by changing the performing text and he offered commentary on that text as he performed in it. Performance becomes illustration and what Garrick did to, with and for Shakespeare throughout his career. As Vanessa Cunningham points out, Dr Johnson defined an editor as a ‘Publisher: he that revises or prepares any work for publication’ and, since Johnson’s primary sense of ‘publish’ is to ‘discover to mankind; to make generally and openly known’, then this was ‘exactly the service that Garrick’s admirers saw him as performing for Shakespeare by revealing the plays to an ever-wider public’.15

Examining the Actor Certainly, if editors lie awake at night worrying about details of punctuation and lineation, Garrick was repeatedly engaged both in analysis and in discussion about exactly that. Richard Warner suggested, in publishing as a letter to Garrick his proposal for a Shakespeare glossary, Garrick was the deserved recipient, given ‘[t]he intimate acquaintance you have had with his writings, the very minutiæ of which you have made your study’.16 That there was minute dissection of Garrick’s way of speaking particular lines is in itself remarkable, a sign of a theatre history, specifically a history of audience response as listening, that no longer happens. As early in his acting career as 16 December 1741, Garrick received a letter from one of his greatest fans, Rev Thomas Newton, who was, like Garrick, both born in Lichfield and an heir to an alcohol merchant. Newton, while concerned for Garrick’s health (‘I hope in the mean time you will spare yourself as much as you can, till you are recovered from your cold, and your voice may

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appear in perfection’), is also unable, as James Boaden, the first editor of Garrick’s correspondence in 1831, puts it, to allow a ‘trivial error to sully long the general merit of his performance’ as Richard III: In the last scene between Richard and Lady Ann, there is one thing that I think you did not speak quite properly, though I am somewhat doubtful. She says ‘What have I done? What horrid crime committed? Rich. To me the worst of crimes – outliv’d my liking.’ In the latter part, outliv’d my liking, you spoke with the same voice, only exalting it; whereas I imagine it should have been with an alteration of voice, more peevishly and angrily.17 Garrick received another complaint about a word in his performance as Hamlet: something . . . seems to me wrong about the pronunciation of a single word . . . It is tropically. That o, I imagine, should be pronounced short, as we pronounce the o in logical; and both for the same reason, because the vowel in the original words, from whence they are derived, is in both an o [i.e. Greek omicron], not an ω [i.e. Greek omega] – a short o, not a long one. I believe you will find custom to be on this side of the question . . .18 When he was playing Macbeth in January 1744, Garrick was told by another correspondent that ‘I see no reason for pronouncing the speech that begins with “Blood hath been shed ere now,” aside.’19 Even more striking is the fact that Garrick seems to have kept the letters, for, while most of the correspondence Boaden included is from the 1770s, the early letters that survive in his collection are, apart from the ones to and from Garrick’s family, predominantly the ones of complaint about such matters of delivery. Rather than throwing them in the bin, Garrick seems to have cared enough to answer them, when not anonymous, and keep them. His answers were often detailed and strikingly apologetic in tone. In other words, Garrick engaged with this kind of detailed analysis of delivery, more evidence of his concern with what Warner called ‘the very minutiæ of which you have made your study’, when it came to the sound (here rhythm, syntax, pronunciation and stage-focus) of Shakespeare.

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No actor before Garrick had had his or her performance as minutely or as publicly examined. A recent biographer identified over 500 items commenting on Garrick published during his lifetime.20 When, for instance, Thaddaeus Fitzpatrick with others was annoyed by Garrick’s tendency to misaccent a line of verse, they decided that, ‘as our memories did not serve us to clear up the point, it was agreed that we should go to the tragedy of Hamlet this evening, each man, furnished with a printed play and a pencil, mark such improprieties, in respect of speaking, as Mr. G– might possibly fall into’. Fitzpatrick’s complaints were first published as letters to journals and then gathered together in a pamphlet, An Enquiry into the Real Merit of a Certain Popular Performer (1760), an attack to which Garrick replied, again in print, in his satire The Fribbleriad (1761) but whose detailed charges he completely ignored. The complainants listed twenty examples from Hamlet, moments where they claimed Garrick created a caesura in a line in ways that worked nonsensically against the syntax: Oh that this too too solid – flesh would melt. He would drown – the stage with tears. I’ll have these players Play something like – the murther of my father. Lay not that flattering – unction to your soul.21 They listed others where Garrick emphasized the last word in a line with a similarly meaningless pause before the next: Or that the everlasting had not fixt – His canon ’gainst self-slaughter. Whether it is nobler in the mind, to suffer – The stings [sic] and arrows.22 Another twenty examples from Richard III distinguish between ‘the words printed in Italics, [which] are those he thought fit to lay emphasis on; . . . such as are in Small Capitals, I apprehend he ought to have spoken emphatically’ (p.27), for example: Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths, Our stern alarms are changed to merry meetings; Our dreadful marches to delightful measures . . . I, that am curtail’d of man’s fair proportion, Deform’d unfinish’d, sent before my time – Into this breathing world, scarce half made up . . . (p.28)

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For many of his examples, there are detailed explanations of why Garrick’s choice was mistaken, for example, for Richard’s line to Lady Anne ‘Then bid me kill myself, and I will do it’: By his former conduct, and confession, it appears, that he was sufficiently ready to kill, and therefore the verb might have escaped the emphasis; but as he seemed willing to change the object, if she ordered him, he should have marked himself. (p.32) It is a fair note to an actor and I often make similar mental notes when listening to actors at the RSC and elsewhere. The Fitzpatrick pamphlet can in some respects be seen as part of the pamphlet culture wars that surrounded Garrick’s management, a sign of the cultural investment – and the profit for publishers – in such wars of words focused on the institution of the theatre. But the extraordinarily long list of pamphlets for and against Garrick throughout his career is the sign of a sustained and very public engagement with his performances. If one wants to write about Burbage or Betterton, one minutely dissects the fragments of evidence, the small corpus of accounts of their performances. But for Garrick there is an immense quantity of description: pamphlets and newspaper reviews, letters and diaries, reports of conversations and early biographies, promptbooks and printed texts, portraits and prints, a mass of votes for and against that swirl around him. No actor before and comparatively few since have ever been so written about, so visible, so important to a society’s need to engage with its cultural events. I shall use Garrick’s Macbeth as a test case for this before turning back to the early stages of his career.

Playing Macbeth As early in his career as 1744, just before he was about to appear as Macbeth for the first time, a pamphlet titled An Essay on Acting, in which will be considered the mimical behaviour of a certain fashionable faulty actor (to give only part of its lengthy title) appeared, starting with a ‘Short Treatise on Acting’ and then offering ‘Critical Observations upon the Character of Macbeth, as it is at present Attempted at the Theatre-Royal in Drury Lane’, an apparently brutal attack on Garrick that seems to be praising the performance of James Quin (1693–1766), the established star in the role of Macbeth. One of its title-page epigraphs adjusts Shakespeare to allude to Garrick’s short stature (‘So have I seen a Pygmie strut, / Mouth and rant, in a Giant’s

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Robe.’) and suggests he is ‘well form’d for Fleance, or one of the Infant Shadows in the Cauldron Scene’ (p.14). But, since Arthur Murphy’s biography of Garrick in 1801, it has been assumed that the pamphlet was written by Garrick himself, a clever piece of negative puffery, designed, as it describes what Quin did, to suggest that what Garrick was doing at the same moment was better. So, for instance, when seeing the ‘air-drawn dagger’, he should not rivet his eyes to an imaginary object as if it really was there but should show an unsettled motion in his eye . . . ‘Come, let me clutch thee’ is not to be done by one motion only but by several successive catches at it, first with one hand and then with the other, preserving the same motion at the same time with his feet, like a man who, out of his depth and half-drowned in his struggles, catches at air for substance. (p.17) Where Quin moved repeatedly, Garrick played the speech with a stillness, a single grab at the dagger sufficient to make the point and the immobility of the head and the focus of the eyes more powerful than Quin’s restlessness. Garrick used the same control in keeping ‘a fi xed eye’ on Banquo’s ghost. A letter of 1761, again writing to someone who had criticized his delivery of an individual line, claiming he had made an unwarrantable pause after ‘single’ in ‘Shakes so my single state of man’ (1.3.140), gives a clear sense of how Garrick thought through a speech and sought to make his voice reveal the character’s thought: If I stop at ye last word, it is a glaring fault, for the Sense is Imperfect – but my Idea of the passage is this – Macbeth is absorb’d in thought, & struck with ye horror of ye Murder, tho but an Idea (fantastical) and it naturally gives him a slow – tremulous – undertone of voice, & tho it might appear I stop’d at Every word in ye Line, more than Usual, yet my intention, was far from dividing the Substantive from its adjective, but to paint ye horror of Macbeth’s Mind, & keep ye voice suspended a little – wch it will naturally be in such a Situation – 23 The key word for Garrick is ‘naturally’, a desire to replace what he saw as the excesses of the traditional acting style with something that can always be justified by reference to realism. But he was also concerned to make clear his view of Macbeth as a heroic and courageous warrior and as a

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man filled with passions, particularly remorse, perhaps the quintessential sentiment of the mid-century male. The man of sensibility is deeply affected by his murderous behaviour and the behaviour is mitigated by, for instance, cutting the onstage murder of Young Macduff, what Paul Prescott has described as making sure that ‘certain atrocities are airbrushed’.24 Contemporaries praised Garrick for the precision of his representation of Macbeth’s thought and his control throughout the play. Thomas Wilkes, who played Ross, noted that It was curious to observe in him the progress of guilt from the intention to the act. How his ambition kindles at the distant prospect of a crown . . . And with what reluctance he yields . . . to the perpetration of the murder! How finely he does show his resolution staggered . . . until he is roused to action by the signal . . . It is impossible to convey an adequate idea of the horror of his looks when he returns from having murdered Duncan . . . How does his voice chill the blood when he tells you ‘I’ve done the deed!’25 And so on through an equally exclamatory account of the whole play. The return from the murder was clearly one of the performance’s high points, with Thomas Davies praising ‘his distraction of mind and agonizing horrors . . . finely contrasted by her [Lady Macbeth’s] seeming apathy, tranquility, and confidence’.26 Most extraordinarily, Garrick managed to suggest that ‘his complexion grew whiter every moment’, perhaps, so a newspaper suggested, simply by having wiped off his make-up before entering,27 and the disarray of his costume, his coat and waistcoat unbuttoned and his wig awry, ‘added greatly to the resemblance of nature in that part of his character’.28 Wilkes may have found it ‘impossible to convey’ Garrick’s performance after the murder but two painters attempted to capture the scene. I shall come back later to the extraordinary number of paintings of Garrick, the most painted non-royal of the century,29 but Johann Zoffany’s characteristically elegant representation of the moment, now in the Baroda Museum in India, does little to convey what Davies described as ‘the wonderful expression of heartful terror, which Garrick felt when he shewed his bloody hands’.30 Henry Fuseli painted the scene twice: the first, still with the actors in contemporary dress recognizably the same as in Zoffany’s image, exhilaratingly captures Garrick’s staring, traumatized eyes, still focused on the offstage moment, with the daggers held up aggressively in front of him at head height, unable to let go of them, making Lady Macbeth, played by Hannah Pritchard, recoil in desperation

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Figure 1.1 Zürich.

Garrick, Kemble, Siddons, Kean

Henry Fuseli, Garrick and Pritchard in Macbeth (c. 1766). © Kunsthaus

as she tries to quieten him (see Figure 1.1); the second reaches a kind of abstraction of character and of scene with little hint of theatre or costume, all now subordinate to the manic energy and eerie lighting of the engagement of the two (see Figure 1.2).31 Jean Georges Noverre, a French ballet-master whom Garrick had brought over to Drury Lane in a disastrous attempt to stage one of Noverre’s ballets in 1755, described Garrick’s death throes in the role – and Garrick, Thomas Davies reported, ‘excelled in the expression of convulsive throes and dying agonies’:32 The approach of death showed each instant on his face; his eyes became dim, his voice could not support the efforts he made to speak his thoughts . . . his legs gave way under him, his face lengthened, his pale and livid features bore the signs of suffering and repentance. At last, he fell; . . . His plight made the audience shudder, he clawed the ground and seemed to be digging his own grave, but the dread moment was nigh, one saw death in reality, everything expressed that instant which

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Figure 1.2 Henry Fuseli, Lady Macbeth Seizing the Daggers (exhibited ?1812). © Tate, London.

makes all equal. In the end he expired. The death rattle and the convulsive movement of the features, arms and breasts gave the final touch to this terrible picture.33 Again, it is the ‘reality’ of what Garrick was doing that so impressed Noverre, the action revealing its truthfulness. Garrick’s performance as Macbeth reclaimed the role as a sustained exploration of guilt and ambition. As Thomas Davies commented, prior to Garrick actors did not even like the encounter with Banquo’s ghost: Before Mr Garrick displayed the terrible graces of action from the impression of visionary appearance, the comedians were strangers to the effects which this scene could produce. Macbeth, they constantly claimed, was not a character of the first rate; all the pith of it was exhausted, they said, in the first and second act of the play . . . [Garrick] said he should be very unhappy if he were not able to keep alive the attention of the spectators to the last syllable of so animated a character.34

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Editing Macbeth Garrick’s first performance as Macbeth was on 7 January 1744. The playbills and newspaper notices advertising and hyping the new production both gave notice of his intention to revive Macbeth as originally written by Shakespeare . . . Quin cried out, with an air of surprise, ‘What does he mean? don’t I play Macbeth as written by Shakespeare?’ 35 But Quin did not. Since 1664, the play had been performed in Sir William Davenant’s adaptation, in which, indeed, the pith of the play is indeed exhausted before the banquet scene. As Stephen Orgel comments on Garrick’s pointing to Shakespeare in the playbills, Twenty years earlier a producer could have expected to attract audiences by advertising a wholly new Macbeth, bigger and better; Garrick’s assertion, the invocation of the author to confer authority on the production, marks a significant moment in both theatrical and textual history.36 Where audiences had since the Restoration come to accept as validating for any new performance its strong connection with the growing tradition of approved star performances, Garrick, as Paul Prescott has argued, offered ‘the claim of textual authenticity . . . to justify, to a potentially hostile community of interpreters, Garrick’s divergence from performance tradition and to locate the privileged origins of his originality’.37 So, for instance, Murphy argued that Garrick published An Essay on Acting precisely because he knew that his manner of representing Macbeth would be essentially different from that of all the actors who had played it for twenty or thirty years before; and he was therefore determined to attack himself ironically to blunt, if not prevent, the remarks of others.38 The notion of tradition in performance is perhaps best expressed in a comment about the post-Restoration performance of Hamlet by Thomas Betterton, the greatest Hamlet from the 1660s until his retirement in 1708: The Tragedy of Hamlet; Hamlet being Perform’d by Mr. Betterton, Sir William [Davenant] (having seen Mr. Taylor of the Blackfryars Company Act it, who being Instructed by the Author Mr. Shakespear) taught Mr. Betterton in every Particle of it.39

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Davenant’s version of Macbeth, the version against which Garrick’s public statement of his return to Shakespeare was pitted, was, for his company’s prompter, John Downes, a huge success precisely because of the spectacle, the ‘bigger and better’ Macbeth, that it had been: being dressed all in its Finery, as new Clothes, new Scenes, Machines, as flyings for the Witches; with all the Singing and Dancing in it . . . it being all Excellently performed, being in the nature of an Opera, it Recompensed double the Expense; it proves still a lasting Play.40 Davenant was, in some respects, simply continuing the pre-Restoration performances of Macbeth. The earliest published text, in the First Folio of 1623, is already an adaptation, with scenes by Middleton that add ‘Singing and Dancing’, though not ‘flyings’. The title-page of Davenant’s version (published in 1674) announces it ‘with all the alterations, amendments, additions, and new songs’ but Davenant did more than add spectacle. He revised the language to suit the taste of the times for clarity and a less extravagantly metaphoric language. Instead of Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather The multitudinous seas incarnadine, Making the green one red (2.2.59–62) Quin and the other actors who used Davenant’s text spoke can the Sea afford Water enough to wash away the stains? No, they would sooner add a tincture to The Sea, and turn the green into a red. (pp.18–19). As Michael Dobson comments, Elsewhere, alterations are dictated by decorums as much social as linguistic: Davenant’s Macbeth, for example, never forgets himself in front of the servants, and instead of venting the furious ‘The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon!’ (5.3.11) politely asks, ‘Now, Friend, what means thy change of Countenance?’ (p.54). In such a well-spoken Scotland as this there can be no place for the drunken Porter.41 In order to sustain this much more narrowly conceived concept of tragedy, all high nobility with little trace of humour, and in order to create a better sense of the moral balance which Shakespeare’s play conspicuously

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lacks but which Restoration ethical and aesthetic principles expected, Davenant also expanded the roles of the Macduffs who are now given new scenes together in which they too meet the witches and ‘debate the moral problem of tyrannicide in rhyming couplets’42. This has the added advantage, for a theatre now casting women as well as men, of making Lady Macduff into a much more substantial role, one able to have her own maid-cum-confidante with whom to converse. Macbeth was Garrick’s first attempt at producing his own acting version of a Shakespeare play, rather than performing the current stage adaptation. He began from first principles, using Lewis Theboald’s edition of 1740 but also emending it in the light of the ideas of William Warburton and Dr Johnson whose Miscellaneous Observations on the Tragedy of Macbeth would be published in 1745. In effect what Garrick created was an efficient acting text, 269 lines shorter than Shakespeare’s but with almost all of Davenant’s material removed. Even the Porter is momentarily reinstated, though reduced to a single line, ‘Faith, sir, we were carousing till the second cock’ (2.1.155), in part to give Garrick as Macbeth enough time to change his costume and ‘Get on [his] nightgown’ (148).43 Lady Macduff’s role returns to its normal proportions and the play’s concentration on its star role, that is, of course, Garrick’s role, is helped by also cutting a number of Lady Macbeth’s speeches. In one respect only did Garrick expand on Davenant’s lead. Where Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Macduff exit fighting, Davenant had given Macbeth a single dying line: ‘Farewell, vain world, and what’s most vain in it, Ambition.’ But that was not enough of a tragic end for Garrick. He borrowed Davenant’s lines giving Macduff an appropriate counterweight to each thrust of his sword: ‘This for my royal master Duncan! / This for my bosom friend, my wife! and this for / The pledges of her love and mine, my children!’ When Macduff exited bearing off Macbeth’s sword ‘to / Witness my revenge’, for there can be no decapitation for Garrick’s Macbeth, Garrick, alone on stage, can have an appropriately substantial final speech: ’Tis done! the scene of life will quickly close. Ambition’s vain, delusive dreams are fled, And now I wake to darkness, guilt and horror. I cannot bear it! Let me shake it off. – ‘Twa’ not be; my soul is clogged with blood. I cannot rise! I dare not ask for mercy. It is too late, hell drags me down. I sink I sink – Oh! – my soul is lost forever! Oh! (Dies). (5.6.73–81)

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It is against this speech that the stage business of dying that Noverre described took place. Francis Gentleman, who provided a commentary to Shakespeare for the edition published by John Bell in 1773 from the Drury Lane promptbooks, was severe on Shakespeare here and equally severe on Garrick: where Shakespeare’s idea of having his head brought on by Macduff, is either ludicrous or horrid, therefore commendably changed to visible punishment – a dying speech, and a very good one, has been furnished by Mr. Garrick, to give the actor more eclat; but . . . we are not fond of characters writhing and flouncing on carpets.44 Garrick’s excellence in death scenes was not to everyone’s taste. But the aim throughout was to ensure a proper affective response from the audience. Where Davenant’s version had had to negotiate the notion of usurpation and regicide, a difficult topic in the tense years after the Restoration (and where it was also politic to cut Malcolm’s comments on royal lust), Garrick’s primary concern was less political than emotional, horror and pity as appropriate. He replied apologetically, for instance, to a criticism of his speaking of ‘Out, out, brief candle’ (5.5.23) with ‘two starts, . . . each with a strong action of both hands’, thereby, to his correspondent, failing to convey ‘the insignificance of life’ and ‘a philosophical contempt’: ‘I must have spoke those words quite ye reverse of my own Ideas, if I did not express with them the most contemptuous indifference of Life.’45 But, as another correspondent put it, ‘Macbeth’s comparison of life to [“A poor player”] pronounced by the softest voice that ever drew pity from the heart of man, I well remember to have affected me beyond expression.’46 In spite of his success in the role, Garrick did not perform Macbeth all that often after the 1744 season; only 37 performances in his entire career, compared with 113 as Benedick, 90 as Hamlet and 85 as Lear.47 In 1767 he was, he wrote to his brother George, ‘very fat. I am made too much of, & Eat & drink too freely – it won’t do – & I can’ undertake Macbeth this season.’48 By 1772, when asked to revive it by Lord North, he politely refused: ‘I am really not yet prepar’d for Macbeth, ’tis the most violent part I have.’49

Authentic Macbeth But Garrick also mentioned to North’s secretary that he had ‘a design to exhibit ye Characters in ye old dresses’.50 Macbeth was played at Drury Lane (without Garrick) ‘dressed in the Habits of the Times’ on 25 November

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1776, as the prompter William Hopkins recorded in his diary.51 But by then Charles Macklin (1699?–1797) had played the role at Covent Garden, in October 1773, and had been widely ridiculed for his performance. Nonetheless, it was Macklin who explored the possibility of historical accuracy in costuming Macbeth to an extent that Garrick never envisaged. Throughout his career, Garrick toyed with historicism in costume designs for Shakespeare, taking further what other contemporaries had experimented with, planning a production of King John in 1750 dressed ‘half old English, half modern’ as the company had in William Shirley’s Edward the Black Prince the same year, 52 trying Richard III and Henry IV, Part 2 in ‘old English habits’ in the 1760s and finally playing Lear in what was conceived of as historical authenticity in his final performances in 1776. But Macklin went much further. When preparing to play Shylock in 1741, a role he performed for 48 years, he read and reread Josephus’s History of the Jews and went daily to watch Jewish businessmen in London coffee-houses, copying manners, gesture and accent and wearing a red three- cornered hat because he had discovered that Venetian Jews usually wore one. For Macbeth he was determined to follow through his historical research. Cooke, Macklin’s first biographer, noted, Macbeth used to be dressed in a suit of scarlet and gold, a tail wig, &c. in every respect like a modern military officer. Garrick always played it in this manner . . . Macklin, however, . . . saw the absurdity of exhibiting a Scotch character, existing many years before the Norman Conquest, in this manner, and therefore very properly abandoned it for the old Caledonian habit.53 As Zoffany’s painting shows, Garrick wore formal contemporary clothes as Macbeth, a court version of a military uniform for the murder, just as, for his second encounter with the witches, he wore the outfit of a modern fine gentleman so that . . . you looked like a beau who had unfortunately slipped his foot and tumbled into a night-cellar, where a parcel of old women were boiling tripe for their supper.54 Where Garrick’s experiments with historical accuracy, when they occurred at all, were limited to costume for the principals, Macklin went much further and ‘shewed the same attention to the subordinate characters as well as to the scenes, decorations, music and other incidental parts of the performance’.55 His own costume as Macbeth draped the plaid

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over his back, used the traditional belted tunic and a bonnet, and rightly avoided the kilt, a late innovation in Scottish wear. His first entrance, Macklin noted, ‘should be preceded by fi fe, drum, bagpipe (query) and a bodyguard in highland dress’.56 Even the set was to depict the world of the historical Macbeth as Macklin understood it: for the interior of Macbeth’s castle, ‘every room should be full of bad pictures of warriors, sword, helmet, target and dirk, escutcheons – and the Hall, boars stuffed, wolves, and full of pikes and broadswords.’57 Macklin’s designs were full of anachronisms: the Scottish troops carried pistols and the castle battlements had cannon. But his vision of the play was far beyond anything Garrick ever attempted, the fullest attempt yet to create a design for a Shakespeare play that was both historical and imaginative. It was also, conspicuously unlike Garrick’s success with Macbeth, something of a disaster with near-riots in the audience so that the management cancelled performances and, after further confrontations with the playgoers, Macklin was dismissed. Where Garrick had worked hard in 1744 to restore the Shakespeare text and oust Davenant’s, as well as ensuring that it properly set off the brilliance of his own performance, Macklin was concerned only with historical authenticity, a unified production style and detailed realism. Macklin may have been mocked but his style of production prefigured the nineteenth century fascination with historicism and the twentieth century fascination with unified, conceptually driven modes of directorial interpretation.

Contexts for change: Garrick the actor Where Macklin’s revolution in theatrical design was anything but an instant success, Garrick’s revolution in acting style at the start of his career certainly had been or, at least, the impact of the challenge that Garrick offered to traditional modes of performance was seen by contemporaries as profound and exhilarating. Garrick was born in Hereford in 1717 and grew up in Lichfield, educated in part at Samuel Johnson’s school nearby. Johnson and Garrick journeyed to London together in 1737 and Garrick, though registered as a prospective law student at Lincoln’s Inn, went into partnership in the wine trade with his older brother Peter. But it was soon clear that Garrick’s true interest was in the theatre. In April 1740 his first play, Lethe, or Aesop in the Shades, a satire on various fashionable foibles, was performed at Drury Lane as an afterpiece, a short play performed after the main work, as part of the benefit night for Henry Giffard. Garrick’s second play, The Lying Valet, would be performed in

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November 1741. It is significant that Garrick’s theatre career begins as a playwright, for his work on adapting and restoring Shakespeare is a combination of the sensitivity of an actor to what makes a great role in midcentury theatre and the perceptiveness of a playwright of how plays are effectively structured in mid-century drama. Giffard was crucial to the first steps of Garrick’s career. In 1729 Giffard had become manager of the theatre in Goodman’s Fields and had then built a new theatre nearby in 1733. The Licensing Act of 1737, which restricted the theatres able to perform plays to two, Drury Lane and Covent Garden, threatened to close down theatres like Giffard’s, especially when the licensees of the patent houses sought to have their monopoly enforced. Garrick asked his brother to use his contacts to help Giffard gain a licence. But Giffard, using a loophole in the act that permitted concerts, reopened Goodman’s Fields in 1741 with a new pantomime, Harlequin Student, celebrating the legitimate drama and ending with the entrance of a monument to Shakespeare. One night, as the lead actor, Richard Yates, was ill, ‘I put on ye Dress & did 2 or three Scenes for him, but Nobody knew it but him and Giffard’, as Garrick wrote to his brother.58 During the summer Giffard ran a season in Ipswich with Garrick in the company and on 19 October 1741 Garrick made his London debut as Richard III, appearing as ‘a Gentleman (who never appear’d on any Stage)’, as the playbill announced. A notice in a newspaper the next day, perhaps planted, described the audience’s response to Garrick as ‘the most extraordinary and great that was ever known upon such an Occasion’ while a Lichfield man, John Swinfen, wrote to Peter Garrick the next day I believe there was not one in the House that was not in raptures. I heard several men of judgment declare it their opinion that nobody ever excelled him in the part.59 Garrick himself wrote to Peter as well: Last Night I play’d Richard ye Third to ye Surprize of Every Body & as I shall make very near £300 p Annum by It & as it is really what I doat upon I am resolv’d to pursue it.60 The combination of economic sense and passion is something that characterizes Garrick’s entire career. Certainly the change of career was a sound move for Garrick and the excitement created by his performances was a huge success for Giffard’s theatre.

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At the heart of Garrick’s success lay his difference from the prevailing style of acting tragedy. The playwright Richard Cumberland, writing nearly 60 years later, described the contrast between Garrick and Quin in a performance of Rowe’s The Fair Penitent in 1746: with very little variation of cadence, and in a deep full tone, accompanied by a sawing kind of action, which had more of the senate than of the stage in it, [Quin] rolled out his heroics with an air of dignified indifference, that seemed to disdain the plaudits that were bestowed upon him. Mrs. Cibber in a key, high-pitched but sweet withal, sung or rather recitatived Rowe’s harmonious strain . . . it was so extremely wanting in contrast, that, though it did not wound the ear, it wearied it; . . . but when after long and eager expectation I first beheld little Garrick, then young and light and alive in every muscle and in every feature, come bounding on the stage . . . – heavens, what a transition! – it seemed as if a whole century had been stept over in the transition of a single scene.61 But Cumberland also suggests that, even at this point in Garrick’s career, 6 years after that triumphant debut, the audience preferred Quin and ‘bestowed far the greater show of hands upon the master of the old school than upon the founder of the new’.62 Theatre revolutions do not really happen overnight. Nonetheless, what Garrick offered as a shift in theatrical form was clearly towards something more vital and faster – hence Cumberland’s emphasis on Garrick ‘bounding on’, ‘light and alive’ – but also something far more realist and mobile, changeable and fluid. At his most teasing, Garrick’s refusal to stop changing his expression drove Reynolds, painting his portrait, to throw ‘down his pallet and pencils on the floor, saying he believed he was painting from the devil’.63 Macklin catches this quality in his description (envious perhaps as well as irritated) of Garrick’s speed: Garrick huddled all passions into strut and quickness – bustle was his favourite. In the performance of a Lord Townly he was all bustle. In Archer, Ranger, Don John, Hamlet, Macbeth, Brute – all bustle! bustle! bustle! The whole art of acting, according to the modern practice, is compriz’d in – bustle! ‘Give me a Horse!’ – ‘Bind up my Wounds!’ – ‘Have mercy Jesu!’ – all bustle! –everything is turned into bustle!64 Something of the bustling speed is apparent in the exact representation of Garrick’s voice that was included in Joshua Steele’s analysis of ‘To be or

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not to be’ (Fig.1), his one attempt to recover from the past ‘some of the celebrated speeches from Shakespeare . . . noted and accented as [actors] spoke them’. Steele, in his attempt to define the ‘melody and measure of speech’, set out rhythm, metre and inflection for the speech ‘as I pronounced it’.

Figure 1.3 Joshua Steele’s notation of his own voice (Towards Establishing the Melody and Measure of Speech (London, 1775), p. 40)

But then, ‘[s]ince writing the foregoing treatise, I have heard Mr. Garrick in the character of Hamlet’ and he marks the differences ‘that I can remember’ between Garrick and himself.65

Figure 1.4 Joshua Steele’s notation of Garrick’s voice (Towards Establishing the Melody and Measure of Speech (London, 1775), p. 47)

It is the most extraordinary document to have survived to demonstrate the sound of an eighteenth-century actor, even though we have no means of knowing how accurate Steele is.66 Where Steele spoke it ‘in the stile of a ranting actor, swelled with forte and softened with piano, he [Garrick] delivered with little or no distinction of piano and forte, but nearly uniform; something below the ordinary force, or, as a musician would say, sotto voce, or sempre poco piano’. But comparing Steele’s version of the first line with Garrick’s it is clear too that Garrick’s is about speed. In every case where the quantity of the syllable is different, Garrick is shorter: ‘or’ is a crotchet length (U.S. quarter-note) where Steele has a dotted minim (half-note), and Steele gives it a whole foot where Garrick gives it a light stress after the pause; ‘that is’ is dotted crotchet and quaver (eighth-note) where Steele has a dotted minim and minim, lightening the stress on ‘is’ considerably from Steele’s ponderous mode.67 At the very end of the speech, Steele notes that Garrick pronounced the last word, ‘orisons’, with a short i, where Steele himself had made it ‘long and heavy, by supposing the word to have been

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originally Norman French, oraison’.68 But Garrick did without the pause after ‘Nymph’, just as his pauses after ‘To die’ and ‘to sleep’ were markedly shorter than Steele’s. This is not just bustle but a search for the throughline of the speech, its architecture as important as its momentary effect. Steele, incidentally, particularly praises Garrick for the clarity of his diction: he and Mrs Cibber ‘are distinctly heard even in the softest sounds of their voices; when others are scarcely intelligible, though offensively loud’.69 If one of the central characteristics of Shakespeare’s dramatic language is the compression of rapid and extreme mobility of thought in densely imaged speech, then the speed of Garrick’s movement and speaking is a necessary precondition for the actor’s adequacy to take on major Shakespeare roles. Indeed, one of the recurrent emphases of modern voice-training for Shakespeare is precisely on speed and lightness, these qualities that defi ned Garrick. His response to the lengthy structures of Shakespeare’s syntax was, as Ronald Hafter suggests, to achieve this ability to represent ever-changing feeling and thought ‘by splintering his syntax into emotional rather than grammatical units . . . The timing of his lines was determined by psychological factors, not mechanical rules’.70 The shift of which Garrick was a part was also a movement towards a form of realism derived not from a set of rules for declamation but from observation and imitation. Macklin, as I noted above, prepared to play Shylock in 1741 by going every day to watch contemporary Jewish businessmen, to observe speech and movement and gesture, as if Shylock was to be found in the coffee-houses of Macklin’s London rather than in an early modern Venice. Friedrich Grimm, watching Garrick in Paris in 1765, catches this quality perfectly: The great art of David Garrick consists in the facility with which he abandons his own personality. He never oversteps truth . . . His vivacity is extreme . . . He is a perfect monkey, imitating everything he sees; yet he always remains graceful. He has perfected his great talents by a profound study of nature and by researches full of shrewdness and of broadness of thought. For that purpose he is ever mingling with the crowd, and it is there that he comes on nature in all its native originality.71 Garrick’s sociable nature, his wish to be in company and, as we might now say, ‘networked’, is also part of his work as an actor, observing, researching, analyzing and then using. The kinds of description of a character’s thought that he repeatedly offers in letters and comments are then part of a psychological approach derived from moving both inwards from the character’s

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speech and from observation and outwards from the character’s thought and emotional state to the vocal and physical representation of the feelings and imagination. ‘Sympathetic imagination’, a common phrase to describe his style, is a coded and communicable realism, the performance of ‘character’ that foregrounds its likeness to the audience as a feeling, thinking being, created through a supposed sympathy. It depends on a recognition of likeness, not difference. Perhaps the most extreme narrative of this form of observation, though one that is often suggested to have been a myth Garrick created, is Garrick’s account of his source for King Lear’s madness, recorded by Arthur Murphy. Garrick claimed to have known a man who accidentally killed his daughter by dropping her from a window, went mad and endlessly repeated the action of playing with the child, dropping her and, bursting into a flood of tears, filled the house with shrieks of grief and bitter anguish. He then sat down, in a pensive mood, his eyes fixed on one object, at times looking slowly round him, as if to implore compassion . . . There it was, said Garrick, that I learned to imitate madness; I copied nature, and to that owed my success in King Lear.72

Figure 1.5 William Hogarth, David Garrick as Richard III (1746). © National Museums, Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery.

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It is no accident that Hogarth’s brilliant portrait of Garrick as Richard III (See Figure 1.5), perhaps the most famous of all images of Garrick in Shakespeare, should represent both energetic vitality, as the character bursts out of the frame towards the viewer/spectator, and a figure who is not some abstracted embodiment of evil but all too human as he wakes from the horrific nightmare of the ghosts’ visitation. There is, indeed, nothing in the image of Richard himself to define the character as evil, only as a startled and traumatized individual. Richard’s speech at this moment, a speech that marks Shakespeare’s own breaking through earlier conventions of dramatic speech towards a new realism, is one that demands an analogous realism from the actor, something that Garrick supremely achieved. Even though in Cibber’s version (the adaptation that Garrick always performed) the speech is cut from Shakespeare’s thirty lines to an extensively rewritten nine, something of the charge is still there and a simplified but still individualized presence is demanding to be acted: Give me a horse – bind up my wounds! ‘Have mercy, Heaven. Ha! – soft! – ’Twas but a dream: But then so terrible, it shakes my Soul. Cold drops of sweat hang on my trembling Flesh, My blood grows chilly, and I freze with horror.73 A new realism in acting is of course nothing but a set of acting conventions that are read by the audience as differing markedly and convincingly from the previous set, now read as codified and artificial. But the degree of change that Garrick embodied and voiced was striking.74

Contexts for change: the Shakespeare revival That Garrick had an enormous effect on contemporary responses to Shakespeare in performance is agreed and that he wanted to restore Shakespeare’s texts to those plays performed with Shakespeare’s titles (as in the example of Macbeth) and to restore some more Shakespeare plays to the standard theatre company repertory, its stock of plays, is similarly clear. But the idea, once conventional wisdom and indicated frequently in Garrick’s time as ever since, that somehow Shakespeare had vanished from the stage before Garrick restored his mighty presence is plainly false.75 From the mid 1730s onwards, for instance, a group of women formed the Shakespeare Ladies Club with the intention of persuading theatre managers to put on Shakespeare plays more often.76 From January 1737

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a number of playbills for Shakespeare performances were indicated to be ‘At the Desire of several Ladies of Quality’, while plays ‘in Imitation of Shakespear’s Stile’ and new adaptations, as well as performances of Shakespeare plays not seen in London for decades (Cymbeline and King John, for example) were also the result of the success of this cultural pressure-group. In March 1737 a letter appeared in The Grub Street Journal from the ghosts of Shakespeare, Jonson, Dryden and Rowe announcing that ‘ ’Tis a great Pleasure for us to hear, that the Ladies begin to encourage Common Sense; which makes us in hopes that the Gentlemen will follow their Example’, while in another newspaper Shakespeare’s ghost praised women: ‘the late glorious Stand the Ladies have made in defence of Wit . . . will prove that your Relish of what is truly good and poetical, is at least equal, if not superior to [men’s].’77 Statistical counts are vulnerable but Avery puts the rise in the percentage of Shakespeare performances from the 1735–1736 season to the 1737–1738 one as a movement from 14 per cent to 22 per cent, while in 1737–1738 Covent Garden alone had 28 per cent Shakespeare in its calendar.78 Arthur Scouten, pushing strongly the argument that Garrick’s influence has been over-rated, argues that if one counts stock plays there were 15 Shakespeare plays in the repertory in 1717, 16 in 1724, 18 in 1740, while in the first year of Garrick’s management of Drury Lane there were 22 in the repertory and in 1776, Garrick’s last year as manager, there were 13.79 Part of the rise in the number of Shakespeare performances was the consequence of the censorship instigated by the 1737 Licensing Act which now required all new plays to be sent to the Lord Chamberlain before performance for approval. Inevitably, the number of new plays per season declined and the number of stock performances increased with Shakespeare supplying many of the latter. As Brian Vickers puts it, Shakespeare’s plays became ‘safe choices, low-risk theatre’ and, as a result of the frequency with which the most popular dozen were performed and the frequency with which audiences returned to see them every season, in the same productions with the same casts, meant that the plays became familiar enough for audiences to attend to ‘nuances of voice and gesture’.80 There is a vast increase in the quantity of writing about theatre from the 1740s, not only in terms of reviewing or otherwise discussing performances and performers in the press but also formulating theories of acting or offering critical analysis of the play-texts, all of which makes Garrick and his Shakespeare work so especially visible and recoverable, for the writing from the 1740s onwards is not only descriptive but also an attempt to ‘evaluate interpretation’.81

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Some of the publications are even designedly practical, like The Dramatic Timepiece (1767), put together by John Brownsmith, for a time prompter at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, ‘being a calculation of the length of time every act takes in the performing in all the acting plays . . . as minuted from repeated observations’, as the title-page lengthily phrased it. Brownsmith details 66 tragedies and 80 comedies. For Hamlet, for example, Act 1 takes 40 minutes, Act 2 22, Act 3 40, Act 4 27 and Act 5 30, making up 2 hours 39 minutes including 7 minutes per act-break. Of other Shakespeare plays Othello took 2 hours 23 minutes, King Lear 2.34 and Macbeth 2.20, while Merry Wives could be completed in only 1.26. The purpose of this was to enable gentry to work out exactly when to turn up at the playhouses to watch from Act 3 onwards, a common practice, and when to require their servants to turn up with the carriage at the end, ‘instead of assembling in public houses or houses of ill fame, to the destruction of their morals, properties and constitutions’.82 Above all, there was edition after edition of Shakespeare’s plays, edited expensively for Jacob Tonson and his heirs by the great line of eighteenthcentury editors (Rowe, Pope, Theobald and Warburton) and, in competition, published cheaply by Robert Walker, lowering the price to an affordable amount, so that, by the 1740s, Shakespeare texts were increasingly to be found everywhere.83 There would be an increasingly clear division between scholarly editions to be read and editions that reprinted the theatres’ performing texts: by Bell’s version of 1773–1734, it could be described in his advertisement as ‘not an edition meant for the profoundly learned, nor the deeply studious’.84 But the unending stream of editions, representing a range of theatre performances as well as critical commentary and scholarly emendation, testifies to the reading public’s commitment to buying (and perhaps occasionally reading) Shakespeare’s plays – and the reading public and theatregoing public always overlapped very considerably.

Plays problematic and triumphant Though Garrick was fairly general in his love of Shakespeare, the range of plays which he was willing and able successfully (that is, successfully in terms of his responsibilities as manager) to mount at Drury Lane was extremely limited. After all, Dr Johnson’s manifesto of a prologue that opened Garrick’s career as co-manager of Drury Lane in 1747 may have begun with an announcement of Shakespeare’s centrality to England’s image of its cultural (and political) importance – ‘When Learning’s Triumph o’er

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her barb’rous Foes / First rear’d the Stage, immortal Shakespear rose’ but it also accepted the power of the audience: Ah! Let not Censure term our Fate our Choice, The Stage but echoes back the publick Voice. The Drama’s Laws the Drama’s Patrons give, For we that live to please, must please to live.85 Garrick occasionally played Henry IV in Henry IV, Part 2 and even more rarely played Hotspur in Part 1; he played the Chorus in Henry V a few times, though Drury Lane rarely put the play on, even when the country was at war with France. Following what was almost a tradition, Garrick revived Henry VIII at the time of George III’s coronation in 1761 but the production, done on the cheap, did not impress. Richard III was the only history play in which Garrick was a success and which his company often performed. Some plays were even less successful: he worked with Edward Capell on adapting Antony and Cleopatra and played Antony himself but the production, in January 1759, managed only six performances in the season and was never revived. Garrick was long interested in Cymbeline, asking for John Hoadly’s new version in 1746. Covent Garden played an adaptation of the play in the 1758– 1759 season made by William Hawkins, Professor of Poetry at Oxford and author of Praelectiones Poeticae, a set of lectures in Latin on Shakespeare, the first series ever at an English university, given between 1751 and 1756 and published in 1758. Hawkins’s proudly patriotic version, for he found ‘something . . . truly British in the subject of it’, was heavily adapted.86 Garrick’s version for Drury Lane was premiered in November 1761, with Garrick as Posthumus. This was much closer to Shakespeare’s than Hawkins’s had been but was still heavily cut, especially in Act 5 which lost over 500 lines. Garrick apologized in the published text for the cutting: The admirers of Shakespeare must not take it ill that there are some scenes, and consequently many fine passages, omitted . . . It was impossible to retain more of the play and bring it within the compass of a night’s entertainment.87 ‘A night’s entertainment’ included entr’actes and an afterpiece and therefore required the main play to be kept reasonably brief. But Garrick made sure his Cymbeline was as patriotic as Covent Garden’s, with no sign at the end of Britain agreeing to pay tribute to Rome.

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There were many plays now staples of the Shakespeare repertory which Garrick simply ignored. Even Julius Caesar seems only to have interested him enough to create Ragandjaw, a wonderfully bawdy parody of the quarrel scene, between Brutarse and Cassiarse, performed at private theatricals at Rev Hoadly’s in July 1746, with Hogarth providing the set and playing Grilliardo, the Devil’s cook.88 Garrick tried playing Othello in 1745, a role in which his great predecessors, Thomas Betterton and Barton Booth, had triumphed. Quin too had been a great success in the role and Garrick aimed simply to be different, most especially in the epileptic fit which Quin avoided but Garrick did to excess, at least in Macklin’s view. In 1746 he described one scene at length to the artist Francis Hayman who had illustrated Shakespeare’s plays for Hanmer’s edition and was now preparing a revised suite of six prints; Garrick recommended the moment when Emilia reveals the truth about the handkerchief when ‘the Whole Catastrophe of the play is unravell’d’ with Othello ‘thunderstruck with Horror, his Whole figure extended’ and Iago should express the greatest perturbation of Mind, & should shrink up his Body . . . with his Eyes looking askance . . . on Othello & gnawing his Lip in anger at his Wife; but this likewise will be describ’d better by giving you the Expression when I see You.89 Garrick had played Iago in Dublin in 1745 and he would again a few times thereafter in England, last in 1753, but neither role really suited him, though the box-office was always good. He began rehearsing Othello again in 1775 but it did not reach performance. Sometimes Garrick had to learn from experience. He turned The Tempest into a three-act opera in 1756, derived directly from Shakespeare with comparatively little taken from the operatic version by Thomas Shadwell of the Davenant-Dryden adaptation of The Tempest, but the failure of that version convinced him to try a version of the play fairly straight and that was another lasting success. But there were immediate great successes too. Garrick adapted The Taming of the Shrew into a three-act comedy afterpiece, Catherine and Petruchio, in 1754, playing Petruchio, and The Winter’s Tale into a three-act ‘dramatic pastoral’, Florizel and Perdita, in 1758, playing Leontes, the two short plays performed together as a double-bill. Garrick’s prologue to the production envisaged The Winter’s Tale as a ‘precious liquor’ that now ‘lay by, forsaken’, a statement hardly true since Macnamara Morgan’s version of Shakespeare’s Act 4 as The Sheep-Shearing had appeared regularly at Covent

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Garden since 1754, but Garrick offered his three-act version as the play ‘now confined, and bottled for your taste’ for ‘ ’Tis my chief wish, my joy, my only plan, / To lose no drop of that immortal man!’90 Both parts of the bill proved lastingly popular, with Catherine and Petruchio being a staple of the repertory through most of the nineteenth century. Garrick simply dumped large sections of both plots to achieve the abbreviated narrative he needed. But he also adjusted the action to produce the right emotional and moral effect. Everything awkward about The Taming of the Shrew was renegotiated: this Catherine may be irritated by having Petruchio foisted on her (‘Reduced to this, or none, the maid’s last prayer, / Sent to be wooed like bear unto the stake?’) but she can see a solution (‘And he the bear / For I shall bait him’) and finds him immediately attractive: ‘yet the man’s a man’.91 Determined to tame Petruchio she also announces the consequence of failure: Cath’rine shall tame this haggard; or, if she fails, Shall tie her tongue up and pare down her nails.92 By the end, this may be a marriage of mutual attraction but it is still based on Catherine’s acquiescence to Petruchio’s absolute dominance, especially when Garrick ends the play by giving him some of Shakespeare’s Katherine’s speech of submission, voicing patriarchal and marital power with no hint of the ironies and discomforts later generations might find in it. Florizel and Perdita performs a similarly redemptive act with an awkward play, not only in terms of its time-scale but also its bawdiness, still present in Morgan’s version, and social improprieties. Even more importantly, the play now creates the proper emotional response of virtually non-stop weeping, from Polixenes’s first line to Paulina, ‘Weep not now’, onwards. Tears were, after all, the ideal index of sympathy and sensibility, signs of the right emotions like love and compassion. By the end, amidst the floods of tears repentant and joyful shed both by Leontes and, Garrick must have hoped, by the audience, the nuclear family is virtuously recreated with the restoration of an heir to the monarchy less significant than the re-establishment of the family unit.93 This need to adjust the play to ensure the proper moral and emotional response had been fully present in Garrick’s 1748 revision of Romeo and Juliet which turned back from Thomas Otway’s 1680 toga-play The History and Fall of Caius Marius and Theophilus Cibber’s 1744 adaptation of Otway under Shakespeare’s title. Garrick kept Otway’s innovation (and

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followed Shakespeare’s source in Bandello) by having Juliet wake before Romeo dies so that there could be a 75-line reunion scene, using every cliché of contemporary tragedy to produce the strongest emotional effect with Romeo momentarily forgetting he is dying from the poison, Juliet lamenting ‘Did I wake for this?’, Romeo cursing his fate as ‘ ’Twixt death and love I’m torn’ and carefully emphasizing ‘She is my wife; our hearts are twined together’ before he dies.94 There could be no room here for Rosaline for Romeo cannot appear to be a Romeo by switching love-objects but there was room for ample spectacle, especially when Spranger Barry, who first played Romeo in Garrick’s version, left for Covent Garden in 1750, Garrick took over the role and the two theatre companies went head to head with rival performances for twelve nights in a row to the increasing annoyance of playgoers, as a contemporary satirist caught it: Well, what’s to-night? cries angry Ned, As up from bed he rouses; Romeo again! and shakes his head; Ah! Pox on both your houses!95 Covent Garden had an elaborate funeral procession for Juliet with music by Thomas Arne and Garrick countered with one by William Boyce, complete with choirs and tolling bells. For the tomb, Garrick’s carpenters and set-painters created a superbly intense, claustrophobic space on stage with a landscape behind and the hint of moonlight. Garrick’s theatre won the war and, while Barry was adjudged the finer Romeo for the first two acts, Garrick’s weakness as passionate lover was offset by his undoubted power and superiority in the tragic emotionalism of the end. On the comparison of the two in the balcony scene, one woman was reported to have announced, Had I been Juliet to Garrick’s Romeo, so ardent and impassioned was he, I should have expected he would have come up to me in the balcony; but had I been Juliet to Barry’s Romeo, so tender, so eloquent and so seductive was he, I should certainly have gone down to him!96

Fairies and comedy At the core of Garrick’s negotiations with Shakespeare’s plays in the theatre was always that tension between a desire to expand the Shakespeare

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repertory, increasing the number and variety of Shakespeare plays in performance, and a recognition of the limits of commercial viability, of what the audience was willing to pay to see. No play typifies that tension and the changes in performance culture more than A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Garrick repeatedly tried to make it work at Drury Lane and never succeeded. After Samuel Pepys saw it, presumably unaltered, at the King’s Theatre on 29 September 1662 and found it ‘the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life’,97 there is no record of a performance of anything quite like Shakespeare’s play until the nineteenth century. Instead it appeared next adapted into a spectacular opera in The Fairy Queen, probably by Thomas Betterton with Henry Purcell’s dazzling music for the interludes at the end of each act, complexly rethinking what the act has performed. The Fairy Queen was itself adapted as a comic puppet-show with some human actors as well, played in the Little Piazza of Covent Garden ‘with new Scenes, machines, several Dances by the Fairies’, probably also functioning as a burlesque of the craze for Italian opera. Thereafter A Midsummer Night’s Dream was a resource, through versions of the ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ playlet abstracted from the rest of the play’s action, for further parody of contemporary operatic forms in Richard Leveridge’s The Comick Masque of Pyramus and Thisbe, performed at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1716, and John Frederick Lampe’s ‘Mock-Opera’ of Pyramus and Thisbe (Covent Garden, 1745), or simply transposed into Charles Johnson’s adaptation of As You Like It as Love in a Forest (1723) to fi ll a gap in the action. Performing the play itself seems not to have occurred to anyone. In 1755 Garrick’s company performed a full-scale through-sung opera, The Fairies, almost certainly the work of Garrick himself, with music by John Christopher Smith, friend and pupil of Handel. Less than a quarter of Shakespeare’s text was left in: Many passages of the first merit and some whole scenes . . . are necessarily omitted in this opera to reduce the performance to a proper length; it was feared that even the best poetry would appear tedious when only supported by recitative.98 Since a separation of genres makes comic and serious operatic styles incompatible, the workers are cut completely and what remains is a drama of lovers and fairies, with Shakespeare’s text supplemented, wherever – and that was frequently – he had unaccountably failed to supply ‘the

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composer with songs’, from Milton, Waller, Dryden and others. Loathed by Walpole who found it a ‘detestable English opera’, taken from a play he thought ‘forty times more nonsensical than the worst translation of any Italian opera-books’, The Fairies was packed with ‘all true lovers of their country’.99 It is the fantasy of the play that so infuriates Walpole and indeed most of his culture. This was one Shakespeare play that in 1755 was not yet stageable. It was not any more stageable 8 years later when Garrick tried to create a five-act version. But Garrick had not attempted to create a main-piece, five-act drama out of any Shakespeare comedy. He carefully worked on the adaptation of Dream and then, ill and discouraged by attacks on his work as actor and manager, Garrick left for an extensive trip, a 2-year grand tour of Europe, putting George Colman in charge of Drury Lane. Garrick wrote to Colman from Paris: ‘as for Midsummer Nights, &. I think my presence will be necessary to get it up as it ought – however if you want to, do for ye best – & I’ll Ensure It’s success.’100 Colman completed the adaptation, cutting Act 5 completely, as Garrick had done for The Fairies, and did not wait for Garrick’s return to perform it. The result was catastrophic. As William Hopkins, the theatre’s prompter, noted in his diary, Upon the whole, never was anything so murder’d in the Speaking . . . Next day it was reported. The Performers first Sung the Audience to Sleep, & then went to Sleep themselves. Fairies pleas’d – Serious parts displeas’d – Comic between both.101 A newspaper review found the play ‘a lively picture of the ungoverned imagination of that great Poet. The fairy part is most transcendently beautiful, and is, in poetical geography, a kind of Dramatic Map of Fairy Land’, though the rest was ‘very flat and uninteresting’.102 But the production was abandoned and, after a night’s work, Colman had created a two-act afterpiece, A Fairy Tale, performed three days later, following the paper’s praise of the fairy scenes by cutting everything else as completely as possible and trying to control the ‘ungoverned imagination’. It, too, was not a success. If Shakespeare was praised for the extremes of his imagination, the investigation of realms of fantasy and the supernatural, then the stage was not yet the place where that could be shown. In paintings like Fuseli’s of A Midsummer Night’s Dream or in music like Thomas Linley the Younger’s extraordinary A Lyric Ode on the Fairies, Aerial Beings and Witches of Shakespeare (1776), setting a text by French

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Lawrence, the wildness of Shakespeare’s imagination could be demonstrated in a form that is proto-romanticist in its extravagance – but not on stage.

Hamlet I have been charting something of the ambivalence of response that many of Shakespeare’s plays generated both for audiences and for Garrick. Hamlet represents for Garrick, along this continuum, both success and failure: a supremely popular performance as Hamlet and a controversial decision as adaptor. Garrick played Hamlet for nearly 35 years, from 1742 to 1776, the interpretation deepening but not altering. At the core was melancholy, of course, but also filial piety and something approaching religion, while for Hannah More Garrick ‘never once forgot he was a prince’.103 As Lichtenberg wrote in 1775, of Hamlet’s first soliloquy, ‘O that this too, too solid flesh’, Garrick is completely overcome by tears of grief, felt with only too good a cause, for a virtuous father and on account of a light-minded mother, . . . The last of the words: ‘So excellent a King’, is utterly lost; one catches it only from the movement of the mouth, which quivers and shuts tight immediately afterwards, so as to restrain the all too distinct expression of grief on the lips, which could easily tremble with unmanly emotion.104 But while ‘To be or not to be’ could not match this emotional effect, it exceeded it by an audience response Lichtenberg found extraordinary: a large part of the audience not only knows it by heart as well as they do the Lord’s Prayer, but listens to it, so to speak, as if it were a Lord’s Prayer, . . . with a sense of solemnity and awe . . . In this island Shakespeare is not only famous, but holy.105 Balancing this was, at the moment of Hamlet’s meeting his father’s ghost, the awe and horror felt by the character and the audience and carefully engineered by Garrick. It was rumoured that Garrick wore a trick-wig for the scene, made by a Mr Perkins, so that his hair could literally stand on end. Lichtenberg’s description of the moment, lengthy and detailed as Garrick turns, staggers, drops his hat, stretches out his arms (the left

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further than the right), opens his mouth and stands rooted to the spot, all ‘with no loss of dignity’, is also one of sympathetic response: His whole demeanour is so expressive of terror that it made my flesh creep even before he began to speak. The almost terror-struck silence of the audience, which preceded this appearance and filled one with a sense of insecurity, probably did much to enhance this effect.106 Murphy thought Garrick managed to change colour, ‘fi xed in mute astonishment, . . . growing paler and paler’,107 and Francis Gentleman agreed it was a moment of sheer brilliance, that ‘give[s] us the most pleasing, I had almost said astonishing sensibility’.108 However, Partridge, going to Hamlet with Tom Jones in Fielding’s novel (1749), found good grounds to sneer at Garrick’s performance: ‘He the best player! . . . Why, I could act as well as he myself. I am sure if I had seen a ghost, I should have looked in the very same manner, and done just as he did.’109 When Garrick first played the role in August 1742 he worked from the standard performance text, a version based on that used by Robert Wilks (c. 1635–1732) when he played Hamlet, and published in 1718, itself derived from Davenant’s Restoration adaptation which was less an extensive rewriting than a cutting and touching up of passages to align them with contemporary taste. The Wilks Hamlet was less introspective and reflective than active and various, shorn of his speech over the praying Claudius and ‘How all occasions’. When first published in 1676 Davenant’s text layered the performance version onto Shakespeare, printing the play whole but marking passages left out in contemporary performance practice, thereby separating reading from watching as explained in a prefatory note that also defines Shakespeare’s special status: This Play being too long to be conveniently Acted, such places as might be least prejudicial to the Plot of Sense, are left out upon the Stage: but that we may no way wrong the incomparable Author, are here inserted according to the Original Copy with this Mark‘‘110 Garrick’s was a performance to watch but he was well aware of what he was not playing. He altered the play here and there throughout his career but in 1772, to make his most radical change, he turned back to the Wilks playing text rather than to the edition of 1763 which contained his current performing version and did not include lines omitted on stage.

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Through the first four acts he restored over 600 lines, moments like the dispatch of the ambassadors to Norway which are still often cut but also much of Hamlet’s role that he had not previously performed, including ‘How all occasions’. The roles of Polonius, Ophelia and Laertes were built back up to Shakespearean proportions and Garrick found time for the whole of the Mousetrap (though not the dumb show). But Garrick was determined also to produce a more generically restricted version, a Hamlet that was properly tragic and far less funny. The impact of his recent trip to France and fascination with French drama, as well as his awareness of what French intellectuals found most unacceptable about Shakespeare, was a driving force but he had also long been annoyed by, for instance, the lead billing given to Osric; in 1754, for instance, Osric was billed higher than anyone except Hamlet. The answer was to cut Osric and the gravediggers completely and, where Shakespeare took 800 lines to move from Ophelia’s last, mad exit to the end, Garrick managed it in barely 60, creating a patchwork of Shakespeare’s own lines and adding very few of his own. Dislike of the gravediggers was not restricted to France. An anonymous pamphlet on the play in 1736 found them ‘very unbecoming such a Piece as this’ while another in 1752 thought that ‘To mix Comedy with Tragedy is breaking through the sacred Laws of Nature.’111 Early reviews of Garrick’s 1772 performances were mostly admiring: one commented that ‘the tedious interruptions of this beautiful tale no longer disgrace it; its absurd digressions are no longer disgusting.’112 There were also favourable reviews by George Steevens who, admittedly, had worked with Garrick on the adaptation, putting back Shakespeare word by word where he could, but who later savagely mocked Garrick’s editing as self-serving: ‘Mr. Garrick . . . has reduced the consequence of every character but himself; and thus excluding Osric, the Gravediggers, &c. contrived to monopolize the attention of the audience.’113 Garrick wrote to a French friend that ‘I have dar’d to alter Hamlet, I have thrown away the gravediggers . . . & notwithstanding the Galleries were so fond of them, I have met with more applause than I did at five and twenty.’114 Perhaps the most sharply critical and witty response was by Arthur Murphy in a superb parody which circulated in manuscript, with Shakespeare’s ghost complaining to Garrick that he was Doom’d for a certain term to leave my works Obscure and uncorrected; to endure The ignorance of players; the barbarous hand Of Gothic editors; the ponderous weight Of leaden commentator; fast confin’d

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In critic fires, till errors, not my own, Are done away, and sorely I the while Wish’d I had blotted for myself before. Garrick is accused of tampering ‘With juice of cursed nonsense in an inkhorn, / And o’er my fair applauded page did pour / A Manager’s distilment’ so that the play was ‘brought upon the stage / With all your imperfections on my head!’ The ghost warns Garrick against further adaptations but, after he leaves, Garrick tells his brother George: This Ghost is pleas’d with this my alteration, And now he bids me alter all his Plays. His plays are out of joint; – O cursed spite! That ever I was born to set them right!115 The radical revision did not outlive Garrick’s career and the playing text reverted to the kind of cut version Garrick had tried to overturn. The constrictions of playing time had meant moving both towards and away from Shakespeare. The search for the dramatic rhythm of the earlier parts of the play had necessitated destroying the rhythms of the final sequence. The problem emblematizes Garrick’s dilemma and the culture’s ambivalence. The play to be read and the play to be seen could not be fully aligned.

King Lear Even for a culture which saw an excess of sensibility relieved by the outpouring of weeping as the highest state of emotional sympathy, sometimes there can be too many tears. When Garrick played King Lear for the last time in 1776 a reviewer found no decline in his power: The curse at the close of the first act, his phrenetic appeal to heaven at the end of the second on Regan’s ingratitude, were two such enthusiastic scenes of human exertion, that they caused a kind of momentary petrifaction thro’ the house, which he soon dissolved universally into tears. Even the unfeeling Regan and Goneril forgetful of their characteristic cruelty, played through the whole of their parts with aching bosoms and streaming eyes.116 It was not exactly the actresses’ fault, for they knew this was the last time that his performance, the most majestic and potent machine for generating the right response to the pathetic that the theatre had seen, would be

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experienced. Years earlier, when Boswell saw Garrick’s Lear in 1762, the theatre was packed more than two hours before the performance. Boswell prepared himself for the experience: I kept myself at a distance from all acquaintances, and got into a proper frame. Mr. Garrick gave me the most perfect satisfaction. I was fully moved, and I shed an abundance of tears.117 It had been the same earlier still when Garrick, not all that impressive in the role when he first played it in 1742, responded magnificently to Macklin’s coaching and, in the reunion with Cordelia, ‘exhibited such a scene of the pathetic . . . as drew tears of commiseration from the whole house’.118 Like yawning and laughter, one person’s tears can generate tears in another. Garrick’s Lear cried and cried. In the curse on Goneril, for instance, Samuel Foote complained in 1747 that Garrick wept: Nor can I easily pardon the Tears shed at the Conclusion. The whole Passage is a Climax of Rage, that strange mixture of Anger and Grief is to me highly unnatural; and besides this unmanly Sniveling lowers the Consequence of Lear.119 An anonymous pamphleteer, responding, turned back to Shakespeare: had he look’d into Shakespeare, he would not have been so severe upon your Tears shed at the Conclusion, or have said that the strange mixture of Grief and Passion was highly unnatural; for this speech immediately following the curse is your direction and authority.120 But Garrick’s Lear did not mention ‘these hot tears, which break from me perforce’ or speak to his ‘Old fond eyes, / Beweep this cause again, I’ll pluck ye out’ (1.4.296, 299–300), for the text he was then using was essentially Nahum Tate’s 1681 adaptation, King Lear with a happy ending, and Tate’s Act 1 ended with the curse, not with the rest of the scene, giving or indeed the following one, so that the focus is on Lear as he storms out with the added words ‘Away, away’.121 The writer knew and Garrick knew what Shakespeare had written but the text for Garrick’s Lear was never to be Shakespeare’s. Throughout his career, Garrick rethought the version of King Lear he performed, even though the broad outlines of his performance hardly changed. He would never restore either the Fool or the tragic ending,

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though both were encouraged. Garrick’s defender in 1747 called for ‘the original, Fool and all’,122 and Davies reported that ‘It was once in contemplation with Mr Garrick to restore the part of the Fool, which he designed for Woodward, who promised to be very chaste in his colouring, and not to counteract the agonies of Lear,’ but Garrick never dared to do it: ‘the manager would not hazard so bold an attempt; he feared, with Mr Colman, that the feelings of Lear would derive no advantage from the buffooneries of the parti-coloured jester.’123 Whenever this discussion with Woodward took place, Garrick was thinking hard about King Lear in 1756 and especially about the ending. There had been pressure to abandon Tate throughout the century, starting well before Garrick first played the role. Garrick’s 1747 champion wondered about Tate’s lines How can you [Garrick] keep your Countenance when you come to the Spheres stopping their Course, the Sun making halt, and the Winds bearing on their rosy Wings that Cordelia is a Queen? . . . the last scene . . . must shew you to advantage.124 Samuel Richardson used the postscript to the last volume of his hugely popular novel Clarissa (1748) to complain of the continued performance of Tate’s ending, wonder whether ‘this strange preference be owing to the false Delicacy or affected Tenderness of the Players, or to that of the Audience’, and urge Garrick, his friend, that ‘if it were ever to be tried, Now seems to be the Time’ since Garrick ‘owes so much, and is gratefully sensible that he does, to that great Master of the human Passions’.125 Arthur Murphy, writing a series of articles on Shakespeare and particularly on King Lear in the Gray’s Inn Journal in 1753–1754, opposed restoring Shakespeare and assumed that ‘after the heart-piercing sensations which we have endured through the whole piece, it would be too much to see this actually performed on the stage: from [Garrick] . . . I am sure it would. I should be glad, notwithstanding, to see the experiment made.’126 Dr Johnson, in his comments on the play in his 1765 Shakespeare edition, was less radical and more content with what ‘the publick has decided’ and recorded his own inability to cope with Shakespeare’s ending: ‘I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia’s death that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor.’127 When Covent Garden staged King Lear in February 1756, its first performances of the play for 10 years, now with Spranger Barry as Lear and

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Mrs Cibber as Cordelia, Garrick responded the next day with the premiere of John Brown’s Athelstan, another play about a king of ancient Britain who dies broken-hearted over his daughter’s body. If this was indeed an attempt to see whether the public might tolerate Garrick as a tragic Lear, the play’s failure warned him off.128 Garrick played King Lear in October, advertising the production’s ‘restorations from Shakespeare’. In truth there was little restored – only ten lines – but there were 200 fewer lines from Tate. As with the battle of the Romeos in 1750, Garrick once again deliberately put himself in direct competition with Barry and again he was the winner. A contemporary rhyme explained why: The town has found out different ways To praise the different Lears. To Barry they give loud hizzas, To Garrick – only tears. ‘A King? Nay, every inch a king’ Such Barry doth appear, But Garrick’s quite a different thing: He’s every inch King Lear.129 In 1768 George Colman produced a different version of the play for Covent Garden, aiming, as he announced in the preface to the published version, ‘to purge the tragedy of Lear of the alloy of Tate, which has so long been suffered to debase it’, though that did not mean incorporating the Fool and, as to the end, he wanted ‘to reconcile the catastrophe of Tate to the story of Shakespeare’.130 Less horrifying than Shakespeare and even than Tate (for Gloucester’s blinding is performed off-stage, not on), Colman’s Lear is, like Garrick’s, all about families. Murphy had argued against another essayist in The Gray’s Inn Journal that Lear goes mad wholly as a result of his daughters’ actions, that the loss of kingship plays no part compared to fi lial ingratitude, and that ‘parental distress’ creates the proper response for the audience where ‘a monarch voluntarily abdicating . . . would, I fear, border upon the ridiculous’.131 When Garrick described the play in a letter in 1770 he wrote of Lear as ‘a Weak man’, ‘an Old Man full of affection, Generosity, Passion, & what not meeting with what he thought an ungrateful return from his best belov’d Cordelia, & afterwards real ingratitude from his other Daughters’, a man whose ‘unhappiness proceeded from good qualities carry’d to excess of folly’, but he never describes Lear as a king.

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As for Murphy, Garrick’s Lear suffers because of his daughters and ‘an audience must feel his distresses & Madness which is ye Consequence of them’.132 Colman’s version of 1768 was not a success. Garrick continued to tinker with the text, putting back in some more Shakespeare, cutting a little more Tate, but he would not go as far as Colman had; for example, Garrick always retained the Edgar–Cordelia romance which Colman had tried excising. Lear-centred – just as his Hamlet was Hamlet-centred – Garrick’s Lear focused on a father and a dutiful daughter, as so many eighteenthcentury plays did.133 It is striking that Cordelia, a part most actors now avoid if at all possible, was seen then as a star role. Lear gave Garrick the perfect opportunity to display a range of emotions and a rapid movement between them. As Davies praised, Garrick had displayed all the force of quick transition from one passion to another. He had, from the most violent rage, descended to sedate calmness, had seized, with unutterable sensibility, the various impressions of terror and faithfully represented all the turbid passions of the soul.134 But, as an awe-struck playgoer wrote to Garrick in 1763, he achieved it ‘without departing once . . . from the simplicity of nature, the grace of attitude or the beauty of expression’.135 ‘Garrick was one night coming on the Stage in Lear’, Hester Thrale noted, when Johnson laughing or arguing behind the Scenes made such a Noise that the little Man was teized by it – and said at last – do have done with all this Rattle. – it spoyls my Thoughts, it destroys my Feelings – No No Sir returns the other – (loud enough for all the players to hear him) – I know better things – Punch has no feelings.136 But, whatever Garrick did or did not feel, his Lear made his audience feel deeply. No wonder, then, that an image of Garrick as Lear in the storm, based on a 1761 painting by Benjamin Wilson, was on one side of the mulberry box presented to Garrick in 1769.

1769: Garrick, Shakespeare and cultural tourism In September 1750, at the start of the theatre season, Garrick delivered a new prologue, once again reminding his audience, as Dr. Johnson’s prologue

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had in 1747, that the audience ruled over the repertory. As Garrick himself put it in this prologue in 1750, Sacred to Shakespeare was this spot design’d, To pierce the heart, and humanize the mind. But if an empty House, the Actor’s curse, Shews us our Lears and Hamlets lose their force; Unwilling we must change the nobler scene, And in our turn present you Harlequin; Quit Poets, and set Carpenters to work, Shew gaudy scenes, or mount the vaulting Turk . . .137 The sacred quality Garrick attributes to the theatre space seems logical enough but Garrick’s creation of a temple to Shakespeare at Hampton, as I explored at the start of this chapter, moved the locus of the sacred space from the public sphere of the actor-manager’s activity to the private space of the grounds of the gentleman’s Thames-side villa, open for himself, his friends and cultural tourists permitted to visit. But sacred spaces cannot stay so strictly private; they need the possibility of a congregation and of pilgrims. When the plans for the Stratford Jubilee were developing, Garrick made clear how he viewed the birthplace: the humble shed, in which the immortal bard first drew that breath which gladdened all the isle, is still existing; and all who have a heart to feel, and a mind to admire the truth of nature and splendour of genius, will rush thither to behold it, as a pilgrim would to the shrine of some loved saint; will deem it holy ground.138 Not quite a manger but the next best thing, this site was to be more even than the shrine of a saint. As William Cowper put it in 1785, For Garrick was a worshipper himself; He drew the liturgy, and framed the rites And solemn ceremonial of the day, And call’d the world to worship on the banks Of Avon famed in song.139 That appropriation of Juliet’s line ‘the god of my idolatry’ that Garrick used in a letter of 1765 would reappear in the great Ode which was the centrepiece of the Jubilee celebrations. And the very notion of a jubilee,

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as Garrick hatched the plan with the burgesses of Stratford-upon-Avon, was designed to evoke pilgrimage and religion from its origins in Leviticus through Boniface VIII’s fourteenth-century institution of a period of remission from punishment for sin consequent on pilgrimage to Rome. Whatever else it was, the Stratford Jubilee was to be the creation of a national religious cult of Shakespeare worship. But the Jubilee was also bound up with paintings and statues, with Garrick’s self-image and commercial sense, with what Shakespeare was and was not, with his ‘apotheosis’, as the Gentleman’s Magazine expected the conclusion of the celebration to be,140 and with Garrick’s ability to create a triumph out of the disastrous consequences of the vagaries of English weather. The process began in 1767 with the Corporation of Stratford-upon-Avon seeking a way to be given something to decorate their rebuilt Town Hall, either a portrait of Shakespeare or a statue of him to put in an empty niche or a portrait of Garrick or, indeed, all three. They offered to elect Garrick a Freeman of the town and give him the document in a box made from the wood of Shakespeare’s mulberry tree, the box one side of which would show Garrick as Lear. Garrick, flattered, offered in return all three. For the painting of himself, he asked Gainsborough to rework a portrait he had commissioned and which Gainsborough had exhibited in 1766, and to create a painting of Shakespeare. Conveniently, the portrait of Garrick showed him leaning elegantly against a pillar surmounted with a bust of Shakespeare, a stance which deliberately replicates that of Shakespeare himself in the Westminster Abbey statue. This was doubly appropriate as the statue Garrick ordered was to be a copy of Scheemakers’. But Gainsborough could not produce the painting of Shakespeare that Garrick requested, try as he might, and thought Shakespeare’s bust in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford ‘a silly smiling thing’, much to Garrick’s fury, for he wrote on Gainsborough’s letter ‘Impudent scoundrel’ and cancelled the commission.141 Benjamin Wilson’s painting of Shakespeare in his study with his source books around him was cheaper and Garrick persuaded the town to pay for the reworked Gainsborough. By late 1768 Garrick began to plan for a celebration of Shakespeare, ‘a Jubilee in honour and to the memory of Shakespeare’, to be held in September 1769 in Stratford-upon-Avon with himself as the Steward, and by May 1769 notices of the event appeared in newspapers with Garrick advertising it in his closing epilogue for the theatrical season: ‘My Eyes, till then, no Sight like this shall see, / Unless we meet at Shakespeare’s Jubilee.’142 A rotunda was constructed ‘On Avon’s banks’ for the main events. Commemorative medals were struck, ribbons designed to be worn

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as favours and wooden souvenirs carved from the unending supply of the mulberry tree. There would be a masked ball, concerts, fireworks, processions and a horse race for the Jubilee Cup. There would be no performance of a Shakespeare play – apart from anything else, there was no theatre for it – but Thomas Arne’s sacred oratorio Judith would be performed, perhaps because the name recalled Shakespeare’s eldest daughter. Since the jubilee was widely proclaimed to be the social event of the summer – Shakespeare as cultural icon defining elitism and social acceptability – then Stratford’s inhabitants responded to consumer demand for beds and meals by overpricing magnificently. Stratford became no longer a provincial backwater but the destination of fashionable London, the perfect spot for cultural tourism. In the event it rained after the first day, 6 September 1769, steadily and torrentially. Processions and fireworks were cancelled and, as the Avon ‘overpeering of his list’ burst its banks, getting to the masked ball necessitated getting across flooded fields. The racecourse was under water and so too was the Rotunda, preventing a repeat performance of the one unquestioned success, the performance of Garrick’s Ode. The Ode itself, staged complete with a planted heckler, the actor Thomas King, playing a fop and complaining that Shakespeare was a provincial nobody, with vast orchestra and chorus and Garrick declaiming magnificently, centred on the statue, set squarely in the midst of the performers: ‘ ’Tis he! ’Tis he! / “The god of our idolatry!” ’143 Shakespeare worship, which in the temple at Hampton had been accompanied by the same line from Romeo and Juliet, was now a national religion and Shakespeare was the sacred icon of nationalism: ‘Can British gratitude delay, / To him the glory of this isle, / To give the festive day / The song, the statue, and devoted pile?’144 But the celebration of the new religion and its intimate connection with patriotism was a financial disaster and roundly mocked by urban satirists. Within a month, Covent Garden staged an afterpiece by George Colman the Elder, Man and Wife; or, The Stratford Jubilee, gently mocking the event but showing off a grand processional pageant ‘exhibiting the characters of Shakespeare’, and ending with ‘The car (drawn by the Muses) containing the Bust of Shakespeare, crowned by Time and Fame’.145 Garrick, hearing of the plans, responded with startling speed: as he wrote in December, I set myself down to work, & in a day & a half produc’d our Jubilee – which has now had more success than any thing I Ever remember – it is crowded in 15 Minutes after ye Doors are open’d, & will be play’d to morrow for ye 39th time.146

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By the end of the season it had been played over 90 times, an unprecedented success. As a French character commented in Colman’s play New Brooms (1776): ‘Vat signify your triste Sha-kes-peare? Begar, dere was more moneys got by de gran spectacle of de Sha-kes-peare Jubilee dan by all de Comique and tragique of Shakespeare beside, ma foi!’147 Garrick’s afterpiece mocked provincial stupidity, of course, for this is the celebration of Shakespeare replaced into the metropolitan context where it still primarily belonged, but, while attendance at the Jubilee had been the exclusive preserve of the fashionably wealthy, attendance at The Jubilee was the right of those urban theatregoers less wealthy but equally fascinated by the spectacle of Shakespeare worship. Both a way of distancing the audience from the experience of cultural tourism (Shakespeare as virtual theme park) and an opportunity to have at least a simulacrum of the event as well, The Jubilee moved inexorably through its insistent celebration of ‘the Bard of all bards’, for ‘the Will of all Wills was a Warwickshire Will’,148 towards the pageant, ‘With bells ringing, fi fes playing, drums beating, and cannon firing’. Hugely outdoing Colman’s pageant at Covent Garden, Garrick’s started with ‘9 Men Dancers with tambourines’, the 3 Graces and 9 muses, then 19 groups representing individual plays, with, in the middle, ‘The statue of Shakespear supported by the Passions and surrounded by the Seven Muses with their trophies’.149 The last scene ‘is a magnificent transparent one in which the capital characters of Shakespeare are exhibited at full length, with Shakespeare’s statue’, yet again, ‘in the middle crowned by Tragedy and Comedy’, and, as Garrick enthusiastically wrote at the end of the manuscript, ‘Bravo Jubilee! Shakespeare forever!’150 In 1761 Reynolds had painted ‘David Garrick between Tragedy and Comedy’, a wonderful take on the familiar trope of the choice between virtue and vice.151 Now it would be Shakespeare crowned by both genres. If we recall Garrick’s brief appearance as Harlequin in 1741 in a play with the Shakespeare statue, it seems only right that Henry Woodward should mock the Stratford events at Covent Garden in 1770 with Harlequin’s Jubilee ending with ‘the descent of the statue of the late Mr Rich, under the name of Lun, which he always adopted when he performed the character of Harlequin’, as one reviewer noted.152 The Jubilee and The Jubilee did nothing to change Shakespeare production, fascinating signs though they are of the economics of culture. They did nothing to make any of the plays more or less popular. But they mark the apotheosis of Shakespeare as cultural symbol almost completely dissociated from the messy complexities of the works themselves. After Garrick’s death George Carter painted ‘The Apotheosis of Garrick’ (1780), showing

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his fellow actors dressed as characters in Shakespeare. But the confusion between Garrick and Shakespeare that Garrick had so carefully promoted had continued to the end of his life: Garrick planted his own mulberry-tree at Abington Abbey in 1778. In 1816 the bicentenary of Shakespeare’s death was celebrated in Hereford, Garrick’s birthplace, with a Garrick Jubilee, a year before the centenary of Garrick’s birth. It ended with a performance of The Jubilee now ending with ‘A Grand Procession . . ., representing the leading Characters in Shakespeare’s various Plays, . . . surrounding a full transparent Portrait of Garrick.’153

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Chapter 2

John Philip Kemble Michael Dobson

The Memory of Kemble Of all the major Shakespearean actor-managers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, John Philip Kemble may have come the closest to being completely forgotten. If for nothing else, Edmund Kean is famous for having collapsed and died while playing Othello, while William Charles Macready is still remembered as a friend of Charles Dickens and a foe of Edwin Forrest; David Garrick has a celebrated club named after him, Sir Henry Irving a pub on the Strand. But although the road in Prescot, Lancashire where John Philip was born is still known as Kemble Street, no inscription marks the site of the lodging-house where his actor parents were staying in February 1757 during one of their long provincial tours, and it is unlikely that any of the street’s current inhabitants know the origins of its name. Similarly, while the facade of the former pub named after him a few doors from the site of the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden (on the corner of Bow Street and Long Acre) still bears the words ‘Kemble’s Head’, no portrait of Kemble remains. (Nor does any other inn-sign, since the premises are now a nondescript Greek restaurant.) It is doubtful in any case how many passing West End theatregoers would recognize a likeness of Kemble if they saw one. Kemble’s elder sister Sarah Siddons, as Russ McDonald points out elsewhere in this volume, is widely remembered as one of the great Shakespearean divas: she is commemorated by a handsome statue on Paddington Green near the site of her grave, and her Lady Macbeth in particular is still consciously emulated by some Shakespearean actresses.1 It would be hard, however, to find a modern actor who wanted to play Macbeth in the manner of Kemble, if he even had any notion of what that might have been, and Kemble’s grand metropolitan home at 89 Great Russell Street is not marked by so much as a blue plaque.

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It was not always thus: those who had witnessed Kemble’s towering performances in unprecedentedly opulent and visually coherent productions of Shakespearean tragedy had a very different sense of his significance. On 30 November 1825, for instance, a little more than two years after Kemble’s death, the great actor-manager was affectingly brought to mind during a social gathering at the Tontine Inn in Sheffield. The Sheffield Shakespeare Club had been founded seven years earlier, when a series of sermons against plays and players delivered by the local vicar had spurred a group of prominent theatregoers in his congregation to inaugurate an annual act of public defiance. Every year the club sponsored the local theatre to give a designated matinee performance of a Shakespeare play, after which they would repair to a local hostelry, eat a large dinner, drink healths, sing songs, and make speeches, in praise of Shakespeare and his stage interpreters and in dispraise of the vicar. Although he had retired a year before the club was founded, Kemble, first established as a professional actor on the York-centred touring circuit in the late 1770s, was regularly mentioned by these northern enthusiasts from the outset: some of them may even have remembered seeing him perform as a novice in Sheffield in June 1781, when he had not only appeared in Othello, Henry VIII and other plays but recited William Collins’s ‘Ode on the Passions’.2 Even after achieving stardom in London Kemble had continued to accept engagements in the provinces, and the familiarity with which his work was still being discussed in Sheffield through the 1820s is testimony to the fact that he continued to enjoy national celebrity. At the club’s first dinner in 1819 the scholarly and deliberate Kemble was praised for the literary insight brought to his interpretations of the plays and toasted as ‘one of the best commentators on the text of Shakespeare’;3 the only other contemporary performer cited nearly as often on this and subsequent occasions was his sister and frequent costar, ‘Mrs Siddons, the Tragic Muse’. After Kemble’s death in 1823 he was officially elevated to Sheffield’s pantheon of all-time great Shakespeareans, when at the next annual dinner a solemn toast was drunk to ‘The Memory of David Garrick and John Kemble’. The tribute offered to the late Kemble at the 1825 meeting was both especially marked and especially revealing. At every such gathering there would be speeches by certain designated officers of the club, including the manager of the Theatre Royal, Sheffield, who was a member ex officio: he always brought with him a number of his actors (referred to in the club’s minutes simply as ‘members of the corps dramatique’), though they usually participated only by eating, drinking and singing songs on demand. In 1825, however, the company’s leading actor, a Mr Salter, felt moved towards

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the end of the evening to rise spontaneously to his feet ‘to propose the memory of one who, in defiance of all difficulties, . . . sustained and purified the stage; who . . . conquered all opinions, and at last obtained the general admiration of his country’. Having already drunk to The King, The Land that the King Governs (This England), The Duke of York, The Shakespeare Club, The Memory of Shakespeare, The Duke of Norfolk, Earl Fitzwilliam and The Ladies, as well as to Mrs Siddons and to Kemble’s younger brother Charles, Salter was overflowing with sincerity and candour, and instead of confining himself to a toast he felt moved to share a personal recollection. In 1820, Salter explained, the year in which the by-then retired Kemble had made one last visit to his homeland in order to sign away his remaining share in the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, I was performing at the Dover Theatre; the play was Hamlet. About the commencement, the manager came round to inform me that the great Kemble was in the house. I was naturally agitated; I feared to meet the gaze and judgement of so great a master. Kemble had arrived at Dover but a few hours before, on his way to Lausanne, from which place it was decreed he should never return. For whatever reason, Kemble had decided to spend his last night in England watching someone else playing one of the Shakespearean tragic roles in which, before finally succumbing to asthma and depression, he had been pre-eminent for over 30 years, from his London debut at Drury Lane in 1783 to his retirement from Covent Garden in 1817. Salter was even given to understand that Kemble had enjoyed the experience, sufficiently at least to grant this obscure junior colleague an audience. The following morning he rushed to Kemble’s lodgings to pay his respects: He had left but a few minutes before, on his way to the pier, about to make his last embarkation. I overtook him on the sands. Upon introduction, Mr Kemble received me with kindness, and encouraged me with his praise. I parted from him with pain, and I now have the melancholy satisfaction of knowing, that I was the last English actor who held converse with him here, and that the tragedy of Hamlet, which had contributed so much to his fame, was the last play which the great tragedian witnessed on his native theatre.4 For Salter, clearly, whose anecdote echoes Kent’s dealings with King Lear as well as the Prince of Denmark’s encounter with his father’s spirit, this

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was a defining moment of professional legitimation. It was as if the authoritative Hamlet of his time had explicitly given him his dying voice: through this valedictory contact, Salter could feel part of an apostolic native succession of Shakespeareans going back to Garrick and beyond. Receiving the endorsement of a man who had been the actor-manager of both metropolitan Theatres Royal in succession (Drury Lane from 1788 to 1796 and 1800 to 1801, Covent Garden from 1803 to 1817), and whose performances in Shakespearean tragedy had been imbued with such an air of vatic solemnity that William Hazlitt had famously described his coming of age as a theatregoer in the 1790s as being ‘brought up . . . in the Kemble religion’, 5 was as close as Salter could have got in 1820 to receiving a benediction from Shakespeare in person. It is no wonder that at the Tontine Inn five years later, on hearing Kemble’s surviving siblings remembered before John Philip himself, Salter should have been overcome with emotion, even to the extent of being embarrassed by his own resulting boldness: My feelings have led me to say this. I witnessed the drinking the health of the junior brother, Mr Charles Kemble, and I could not resist the inclination to pay my tribute of respect to the memory of the great master of our stage. The Memory of John P. Kemble. After which toast, there seems to have been a slight pause, before the President of the Club reassumed control of the meeting and moved on to propose the health of a local aristocrat, the Earl of Harewood. Where could one look now to find the memory of that ‘great master of our stage’ perpetuated with anything like Salter’s level of enthusiasm? With the passing of Salter’s generation of disciples and emulators, Macready among them, Kemble went decisively out of fashion, and thereafter he largely vanished from public consciousness. Dying in Switzerland, he was not given the Westminster Abbey funeral bestowed on some of his peers and, although a statue was installed there after his death as a memorial (a likeness by Hinchcliff, to a design by Flaxman, depicting him in the title role of Addison’s Cato), it was quietly removed in 1865. Even his modest grave in Lausanne is now impossible to find, since the Pierre-le-Plan cemetery was deconsecrated and redeveloped as a park in the 1960s: a small memorial panel to him was installed at the local English church only in the late 1990s.6 There can be few actors of the past more dependent for their posthumous fame on the visual arts; thanks to his friendship with Thomas Lawrence, R. A., for instance, at least the National Portrait Gallery, the

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Guildhall art gallery and Tate Britain still promulgate Kemble’s memory, through the prominent display of Lawrence’s massive portraits of him in the roles of Cato (1811),7 Coriolanus (1798, see Figure 2.1) and Hamlet (1801, Figure 2.2) respectively. To some extent, Kemble has merely suffered from the inevitable simplifications of popular stage history. It has not been easy for modern accounts of the development of the English theatre to produce a rapid slogan-like summary of his distinctive contributions to the staging of Shakespeare. While his immediate predecessor as a major Shakespearean actor-manager,

Figure 2.1 John Philip Kemble as Coriolanus. Painting by Thomas Lawrence (1798). Guildhall Art Gallery, Corporation of London.

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Figure 2.2 ‘Hamlet Apostrophizing the Skull’, engraved by J. Rogers (c. 1817) from the painting by Thomas Lawrence (1801). [property of the author]

Garrick, is lauded for restoring more of Shakespeare’s plays to the repertory, and his successor, Macready, is praised for removing the interpolations of adaptors, Kemble neither popularized any hitherto unrevived Shakespeare plays nor banished any established adaptations. (He continued, for example, to perform Colley Cibber’s version of Richard III and Nahum Tate’s happy ending to King Lear, and he even put the extra sisters for Caliban and Miranda contributed to The Tempest in 1667 by Sir William Davenant and John Dryden back into its acting script, years after both Garrick and Sheridan had revived the original play without them). While Garrick’s achievements in comedy and tragedy are habitually celebrated as

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an appropriately Shakespearean versatility, Kemble’s two specialities as a performer are liable simply to look inconveniently contradictory. Stage historians tend to describe him either as the most Gothic of Shakespearean actors, a master of archaic supernatural terror best seen confronting ghosts as Macbeth, or as the most neo-classically rational, best seen striking noble attitudes in a toga as Brutus. Most of all, Kemble has been overshadowed by the celebrity of his contemporary Kean – a mercurial, intemperate outsider, apparently as much the victim of his talent as its possessor – who has fitted modern ideas of the paradigmatic actor much more comfortably, and who has inspired not just several new biographies but a whole book on his enduring fame since the last time anyone published a biography of Kemble, in 1980.8 Some of the neglect into which Kemble has fallen, however, has been the result of long-term historical trends against which he was already embattled during his own lifetime, a continuation of the ‘difficulties’ and contrary ‘opinions’ acknowledged even by Salter. The terms in which Kemble defined his priorities as a Shakespearean manager and performer were already noisily contested during his career, and the fact that those terms have largely fallen into disuse since his retirement has made it difficult either to understand the nature of his art or to recognize his lasting achievements. At his farewell performance on 23 June 1817, Kemble assured his audience that his managerial policy had always been directed towards achieving ‘a union of propriety and splendour in the representation of our best plays, and particularly those of the divine Shakspeare’.9 I will set out to explain what Kemble meant by this in due course, since the words ‘propriety’ and ‘splendour’ must be almost obsolete in current theatre criticism, quite apart from being largely alien to the aesthetics of present-day Shakespearean directors such as Deborah Warner or Nicholas Hytner. Kemble’s leading qualities as a performer, as described by his admirers, sound equally remote from those of more recent Shakespearean actors such as Simon Russell Beale or Anthony Sher. ‘[W]e hesitate not to pronounce,’ declared the editor of An Authentic Narrative of Mr Kemble’s Retirement from the Stage (1817), that, with a magnificent expression of countenance, and grandeur of form, he united a correspondent tone of thought and feeling; – that, from his judgment, taste, and genius, displayed with continued success through a brilliant professional life, we are bound to consider him a master of his art; – and that so splendid a combination of acquirements must entitle, to an inscription on the tablet of Fame, the name of KEMBLE.10

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This chapter may have little chance of renewing Kemble’s inscription on the tablet of Fame, least of all by restoring a conservative early nineteenthcentury valuation of ‘ judgment, taste, and genius’ to popular currency, but what it can offer is a fresh understanding of how this remarkable actor understood and deployed Shakespeare. Streamlining and intensifying the great tragic roles for an increasingly operatic public theatre, Kemble, I will argue, was the supreme Platonist of the English Shakespearean tradition, committed to making visible in performance the ideal forms which for him were only imperfectly embodied in the plays’ printed texts. As well as achieving extraordinary force as a tragedian, furthermore, he sought a hitherto unknown level of coordination between every aspect of the productions mounted under his management. With an unusually developed visual sense, he anticipated what has more recently been called ‘designer Shakespeare’, focussing and expressing his interpretations of the plays via meticulously organized decor and movement and immense stage tableaux. If his accomplishments in these respects have been undervalued, it is also partly, I will argue, because Kemble found himself having to negotiate and situate this ambitious work as a performer and producer of Shakespeare in turbulent and divisive times. Kemble was an advocate of classical tradition in a period which some contemporaries and most successors would conceive as romantic, and a high Tory royalist in an age of political ferment on behalf of democracy. His statuesque, idealized performances as Shakespeare’s Romans were contemporary with vogues for nautical melodramas, child-stars and performing dogs, and his career as a respectful impersonator of Shakespeare’s English kings began during the American war of independence and ended only two years after the final defeat of revolutionary France. It speaks volumes about his professional self-image and his perceived relations to his audience and to his age that the role in which he chose to bid farewell to the London crowds was that of Caius Martius Coriolanus, defier of the mob. To his devotee Salter, Kemble was at once a representative of tradition and a figure for its power, and what will become clear in the account of his career below is that to Kemble most questions, whether artistic, political, religious or managerial, were ultimately questions of authority. In the era of the French Revolution, all such questions, including that of the authority and allegiances of Shakespearean drama itself, were inescapably politicized, and it is just possible that nowadays more social and political historians than students of the theatre read about Kemble, as a result of the major public disturbances which his work helped to precipitate.11 At each of the Theatres Royal in turn, he faced a

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tumultuous crisis of his authority as the leading Shakespearean of his time. At Drury Lane it was the scandal and uproar surrounding the staging of a forged Shakespeare play, Vortigern, in which Kemble played the title role in 1796. At Covent Garden it was the most sustained instance of theatrical disorder Britain has ever seen, the 67 consecutive nights of the Old Price Riots in 1809. Both episodes dramatized an unresolved tension between Shakespeare as high culture and Shakespeare as mass-market commodity. Kemble entertained higher notions of Shakespearean tragedy as an art form than any of his predecessors in an era when London’s legitimate playhouses were accommodating larger popular audiences than at any time before or since, and it is perhaps this contradiction more than any other which has haunted and undermined his posthumous reputation.

Becoming ‘Great John Kemble’: Kemble and the Gothic That contradiction made itself felt very early. Kemble’s apprenticeship as a Shakespearean, unusually and with lasting consequences, allied him both to the popular theatre and to the world of literary scholarship. In the terms of gothic cliché, he inherited two family curses: the life of a touring player, and the self-image of a learned Catholic martyr. His father Roger was an ex-barber from Herefordshire, who, after making his stage debut in Canterbury, had in 1752 joined a provincial theatre company active around the Cotswolds and along the Anglo-Welsh border. He subsequently married the manager’s actress daughter Sarah Ward, and he would take over the company on his father-in-law’s retirement in 1761. Alongside these theatrical ambitions, however, Roger Kemble also cherished his family’s tradition of loyalty to the Stuart monarchy and the Old Faith. His direct ancestor, Captain Richard Kemble, had fought with Charles II’s army at Worcester in 1651, and his great-uncle Father John Kemble had been executed on trumped-up charges of treason in 1679 during the hysteria over an alleged ‘Popish Plot’. Although he made the conventional compromise with his Anglican wife that any daughters would be raised in the established church (hence their first child Sarah Siddons’s orthodox Protestantism), Roger Kemble hoped to bring up his sons as worthy heirs to the family’s earlier generations of Jesuits and Jacobites. The young John Philip, like his siblings, occasionally helped out in the itinerant family business by appearing in infant roles, but he was always, at least according to the rumours later peddled by such celebrity publications as The Secret History of the Green Room, ‘Intended for a Catholic Priest’.12

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Whether or not Kemble senior definitely hoped his eldest son would become a clergyman, he certainly didn’t want him to become an actor. James Boaden, Kemble’s first real biographer, who met both of his parents, declared that Roger ‘never intended the stage as a profession for any of his children’, and that he sent John Philip to the Catholic seminary at Sedgley Park in Staffordshire and thence to the English college at Douai ‘to qualify him . . . for one of the learned professions’.13 (In the era before either the Catholic Emancipation Act or the founding of non-Anglican institutions beyond Oxbridge, such as University College, London, this devout establishment in Flanders offered the only further education available to an English Catholic unwilling to renounce his faith). At the end of 4 years in college, however, Kemble decided that he had no vocation for either the priesthood, the law or medicine, and that he wanted to follow in his parents’ footsteps instead, or perhaps more immediately in his sister’s. The summer in which the 18-year-old John Philip left Douai, 1775, was the same in which the 20-year-old Sarah, already playing leading roles and married to a fellow-actor, was spotted by one of David Garrick’s talent scouts and recruited to Drury Lane, and it was through her influence that Kemble obtained most of his early opportunities. Kemble’s bookish schooling may have had no influence on his choice of career, but it had a permanent effect both on his personality and on his approach to the stage. Whatever hardships and indignities his chosen calling might offer he never regarded himself as just another jobbing actor. His kinship to an accredited Catholic martyr provided a social cachet at Douai which, coupled with his own conspicuous excellence in classics and rhetoric, gave him an early sense of his own distinction, and having enjoyed a formal academic education at all, never mind a Catholic one, set him apart socially and culturally from most of his future colleagues in the commercial theatre. Returning to England with an enthusiasm for the works of Aristotle and Sophocles, a deep familiarity with academic theology, and a reputation as a student and declaimer of English poetry,14 the young Kemble set about becoming an actor as though the stage were one of the learned professions into which his father had dreamed of launching him. Prompting literary ambitions which his work in the practical theatre never quite displaced, and underpinning social aspirations which were visible even as he made a hand-to-mouth living strolling the provinces, Kemble’s education was always prominent in his self-presentation. (It is entirely typical that while Garrick, once he had achieved prosperity, bought a townhouse just around the corner from the Theatres Royal, Kemble

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would choose one immediately next door to the British Museum). In his early 20s, as a member of Tate Wilkinson’s itinerant troupe in Yorkshire, he alternated between playing juvenile leads and giving ‘Lectures on Public Speaking’ which incorporated Hamlet’s advice to the players, poems of his own composition, and passages from St Paul.15 When a colleague in the company, Joseph Inchbald, died suddenly in 1779, Kemble wrote two elegies, one of them in Latin, which he published alongside pastorals, epilogues and love poems in a slim volume called Fugitive Pieces the following year.16 For his benefit performance in 1778, when he was still only 21, Kemble chose to play the eponymous hero of his own tragedy Belisarius, the story of the last Roman general ever to be granted a triumph.17 This play was moderately successful, but, as in his acting, Kemble was less at home in comedy, whether original or Shakespearean. His farce The Female Officer, 1779, was not printed, and nor was his 1780 adaptation of The Comedy of Errors, which was unpromisingly retitled Oh! It’s Impossible and rewrote the twin slaves, the Dromios, as stereotypical African-Americans. (‘Had this alteration been printed’, wrote an embarrassed James Boaden nearly 20 years after slavery had been abolished within British dominions, ‘I incline to think [Kemble’s] maturer judgement would certainly have consigned the whole impression to the flames’).18 At York Kemble was ‘courted by most of the considerable inhabitants’, who laid aside their general disapproval of actors because ‘[i]t was known that he had received a learned education and had acquired academic distinction.’19 He even collected the first of a growing number of aristocratic friends, Lord Percy, subsequently the Duke of Northumberland, typically after persuading him to lend some of the regiment of dragoons he had brought to York to swell the crowd scenes in The Female Officer. During a visit to London in April 1780 Kemble further developed his social profile by joining the debating society known as the ‘School of Eloquence’ at Carlisle House in Soho, where before an audience of 1500 he spoke on behalf of the motion ‘that our senators ought to be answerable in a private capacity for what they say in a public’. One commentator described him as ‘modest, calm, argumentative . . . the Burke of Carlisle House’, but another, noticing what were perhaps early symptoms of the asthma which would always dog him and would later result in an addiction to opiates, complained that ‘Mr Kemble should speak rather louder . . . I am sure the Ladies and Gentlemen at the bottom of the Hall, could barely hear a fine speech, which more confidence would have made felt.’20 Kemble was evidently determined from the start that recognition as an actor should not preclude recognition as a scholar and (once he had the income to support

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the status) a gentleman. If that meant cultivating a manner and lifestyle as much patrician as thespian, then so be it. This desire to be both actor and gentleman would have been inconceivable had it not been for David Garrick’s efforts, over the previous 40 years, to render the theatre respectable. Kemble’s adult debut, in the title role of Nathaniel Lee’s Theodosius, or the Force of Love at Wolverhampton in January 1776, took place only months before Garrick’s retirement, and his London debut in 1783 only a few seasons after Garrick’s death: this coincidence was not lost on Kemble’s later admirers, who saw Kemble as continuing Garrick’s work as guarantor of the theatre’s social acceptability. ‘It is a circumstance worthy of observation, that just about this period GARRICK retired from the public scene,’ observed the Monthly Mirror in a retrospective article published during Kemble’s ascendancy in the 1790s, ‘and it should seem as if NATURE took THE STAGE under her immediate protection, by thus early endeavouring to atone for the loss it had recently suffered’.21 It was not immediately obvious, however, that the young Kemble – despite being better educated, taller, and more conventionally handsome – would adequately compensate the Stage for Garrick’s departure. For one thing, whatever twilight benevolence he may have mustered for Salter, he lacked Garrick’s conciliatory touch with colleagues. Tate Wilkinson, for instance, relates a story of Kemble petulantly insisting on playing Hamlet in defiance of the claims of a more experienced and locally better-known performer, and at Drury Lane he would on one notorious occasion resort to a managerial strategy which Garrick had never adopted, namely fighting a duel with one of his actors.22 Even as a very junior member of a provincial company, he could be just as uncompromising with audiences. When a baronet’s daughter continued to talk and laugh loudly with her friends during the last act of Arthur Murphy’s Zenobia at York in April 1779, Kemble stopped in mid-scene, haughtily announcing that he would proceed only ‘when that lady has finished her conversation, which I perceive the going on with the Tragedy only interrupts’.23 Noisy scenes in the auditorium, with one faction calling for an apology from Kemble and another supporting him, continued for the remainder of the play and at every successive performance for a week, but Kemble stuck indignantly to his guns, and the affair eventually passed off without any apology being offered. Thirty years later, during the Old Price Riots, he would attempt to face down unruly audiences in just the same manner, but with very different results. Wilkinson seems to have been comparatively unfazed by this incident – all publicity was good publicity. What concerned him more was the question

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of his imperious up-and-coming star’s range. Although he found Kemble ‘almost unexceptionable’ in ‘particular characters, where sternness is requisite’, he regarded him as deficient ‘in the tender passions’ demanded by roles such as Romeo.24 This view was shared by another member of Wilkinson’s company, Joseph Inchbald’s widow Elizabeth, a fellow Catholic with whom Kemble enjoyed at very least an amitié amoureuse in the early 1780s and who would remain both a confidante and a perceptive commentator on his work during her subsequent career as a playwright and novelist. According to Inchbald, Kemble was ill-suited to playing conventionally amorous leading men, especially in comedy. ‘It is one of the reproaches on Mr Kemble, as an actor, that he cannot paint the passion of love,’ she would later write, ‘nor can he, in water colours, as it is usually done’. She qualified this, however, by reference to a different set of roles: The truth is, Kemble cannot love moderately – sighs, soft complainings, a plaintive voice, and tender looks, bespeak more moderation – he must be struck to the heart’s core, or not at all: – he must be wounded to the soul with grief, despair, or madness . . . Garrick . . . could imitate the manners of the whole human race – [Kemble] can describe only their passions.25 Kemble, in short, poor at mimickry but unrivalled at embodying grief, despair and insanity, was perfectly suited as an actor to the style which was just coming into vogue during his youth, the Gothic. (Indeed, Inchbald would use him as the model for the forbidding but sexy Catholic guardian Dorriforth in her novel A Simple Story, 1791, a direct literary forbear of Mr Rochester and Heathcliff). The meanings implied by the term ‘gothic’ as a description of a literary or cultural mode were piquantly compressed by Sigmund Freud when he observed that the repressed always returns,26 and in the late eighteenth-century theatre much of what had been repressed in favour of lucid Enlightenment modernity in earlier generations made a dramatic comeback: castles, ghosts, sensational violence, archaizing blank verse, and representations of the Catholic and feudal past. Around Shakespearean history and tragedy, admittedly, some of this had never faded away, but Richard III and Macbeth came to look very different in a repertory now rapidly filling up with their latterday imitators. During Garrick’s youth some of Shakespeare’s plays were still being rewritten to make them more closely resemble modern ones; during Kemble’s time modern plays were instead being written deliberately to resemble Shakespeare’s, or at least to emulate effects of inexorable gloom and horror associated with the

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tragedies. Garrick had spent much of the time when he wasn’t performing Shakespeare appearing in light-hearted contemporary satirical comedies; Kemble would instead specialize in pseudo-Shakespearean spectacles of guilt and remorse, plays such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre (1797) and James Boaden’s Aurelio and Miranda (1799, an adaptation of Lewis’s 1796 novel The Monk, itself indebted to Measure for Measure).27 These roles would inevitably influence his work in Shakespeare proper, and in practice the dividing line between his way with the gothic and his way with Shakespeare would always be a blurred one. Premonitions of this trend were visible even in Kemble’s childhood: his very first appearance on the professional stage, at the age of ten, was in the role of the infant Duke of York (the future James II) in William Havard’s King Charles the First: An Historical Tragedy. Although this was not an expensive production (it took place at the King’s Head in Worcester), the playbills drew particular attention to its archaeological accuracy (‘The Characters to be dressed in ancient habits, according to the fashion of those times’),28 something which Kemble’s adult career would develop further. The whole event, moreover, was designed to sound as old-fashioned as it looked, since the script was ‘Written in Imitation of Shakespeare’s Style’. Hence the first iambic pentameters which Kemble ever recited in public came not from Shakespeare but from Havard’s hyper-royalist parting scene, set just before Charles’s execution: KING: . . . Come hither, James; nay, do not weep, my Boy, Keep thy Eyes bright to look on better Times. JAMES: I will command my Nature if I can, And stop these Tears of Sorrow, for indeed They drown my Sight; and I would view thee well; Copy my Royal Father in his Death, And be the Son of his heroic Virtues.29 As an adult, the first new play in which Kemble conspicuously shone was also an exercise in simulating a gloomy and violent past, Robert Jephson’s The Count of Narbonne (1780), adapted from Horace Walpole’s pioneering Gothic novel The Castle of Otranto (published in 1764 with a long preface justifying its romantic horrors by appeal to Shakespearean precedent). Kemble, having moved (along with Mrs Inchbald) from Wilkinson’s company to the Smock Alley theatre in Dublin in 1781, was cast in the title role in the play’s first Irish production. As Inchbald pointed out, Jephson’s dramatization of the guilty Count’s renunciation of his loyal

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wife was much enhanced by borrowings from Shakespeare (‘Neither “The Winter’s Tale” nor “Henry VIII” were [in 1780] performed at either of the [London] theatres; and the town had no immediate comparison to draw between the conjugal incidents in “The Count of Narbonne” and those which occur in these two very superior dramas’), 30 but this was Shakespearean pastiche put to definitively Gothic ends: the play’s depiction of the Count’s haunted attempts to murder the rightful heir of Narbonne, his thwarted, predatory pursuit of a younger bride, and his accidental murder of his own daughter (played in Dublin by the young Dorothy Jordan, a future Drury Lane colleague) provided Kemble with ample scope for the ‘sternness’ recognized by Wilkinson. Placing its terrors on a set designed to simulate medieval architecture, Jephson’s play may have provided hints for Kemble’s later visualizations of Macbeth: in any event, it provided him with a cod-Shakespearean blank verse dying speech not very different from the one through which he would gasp as Macbeth: COUNT: . . . But, hateful to myself, hated by thee, By Heaven abandon’d, and the plague of earth, This, this remains, and all are satisfied. [Stabs himself]. Forgive me, if ’tis possible – but – oh – [Dies].31 As even this passage suggests, Gothic dramas like this sought to achieve psychic intensity rather than minute psychological realism; so too would Kemble.32 Significantly, it was this role, rather than any from the native classics, which assured Kemble’s early success. ‘Mr Kemble made a very strong impression in the Count . . . he burst upon the audience in the full blaze of his powers; from that moment his reputation was increased, or rather then decided,’ wrote Boaden. ‘That winter he added Sir Giles Overreach [in Massinger’s A New Way to Pay Old Debts] and Romeo to his Hamlet and Alexander [in Nathaniel Lee’s The Rival Queens], but the Count of Narbonne was the unrivalled attraction.’33 To Kemble’s satisfaction, this local triumph also gave him the entrée, via Jephson, to the élite social circles of Dublin Castle, where he made the acquaintance of the likes of Lord Inchiquin, and of a man destined to become the most important Shakespearean scholar of his time, Edmond Malone, who had written a prologue for Jephson’s play. 34 Kemble remained a close associate of Malone, and indeed a colleague, to the extent of ultimately contributing footnotes of his own to the posthumous expansion

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of Malone’s great 1790 edition of Shakespeare, the Malone-Boswell edition of 1821. 35 By the time that Kemble, thanks to the success of his elder sister, was invited by Richard Brinsley Sheridan to return from Ireland and join the company at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, in 1783, he had ample experience of playing Shakespeare, but was best-established as a specialist in the Gothic. Fortunately for his hopes of establishing himself as the leading Shakespearean actor of his generation, Shakespeare too provided drama in which the repressed returns, forcing an educated humanist to struggle against the irrationality of the passions, confronting a prince with a ghost. For his debut on 30th September, Kemble chose the same role in which he had fi rst appeared in Dublin, determined that his career on the boards which Garrick had dominated for so long would begin with his own interpretation of one of the late master’s signature parts: Hamlet. In playing this role, as his friend Sir Walter Scott would later put it, Kemble ‘was to encounter at once the shade of the murdered King of Denmark, and, in the mind’s eye of the audience, that of the lost Garrick’. 36 Kemble’s dealings with both ghosts were entirely characteristic. He had long ago prepared the part of the Prince meticulously in the study before ever playing it in public; now, as well as looking at current London promptbooks, he examined scholarly editions and, when he could obtain them, the earliest printed editions too. (In 1790 he spent £17.6s.6d on acquiring his own copy of the fi rst, ‘bad’ quarto: in time he would amass a scholarly library even bigger than Garrick’s, including a First Folio among some 4,000 other volumes of plays). 37 Starting from this re-examination of the text, he evolved his own cuts (he replicated many that had been made by earlier actors, such as the removal of all reference to Fortinbras, but decisively rejected Garrick’s drastic alterations to the last two acts), and he developed his own inflections of individual lines. Rather than aiming solely for maximum momentby-moment effect, these were designed to serve an overarching conception of the role, the keynote of which was a pained, melancholy dignity brought into ever-increasing tension with the violent exigencies of the plot. His was a princely, slow-spoken Hamlet, who tenderly singled out his friend Horatio in questioning him about the Ghost (‘Did not you speak to it?’), almost wept as he remembered his father on ‘I shall not look upon his like again’, and took every occasion to kneel dutifully to his parents, whether in fi lial reverence as his father’s ghost descended

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through the trapdoor in the fi rst act, or with gentle supplication to Gertrude in the closet scene on ‘Mother, for the love of grace, / Lay not this flattering unction to your soul . . . ’ (‘His Hamlet shows the Gentleman compleat, / His easy manners – Oh heavenly Treat’, rhymed one admirer).38 In preparing this role, as with most others, Kemble singled out a ruling passion (in this instance, Melancholy) and a set of personal manners by which to qualify it (here, supreme gentility), and then played both with absolute consistency, clarity and mounting intensity over the duration of the play. In the graveyard in 5.1, he was ‘studiously graceful’, as if already posing for Thomas Lawrence’s 1801 painting (destined to become one of the most widely reproduced theatrical prints of the period, Figure 2.2), and by this stage ‘he looked an abstraction’, as Boaden observed, ‘of the characteristics of tragedy’.39 This was a world away from his predecessor’s improvised-looking starts and rapid turns of thought and mood. Kemble was pensive and deferential to the shade of old Hamlet, but as far as possible he simply ignored the shade of old Garrick. This conception of the part didn’t please everyone, either in 1783 or over the three ensuing decades during which Kemble would continue to play the Dane. Tate Wilkinson, though he admired Kemble’s nobility in the third act, missed Garrick’s more naturalistic ‘quick flashes of fire, and variety of conveyance’,40 and Hazlitt, who similarly criticized Kemble for ignoring the ‘wildness’ and ‘undulations’ of the role, felt that Kemble always played Hamlet ‘like a man in armour . . . in one undeviating straight line’.41 In keeping with its cerebral style, this was a debut which inspired critical discussion rather than immediate passionate enthusiasm. ‘[His] evidently minute study of the text, and the tout ensemble of his performance, made a powerful impression on the public mind,’ recalled one member of the first-night audience, but ‘the whole seemed to be rather marked by the nicety of study than the vivid spirit of nature.’42 ‘ “Did not you speak to it” is an Emphasis not at all justified by the context,’ complained the Public Advertiser.43 Strikingly, however, even those who accused Kemble of pedantically straining after novelty were sufficiently impressed by his seriousness and presence to start using the epithet ‘great’. When John Philip’s fat younger brother Stephen failed to impress as Othello at the rival theatre in the same season, for instance, wits observed that Covent Garden had made the mistake of hiring the big Kemble instead of the great one,44 and in November 1783, as Kemble’s fame grew, the Morning Chronicle printed an ‘EPIGRAM, to Mr. J. K. on his unequalled originality’. In comparing ‘great

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John Kemble’ with some of his most famous predecessors, even this squib hovers ambiguously between sarcasm and genuine praise: THOU soul of Betterton, thou voice of Booth, Graceful in all, in nothing e’er uncouth; Thou eye of Garrick, with the form of Barry, Sure Nature’s choicest bounties thou dost carry! What crouds on crouds attend thee every night, To see thee stalk and stare, or dance and fight! Talk not of Quin, let Garrick be forgot; For great John Kemble’s all – that they were not.45 In some respects the anonymous author had got it right: Kemble’s Hamlet did mark a decisive break with the existing manner of staging Shakespeare, and not only because it seemed so much statelier and more stylized than Garrick’s. Although this was one of the few Shakespearean roles in which Kemble did not choose a costume radically different from those worn by his forbears (like Garrick, he played Hamlet in contemporary clothing, ‘a modern court dress of rich black velvet, with a star on the breast, the garter and pendant ribband of an order, – mourning sword, and buckles with deep ruffles: the hair in powder’),46 it was already clear that his interpretation of Shakespeare’s plays would be based not on theatrical tradition but on his own critical re-readings of their texts. Betterton, Booth, Barry, Quin, Garrick et al. had been merely players: Kemble was not just an actor but a scholar, and he knew better. Both this approach and the attitude that went with it would become more obvious after Kemble, his stardom established, was promoted to acting manager of the company in autumn 1788 on the retirement of the resident leading tragedian, William ‘Gentleman’ Smith, and could make what we would now think of as directorial decisions about overall decor and movement and the casting of other players. In the meantime Sheridan – as far as the interests of Smith would permit – tried him in other parts. Avoiding the more protean role of the slumming Prince Hal, Kemble was an immense success as the young Percy in Henry IV part 1. ‘His Hotspur is a grand delineation, / The true Spirit of the English Nation’, applauded one feudal patriot;47 Sir Walter Scott, more judiciously, would attribute Kemble’s success at conveying ‘the rapid and hurried vehemence of Hotspur’ to his affinity with characters single-minded or affected almost to the point of monomania: ‘He seems to me always to play best those characters in which there is a predominant tinge of some over-mastering passion or acquired habit

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of acting and speaking colouring the whole man.’48 Kemble’s Benedick, by contrast, like most of his juvenile leads in comedy, pleased few, though he was a convincingly snobbish Bertram in All’s Well That Ends Well. Posthumus in Cymbeline, with Siddons as Imogen, proved a sufficiently straight-faced role to become another career-long favourite; his inflexible Othello, also played initially opposite Siddons as an unlikely Desdemona, drew mixed reviews (see Figure 2.3); but Kemble’s Richard III was, by general agreement, a failure. In this role, as some complained of his Hamlet, Kemble

Figure 2.3 Kemble as Othello, one of his last performances at Drury Lane, 1802; a rapid eye-witness sketch (subsequently gone-over with watercolours) by Thomas Loftie. Harvard Theatre Collection TS 990.1.40.

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lacked the bustling energy of Garrick (even his first entrance, according to Henry Mercer Graves, was too ‘slow and measured’),49 and though he played Richard at intervals over many years he was never sufficiently impolite to be wholly convincing. (According to Boaden, Kemble insisted that in order to deceive so many fellow-royals, Richard ‘must have been refined in his manners’.)50 Within his own lifetime he would, unusually, be eclipsed in this role, by both George Frederick Cooke and, later, Edmund Kean. In 1801, indeed, Kemble had the embittering experience of reading the anonymous pamphlet Remarks on the Character of Richard the Third, as played by Cooke and Kemble. As he did so, he furiously underlined the word ‘one’ in the sentence ‘After disapproving of Mr Kemble in so many instances, let me mention one in which he is admirable: the words in Hamlet, “There is an especial providence, in the fall of a sparrow.” ’ In the margin the actor then wrote, in his best scholar-and-gentleman persona, ‘Mr Kemble is much obliged to the candour of a Critick, who allows that he can speak one line properly, in a Character that contains many hundred.’51 In just as scholarly a manner, Kemble meticulously learned the lines for each fresh role he undertook by neatly copying them out, with just their cues, in a series of leather-bound notebooks, most of them subsequently labelled with the date and place where he first acted them in public. Many of these part-books are now in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC, among them ‘King John. Theatre Royal Drury-lane December 1st 1783’ (another lasting success, usually with Siddons as Constance), ‘Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. Theatre Royal, Drury-lane. Jany 22nd 1784’ (in which Kemble, like many other Shylocks since, allowed himself an added ‘Oh!’ on his exit from the trial scene, not to mention a ‘Hoh!’ on being sentenced to Christianity), ‘King Lear, Theatre Royal Drury-Lane Jany 21st 1788’ (a role of which Kemble was regrettably deprived in his later years, since the play was withdrawn from the repertories of both Theatres Royal in deference to the madness of King George III from 1811 until after Kemble’s retirement) and ‘Macbeth. Theatre Royal Drury Lane March 31st 1785’.52 Characteristically, Kemble staked his claim to this latter major role, destined to be one of his most celebrated, not only on the stage but in critical prose. In 1786, in response to the posthumous publication of an essay by the critic Thomas Whately in which he had argued that Macbeth was less ‘intrepid’ than Richard III, Kemble published Macbeth Reconsidered: An Essay Intended as an Answer to Part of the Remarks on Some of the Characters of Shakespeare, complete with a dedication to Malone.53 Kemble, he would have us know, not only acted in Macbeth but read widely about it and discussed the play with the greatest scholars of the day.

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Kemble would cement his identification as the finest Macbeth of his time when he staged a lavish new production in 1794. Between his initial London performances in the role in 1785 and this first Macbeth which he might be considered to have produced as well as starred in, however, two major developments occurred which would drastically affect the nature and reception of his performance. One of these was political, the other architectural, and in time the two would overlap. Within a year of Kemble assuming the management of Drury Lane for Sheridan, the Bastille fell. The progress of the Revolution had major consequences for British politics, with Whigs at first welcoming what looked like a French attempt to secure constitutional liberties which the British had enjoyed since the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688, and Tories decrying the reforms initiated by the National Assembly as steps towards mob rule. But since British cultural identity had for years been structured around an opposition to all things French, the Revolution had consequences for the meanings of Shakespeare too. During the earlier eighteenth century, especially during the Seven Years War (1756–1763), Garrick and others had successfully identified Shakespeare’s hybrid, generously irregular plays with British (Protestant) liberty, contrasted with the rigid neoclassicism of the French stage and the Catholic despotism of the French monarchy and aristocracy. According to this logic, the unwritten British constitution was normal and good because, like Shakespearean drama, it was freer and more socially inclusive than that of Britain’s nearest continental neighbour and rival.54 But if the antithetical French were now going to be too libertarian and democratic instead of too reactionary, then in order to anchor British cultural identity against Frenchness, Shakespeare, for some at least, would have to stand less for freedom than for a different set of native values: continuity with the glorious feudal past, a sensible resistance to cultural and governmental innovation, a proper respect for traditional royal prerogatives. Whether or not one espoused this assimilation of Shakespeare to the conservative perspective on the Revolution articulated by Edmund Burke in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies looked more controversial after 1789 than they had for generations. As the revolutionaries moved from reforming their monarchy to attacking the very concept of royalty, and as the Corresponding Societies and other radical groups sought to promulgate their ideas in England, so it became possible to wonder whether Shakespeare’s dramatizations of medieval England’s succession crises were reverential or sceptical about kingship. After the execution of the French royal family in 1793, Shakespeare’s dramatizations of regicide seemed alarmingly topical, and his depictions of political conspiracy,

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popular protest and assassination were deemed too inflammatory to be staged. As a result, Kemble was deprived for more than a decade of a role in which he had excelled since early 1789, Coriolanus, and his plans to revive Julius Caesar had to be shelved until the 1811–1812 theatrical season. ‘[W]hen the circumstances of certain periods make certain incidents of history most interesting’, sighed a sympathetic Inchbald, those are the very seasons to interdict their exhibition. Till the time of the world’s repose, then, the lovers of the drama will, probably, be compelled to accept of real conspiracies, assassinations, and the slaughter of war, in lieu of such spectacles ably counterfeited.55 In these troubled times Kemble, always instinctively sympathetic towards aristocrats, nailed his colours to the mast early. His response to France’s first moves towards popular emancipation was, in October 1789, to revive what was regarded as Shakespeare’s most anti-French play, Henry V, starring as a very royal Henry. The subsequent outbreak of hostilities between Britain and France only seemed to vindicate this choice of repertoire. As Jonathan Bate points out, Kemble played the role of Henry sixteen times between 1789 and 1792, then revived his production in 1803, the year in which war was renewed after the fragile peace of Amiens; the performance of 25 November that year was given ‘for the Benefit of the PATRIOTIC FUND’ and furnished with a concluding ‘Occasional Address to the Volunteers.’56 Any lingering doubts about Kemble’s opinion of the Revolution were removed in January 1793, when he temporarily closed Drury Lane as a mark of respect for the guillotined Louis XVI. This display of solidarity with the ancien régime infuriated his Whiggish proprietor Sheridan, but pleased both Kemble’s aristocratic patrons, such as the Duke of Norfolk, and the more conservative of his fellow-Shakespeareans, such as Edmond Malone. Among the new friends Kemble cultivated in the 1790s, furthermore, were some who were not just anti-Jacobin by inclination but counter-revolutionary by profession. These included the bilingual Swiss agent Charles Michel Lullin, who had been recruited to the Aliens Office by the spymaster William Wickham to infiltrate potential émigré conspiracies. (Lullin consulted Kemble about the art of acting while preparing the French verse translation of Richard III which he staged with a cast of expatriate amateurs – as a pretext, presumably, for keeping them under his eye – in 1798).57 While some of his circle, such as Inchbald, maintained

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acquaintance with both reformists and reactionaries, Kemble scorned to temporize with radical opinion. When he staged Macbeth in 1794 he carefully framed the first performance so that nobody could mistake the immediate applicability of Shakespeare’s account of the dire consequences of killing a king: in a specially commissioned prologue, ‘the flourishing state of this country, compared with that of a neighbouring nation, was very judiciously introduced.’58 If Kemble’s 1794 Macbeth was different in political emphasis from its 1785 precursor, it was different stylistically too. Sheridan had been a feckless and unreliable proprietor even before his political career had substantially distracted him from the proper management of Drury Lane, and under his stewardship Christopher Wren’s 1674 building had received no essential maintenance since the cosmetic makeover by the Adam brothers which Garrick had commissioned in 1775. In 1791 the playhouse was declared unsafe, and the company transferred to the Haymarket while the building was demolished and rebuilt to a new design by Henry Holland. Although London’s potential audience for live theatre had grown enormously since 1674, the city’s two Theatres Royal still enjoyed a monopoly on the performance of ‘legitimate’ spoken drama, and the temptation to accommodate as many paying customers as possible at each performance, regardless of the demands of visibility or acoustics, proved irresistible to the shareholders. Towering above Westminster so as to accommodate five tiers of galleries, Holland’s new Theatre Royal, Drury Lane was one of the largest secular buildings in London; while its predecessor accommodated about 2,000 spectators at a time, this auditorium seated 3,600. As Benjamin Wyatt would explain of the 3,000-seater with which he replaced Holland’s after the fire of 1809, I was aware of the existence of a very popular notion, that our Theatres ought to be very small; but it appeared to me, that, if that popular notion should be suffered to proceed too far, it would tend, in every way, to deteriorate our Dramatic Performances; by depriving the Proprietors of that Revenue which is indispensable to defray the heavy expenses of such a Concern, and to leave a reasonable Profit to those whose Property might be embarked in the undertaking.59 The fact that Wyatt’s Drury Lane (nowadays limited to admitting 2,100) has in our time proved much more hospitable to spectacular musicals than to Shakespeare cannot be attributed solely to the depravity of popular taste. In general, modern audiences prefer their Shakespearean productions to flow smoothly across open stages without long breaks for the changing of scenery,

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and they value a sense of twitch-by-twitch intimacy with their leading players; it is difficult to achieve either in the immense proscenium-arch houses built during the Romantic period. Kemble had trained in the provinces in some very small theatres indeed – similar to the surviving Theatre Royal built in Richmond, Yorkshire, in 1788, which can now hold only 214 – but the cavernous new playhouses of Georgian London demanded a different scale of acting and design entirely. Holland’s Drury Lane, which would open with Macbeth on 12 March 1794, had a stage 83 feet wide and 92 feet deep, and in its fully lit auditorium almost twice as many people as had attended Kemble’s previous performances in the role would be able to see and hear one another’s reactions to the actors at least as well as they could see and hear the actors themselves. In such a playhouse, changes of mood which in smaller theatres might be signalled by variations in facial expression and vocal tone had at the very least to be underlined by incidental music; visual indications which in our time can be made by a single lighting cue – such as the introduction of a blue filter to suggest the approach of evening – could be made only by large painted backdrops; scenes had to be made short enough to accommodate the changing of those backdrops, or to be played downstage in front of painted shutters while larger alterations of scenery were being carried out behind them, and they had to be organized into a sequence that would minimize the need for such scene-shifting; and costumes had to be showy enough to read from a very long way away. (Hence the size of Kemble’s plume as Hamlet, Figure 2.2). ‘The splendours of the scene, the ingenuity of the machinist and the rich display of dresses, aided by the captivating charms of music, now in a great degree supersede the labours of the poet,’ lamented the playwright Richard Cumberland in 1806: There can be nothing very gratifying in watching the movement of an actor’s lips when we cannot hear the words that proceed from them, but when the animating march strikes up, and the stage lays open its recesses to the depth of a hundred feet for the procession to advance, even the most distant spectator can enjoy his shilling’s worth of show.60 Kemble knew more than had most actor-managers since the 1660s about the playhouses for which Shakespeare’s plays had originally been written – his friend Malone had only recently discovered the papers of the Elizabethan manager Philip Henslowe and had incorporated his findings into the account of the Elizabethan theatre prefaced to his 1790 edition of Shakespeare – but, stage historian or none, he knew that his productions of Shakespeare needed to provide plenty of shillings’ worth of show. He

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recognized that he was essentially working in a different theatrical medium to that of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and he clearly prided himself on his ability to translate from the one into the other: after 1788 he took to publishing his acting versions of Shakespeare’s plays, often before his productions opened, much as a nineteenth-century conductor might have published his own arrangements of early music for modern instruments. He allowed Inchbald to reprint directly from his current promptbooks in her British Theatre compilation of 1808, and he then republished his Shakespeares as part of a complete set of the ‘Old English Plays’ he had adapted in 1815, establishing a precedent for those subsequent nineteenthcentury Shakespearean actor-managers who similarly wished to maintain a presence in the book market as well as on the stage, such as Macready and Irving.61 One notable distinguishing feature of these texts probably reflects Kemble’s career-long interest in making his bit-part actors fit more thoroughly into his productions, namely his provision of personal identities for figures never named in Shakespeare’s dialogue and labelled in previous cast-lists only by such designations as ‘First Gentleman’ or ‘Attendants’. Under Kemble, for example, The Merchant of Venice included very minor characters called ‘Stephano’ and ‘Pietro’ and Measure for Measure featured one ‘Leopold’; The Winter’s Tale a ‘Phocion’, ‘Lamia’ and ‘Thasius’; Othello ‘Luca’, ‘Giovanni’, ‘Marco’, ‘Paulo’, ‘Antonio’, ‘Julio’, ‘Lorenzo’ and ‘Canno’. These tiny alterations may simply represent Kemble self-importantly adding his own finishing touches to Shakespeare’s unpolished art, but the stage directions he supplies for these newly-christened cast members allow us to see the care he devoted to choreographing the whole traffic of his stage. If the names made his messengers and attendants feel more important and more inclined to pay attention in their rehearsals, even when not about to speak their only two lines in the play, so much the better. In its text and its decor alike, Kemble’s Macbeth provides the perfect example of what the actor-manager meant by a ‘union of propriety and splendour’. It amply fulfilled his early recognition, as Boaden described it, that ‘a grand and permanent attraction might be given to Drury Lane by encreasing the power of Shakespeare’: This he proposed to effect by a more stately and perfect representation of his plays – to attend to all the details as well as the grand features, and by the aids of scenery and dress to complete the dramatic illusion.62 The 1794 Macbeth was not only a visually splendid and reassuringly expensive-looking spectacle – complete with 16 separate sets and a drop curtain,

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newly commissioned from seven named artists, a huge massed advance down the stage by Macbeth’s army, and an apparition scene in which, counting supernumerary children as spirits and choruses of extra witches, a hundred people were on stage at once – but a show in which everything matched.63 Its costumes, in particular, were all carefully chosen to place the play’s action within a consistent, self-contained world. Instead of following the customary eclecticism accepted by Garrick – whereby each character’s clothing was primarily intended to give a clear signal about his or her social status and role, regardless of region or period, so that his Macbeth, for instance, had worn the red coat appropriate to an eighteenth-century general – Kemble turned to the example of Charles Macklin, who in 1773 had for the first time dressed Macbeth in clothes designed to suggest, however vaguely, both Scotland and the medieval past. In 1785 Kemble had only added a tartan cloak and scarlet breeches to Garrick’s red coat, but now, after considerable research, he dressed the Thane and his fellow- soldiers in ‘the bold military habit of the ancient Scots’.64 These newly historicized human figures were perfectly congruent with scenery which included an ‘Inside view of the palace at Fores – A very fine Gothic Apartment’, ‘The Blasted Heath, with Bridge, &c’ and a ‘Gothic Apartment at Dunsinane’.65 ‘It is impossible to contemplate the consistent disposition of able actors, of appropriate habiliments, and of picturesque scenery, with which this tragedy is now embellished,’ commented an approving Elizabeth Inchbald, ‘and not boldly demand – where was Garrick’s taste?’66 The witches, meanwhile, were stripped of the elements of burlesque they had retained in earlier eighteenth-century performance and given an appearance sufficiently eerie and portentous to be consistent with high tragedy. Whereas in Garrick’s time, as W. C. Oulton remembered, they had been represented as ‘beggarly Gammers’, Kemble, after studying other seventeenth-century texts about witchcraft,67 dressed them as ‘preternatural beings, distinguishable only by the fellness of their purposes, and the fatality of their delusions’: thanks to these ‘appropriate vestures’, they could now ‘strike the eye with a picture of supernatural power’, and ‘avoid all buffoonery in those parts, that Macbeth might no longer be deemed a Tragi-Comedy’.68 Kemble’s quest for what he regarded as generically ‘proper’ to the play led him further than this. In cutting the gross comedy of the Porter (Macduff was instead admitted by a shamefaced Seyton who excused his lateness only by remarking that he had been carousing till the second cock), and omitting the onstage killing of Lady Macduff’s son (the whole shockingly naturalistic and brutal scene disappeared), Kemble was only following Garrick, but he made a new cut

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of his own in the banquet scene. While Old Hamlet was a dignified and respectable ghost and could be knelt to accordingly, there was something crude and potentially comic about the blood-boltered Banquo. As Robert Lloyd had written as early as 1760, When chilling Horrors shake th’affrighted King And Guilt torments him with her Scorpion Sting . . What need the Ghost usurp the Monarch’s Place, To frighten Children with his mealy Face? The King alone should form the Phantom there, And talk and tremble at the vacant Chair.69 Kemble, determined to focus the attention of the audience not on an old-fashioned exercise in gory makeup but on his own portrait of a mind approaching the point of collapse, followed exactly this suggestion. (According to the Biographia Dramatica, this was ‘an alteration in which every classical mind must agree with Mr Kemble’.)70 Here as elsewhere Kemble privileged cultivated taste over absolute fidelity to the letter of Shakespeare’s text: the point was not only to perform the play in the manner best calculated to render it effective in the theatre of 1794, scenery, music, extras and all, but to perform it in the manner in which Shakespeare would have written it himself had he been better informed about aesthetics. This wasn’t to be just Shakespeare’s Macbeth as published in the Folio by Heminge and Condell, but the Platonic ideal of Macbeth as discerned underlying it by Kemble. As in his acting, which was committed, as an admirer explained, to ‘exhibiting Nature, not with perfect truth, but mellowed, or heightened’, so it was with Kemble’s textual dealings with the Poet of Nature. Kemble’s acting text presented Shakespeare as consciously subjected to the theories on how Art selectively edits Nature propounded by Joshua Reynolds in connection with history painting: as far as Kemble was concerned, it was ‘the best part of Nature only, which should be given . . . stooping to represent the common defects of common life, either in person or action, degrades the character and the art’.71 Hence wherever Shakespeare had made the unclassical mistake of suggesting that there might be an unheroic side to this play’s tragic hero, such as by depicting an anxiously premature haste to don his armour at the approach of battle in act 5, Kemble silently removed it, just as he removed Macbeth’s striking of the messenger who brings the news that Birnam Wood is approaching Dunsinane (a stage direction added in Nicholas Rowe’s edition of 1709 that had been followed by most Macbeths since).

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Kemble’s conception of the Thane’s character, as he explained at length in Macbeth Reconsidered, was one in which personal cowardice had no part. This Macbeth was a uniformly valiant warrior misled into crime but undaunted almost to the last by the horrors he encountered thereafter, so much so that in practice he tended to face up to Banquo’s invisible ghost with little sign of the trembling recommended by Lloyd. As ever, Kemble’s performance followed an inexorable straight line until reaching a dramatic breaking point, in this instance, according to most eyewitnesses, the news of Lady Macbeth’s death. As William Charles Macready remembered, when the news was brought, ‘The queen, my lord, is dead’, he seemed struck to the heart; gradually collecting himself he sighed out, ‘She should have died hereafter’. Then as if with the inspiration of despair he hurried out distinctly and pathetically the lines, Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day . . . . . . rising to a climax of desperation that brought down the enthusiastic cheers of the closely packed theatre.72 After this, Kemble’s Macbeth went to pieces, but they were still heroic pieces. Though momentarily appalled by the news that Macduff was not of woman born, he roused himself to his greatest display of martial ardour yet on ‘Lay on, Macduff!’ Crucially, though, he finally regained a sense of his story’s moral meaning, and took a last opportunity to point it out. However courageously he defied Macduff, this Macbeth ultimately conceded the justice of his exemplary punishment. Shakespeare had clearly been wrong to have him decapitated offstage, let alone to have his severed head displayed tastelessly to the audience: Garrick had only been completing the true design of the play when he had allowed Macbeth to perish onstage recognizing the proper reward of regicidal ambition. Kemble, accordingly, retained most of the dying speech which his predecessor had supplied: ’Tis done! The scene of life will quickly close. Ambition’s vain, delusive dreams are fled, And now I wake to darkness, guilt, and horror. – I cannot rise: – I dare not ask for mercy – It is too late; – hell drags me down;– I sink, I sink; – my soul is lost for ever! – Oh! – Oh! – [Dies].73

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This may seem like a heavily simplified version of the play, but, to judge from contemporary reports of the effect not just of Kemble and Mrs Siddons in the leading roles but of the entire production, what it lost in ambiguity it gained in power. To Mrs Inchbald, for instance, this was Kemble’s masterpiece, a vindication of the didactic force which the modern theatre might exert when all its resources were expertly directed to a single end: [T]o those, who are unacquainted with the effect wrought by theatrical action and decoration, it may not be superfluous to say – The huge rocks, the enormous caverns, and blasted heaths of Scotland, in the scenery; – the highland warrior’s dress, of centuries past, worn by the soldiers and their generals; – the splendid robes and banquet at the royal court held at Fores; – the awful, yet inspiring music, which accompanies words assimilated to each sound; – and, above all – the fear, the terror, the remorse; – the agonizing throbs and throes, which speak in looks, whispers, sudden starts, and writhings, by Kemble and Mrs. Siddons, all tending to one great precept – Thou shalt not murder, – render this play one of the most impressive moral lessons which the stage exhibits.74 We are unlikely to see a Macbeth like this in our time; in terms of theatrical aesthetics, the nearest thing available nowadays might be a rather old-fashioned production of Verdi’s opera. This same season, indeed, would see the premiere, in June 1794, of Kemble’s greatest commercial success as a writer, which was itself a Gothic opera, his adaptation of a French ‘musical romance in three acts’, Lodoiska. (The score was by Stephen Storace, responsible for Drury Lane’s 1789 smash hit The Haunted Tower). With its wicked Polish baron, finally defeated when his castle, already ablaze, is stormed by a band of heroic Tartar warriors, this gothic spectacular catered to a different taste from Macbeth – but perhaps not as different as all that. The triumphant dedication of the new Drury Lane ‘as a monument to the Genius of Shakspeare’75 by Kemble’s splendour-and-propriety-enhanced Macbeth marked the actor’s most successful public assumption yet of Garrick’s mantle as Shakespeare’s current representative on earth. In case anyone hadn’t noticed this during the play, moreover, his company’s claim to own both the national poet and Garrick’s legacy was pointed out by a special ritual after the first performance. ‘After the Epilogue the statue of Shakespeare was displayed, and was crowned with bays by Miss Farren. Mr. Dignum sung the song in praise of the Mulberry-tree [written by Garrick for his Shakespeare Jubilee in 1769], and the scene was closed by a peal from an excellent set of bells.’76 As Macbeth, Kemble, according to those of his devotees as familiar

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with Burke’s writings on aesthetics77 as with those on politics had touched the sublime: he was now ‘the great John Kemble’ indeed.

Becoming ‘King John’: Kemble and the Crowd If the 1794–1795 season marked a high-point of Kemble’s career as a provider of simultaneously popular and high-minded live Shakespeare, however, it also included one conspicuous low. One consequence of Kemble’s desire that every aspect of the shows produced under his management should reveal the influence of a single guiding intelligence was a degree of personal responsibility for matters which previous actor-managers had been content to delegate, and his recognition that on the immense new stage of Drury Lane more extras (with more names) needed to be more carefully marshalled than ever before in crowd scenes obliged him considerably to increase the amount of rehearsal undertaken by supernumeraries and principals alike. The resulting overwork in London was compounded not only by the taxing engagements in Edinburgh, Dublin and elsewhere which Kemble accepted in order to maximize his income whenever Drury Lane was closed, but by depressing unpopularity among his colleagues. To some of his fellow actors, Kemble’s high artistic ambitions just looked like the symptoms of megalomania, and during the 1790s the mutterings against him acquired a distinctly political cast: he was ‘the Autocrat of Drury Lane’, a ‘dictator’ who subjected his fellow-performers to ‘tyranny and oppression’.78 Although Kemble had long been in the habit of resorting to drink as a means of coping with the resulting isolation and stress, he had always scrupulously maintained his professional respectability. In 1787 he had abruptly married Priscilla Brereton (like Mrs Inchbald, the widow of a fellow-actor),79 and their childless, companionable marriage had seemed to most observers to be an invulnerably placid arrangement until early in 1795. In pursuit of his heroic ambitions Kemble had been marching undeviatingly forward for years, but now, suddenly, something snapped. On 28th January, most of the London newspapers published the following announcement: I, John Philip Kemble, of the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, do adopt this method of publicly apologising to Miss de Camp, for the very improper and unjustifiable behaviour I was lately guilty of towards her, which I do further declare her conduct and character had in no wise authorised; but on the contrary, I do know and believe both to be irreproachable.80

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Fanny de Camp was a young singer and actress in the Drury Lane company. Kemble had sexually assaulted her backstage, but her cries for help brought rescue for her and utter humiliation for her drunken attacker. As the other Kembles gathered around to soothe the injured party and minimize the public damage, de Camp developed a strong attachment to Charles Kemble, a relationship fiercely opposed by John Philip, who succeeded in delaying their engagement until 1800 and their actual marriage until 1806, a full decade later than they would have wished it. (It was this couple’s children, even so, among them Fanny Kemble, who would in time inherit the family’s thespian capital.) Screams from the tyrant’s lair; a wronged, innocent maiden taken under the protection of a virtuous younger brother and brought into the bosom of the dynasty in defiance of the autocrat’s curses; a moment’s lapse into unforgiveable crime, to be brooded over and repented forever; to contemporary show-business gossip it seemed as though Kemble’s life offstage was now every bit as Gothic as his roles onstage. The last thing Kemble needed after an imbroglio which ‘more seriously affected his honour than any other part of his conduct through life’81 was something which might further damage his reputation by compromising his artistic integrity as a performer and producer of Shakespeare. The following season, however, that is what happened. It involved another blurring of the boundaries between Shakespearean tragedy and the contemporary popular gothic. Late in 1794 William Henry Ireland, the illegitimate teenaged son of the writer and antiquary Samuel Ireland, had begun to present his father with documents purporting to be in the hand of William Shakespeare himself. Somehow swallowing a bizarrely proto-Freudian account of their provenance (which included a mysterious publicity-shy nobleman who wanted to share these priceless relics because they had been presented by Shakespeare to a Jacobean William Henry Ireland who had rescued the Bard from drowning), Samuel put these materials on show to an invited selection of fascinated literati at the family home in Norfolk Street, just off the Strand: some were even taken to St James’s Palace for the inspection of an intrigued Prince George. At the end of 1795 Ireland published a generous selection of the documents in facsimile as Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments under the Hand and Seal of William Shakespeare, including the Tragedy of King Lear, and a Small Fragment of Hamlet, from the Original MSS. in the Possession of Samuel Ireland,82 and the appearance of this book prompted a wave of renewed public interest. Everyone who was anyone in the republic of letters felt obliged to declare themselves either a ‘Believer’ or an ‘Unbeliever’. Given how incompetent these forgeries

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look to modern readers more accustomed to seeing what Elizabethan spelling and handwriting really look like, it may seem surprising that there were any believers at all, but William Henry knew exactly what the late eighteenth-century public most wanted to hear about Shakespeare. His atrociously spelled documents perfectly filled the gaps in the Bard’s life-story about which scholars had remained silent for want of evidence. The Shakespeare they purported to reveal professed a zealous orthodox Anglicanism, wrote charmingly rustic love poems to Anne Hathaway (or rather ‘Hatherrewaye’), and was personally thanked for ‘prettye Verses’ by Elizabeth I. Kemble’s friend Malone, who was carrying out research for a biography of Shakespeare at the time, had declined an invitation to examine the documents in person, but he saw through them the moment he opened a copy of Ireland’s book, and on 10 January 1796 he started work on a detailed exposée, An Inquiry into the Authenticity of Certain Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments, Published Dec. 14 1795.83 Ordinary readers in large numbers were deciding whether or not to accept Ireland’s papers as genuine on the grounds of pure uninformed consumer preference, apparently convinced that gentlemanly taste alone was sufficient to distinguish true Shakespeare from false. Malone was so determined that they should be put right by the most rigorous forensic scholarship he could muster that what began as a pamphlet eventually swelled into a 424-page book.84 The episode of the Ireland forgeries, then, marked a struggle for the right to pass judgement on matters Shakespearean between amateur opinion and a newly professionalized form of specialist scholarship. In the 1790s this struggle could not help but be seen in political terms: to Malone, for instance, who sent a copy of his Inquiry to a pleased Edmund Burke, the forgeries represented an upsurge of the masses against their educated betters, symptomatic of the lamentably revolutionary times in which he lived. Addressed to the Earl of Charlemont, his book professed a patriotic desire to preserve the national poet’s texts ‘pure and unpolluted by any modern sophistication or foreign admixture whatsoever’, and it accused the Irelands of attributing scandalously and anachronistically French republican opinions to Shakespeare in one of the forged verses.85 But while the laymen and the scholars argued over what might best qualify someone to recognize what was and wasn’t Shakespeare, where was the stage? As the most conspicuous professional Shakespearean in London, famed for his expertise in preparing Shakespeare’s texts for performance at a Theatre Royal which displayed a statue of Shakespeare as one of its trademarks, Kemble was naturally expected to voice an opinion. His freedom to make his views known, however, was in practice compromised by the theatre’s

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status as a commercial institution. In addition to forging letters, verses, manuscripts of known plays and legal documents, the industrious William Henry had also provided two hitherto unknown Shakespeare plays, Vortigern and Henry II, and Sheridan had accepted Vortigern for performance at Drury Lane. Given the level of public excitement about the Ireland documents, Sheridan realized, Vortigern would be compulsory viewing for believers and unbelievers alike, who might each want to see it several times before reaching their conclusions as to whether it was really by Shakespeare or not. (Sheridan’s agreement with the Irelands was that he should pay them £300 for the manuscript and then give them a 50 per cent share of the profits from the first 60 performances – a very optimistic projection of the play’s commercial potential – and it was probably he who discouraged Samuel from immediately publishing the script, thereby compelling the curious to see it in performance.)86 To ensure the maximum box-office return, then, the company would have to present the play impartially to the ticket-buying public and let them decide as to its real authorship: as James Bland Burgess’s prologue would tell the audience at the first night, ‘With you the judgment lies: / No forgeries escape your piercing eyes! / Unbiass’d, then, pronounce your dread decree, / Alike from prejudice or favour free.’87 This strategy – of allowing all shades of opinion free rein so long as they paid for admission – necessarily involved giving Vortigern a full-scale production featuring Drury Lane’s best-regarded Shakespearean actors, with the greatest of them, Kemble, in the title role. As a friend and colleague of the scholar who was busily penning a savage demolition of the Ireland forgeries while Vortigern went into rehearsal, even had he lacked the wit to detect their errors himself, Kemble can’t have thought the play genuine for a moment. As Sheridan’s salaried actormanager, however, he could neither refuse the part nor damage the play’s profitability by openly declaring it to be fraudulent. As Sheridan later explained, he himself ‘had nothing to do with the private piques and animosities of Mr Kemble, or whether he approved of the manuscripts or not . . . [I] regarded that gentleman merely as a servant of the theatre’, a member of staff whose duty was solely to ‘exert himself to the utmost for the benefit of his employers’.88 Being obliged to play the leading role in a manifestly forged play was clearly a deeply humiliating position for Kemble, calculated to undermine his authority as a learned and discriminating Shakespearean actor, but while Sarah Siddons could evade the whole embarrassing debacle by refusing her allotted role on the plea of a strategic heavy cold, all Kemble could do, given his position as manager, was squirm and stall. The date for the first performance of Vortigern

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progressively slipped, probably because Kemble was hoping that the publication of Malone’s Inquiry would burst the Ireland bubble first so that the play could be withdrawn before it ever opened. His bargaining position with Sheridan was weakened in March, however, after he gave a flagrantly uncommitted performance in George Colman the younger’s The Iron Chest, an adaptation of the novelist and political theorist William Godwin’s notoriously radical (and, to Kemble, repugnant) Caleb Williams. Kemble tried nonetheless to persuade Sheridan that his conscience would only allow him to appear in Vortigern if the first performance took place on April Fools’ Day, but Sheridan finally set the date for 2 April 1796. By then, however, the play was already destined for a very stormy premiere. Malone’s conclusively damning Inquiry appeared on 31st March , too late to force a cancellation, but just in time to guarantee that the first-night audience of Vortigern would include a substantial number of spectators who were there not to make a dispassionate appraisal of the script but to vent their anger at having been deceived by Ireland’s other forgeries. One irony in all this is that, fraudulent or not, Vortigern provided Kemble with a role perfectly tailored to his acting. Ireland, a keen theatregoer, later admitted that ‘every leading character introduced in the Vortigern was positively written for some certain performer,’89 and its rambling plot is a composite of the Shakespearean tragedies and histories in which Kemble had most conspicuously shone to date, particularly Macbeth, Cymbeline, and King John. In scenic structure, incident and diction, however, it more closely resembles the pseudo-Shakespearean gothic of Jephson’s Count of Narbonne or Kemble’s own Lodoiska. Vortigern is an ambitious, intermittently guilt-stricken but uniformly valiant regicide and usurper (shades of Kemble’s Macbeth) who turns from his virtuous wife in order to pursue the lovely Saxon maiden Rowena (shades of the de Camp affair?), but who is finally besieged in the Tower of London and, despite a courageous Richard III-like performance in battle (‘Give me another sword, I have so clogg’d / And badgèd this with blood and slipp’ry gore / That it doth mock my gripe’),90 is defeated by the rightful heirs to the throne. Conscious of the text’s spuriousness, Kemble must have felt that he was being obliged to perform a nightmarishly public act of self-parody. It can’t have made him any happier to discover, on 2nd April, that he would be doing so before the largest single audience of his career. So many people crowded so eagerly into the theatre when the doors opened that many were swept past the front-of-house staff without paying; some had to drop down from overcrowded boxes to squeeze into a dense throng in the pit. Many brandished a printed flyer which Samuel Ireland had distributed,

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attacking Malone and demanding a fair hearing for the play; others were forearmed with potential projectiles. Estimates put the combined audience of what were dubbed ‘Irelandites’ and ‘Maloneites’ at over 4,000. Although there were some skirmishes between believers and unbelievers at intervals during the first four acts, the evening remained relatively calm until, during the fi fth, Kemble could no longer endure the false position in which he had been placed. The crux came during Vortigern’s soliloquy on mortality, a pastiche of ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow . .’ and Richard II’s ‘For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground’, with a touch from Falstaff’s narrated death in Henry V. Addressing a Death alleged to take a special interest in the king, Kemble started to intone O then thou dost ope wide thy hideous jaws, And with rude laughter and fantastic tricks Thou clapp’st thy rattling fingers to thy sides, And when this solemn mockery is o’er, With icy hand thou tak’st him by the feet, And upward, so, till thou dost reach the heart And wrap him in the cloak of ‘lasting night. ‘No sooner was the above line [“And when this solemn mockery is o’er”] uttered in the most sepulchral tone of voice possible,’ remembered William Henry Ireland, than the most discordant howl echoed from the pit that ever assailed the organs of hearing. After the lapse of ten minutes, the clamour subsided; when Mr Kemble, having again obtained a hearing, instead of proceeding with the speech at the ensuing line, very politely, and in order to amuse the audience still more, redelivered the very line above quoted with even more solemn grimace than he had in the first instance displayed.91 Despite further frequent interruptions, the play eventually reached its conclusion, but when an announcement was made to the effect that it would be repeated the following night such violent disorder erupted that a different play had to be announced instead (Sheridan’s School for Scandal). Kemble had finally let it be known that he did not believe Shakespeare had written Vortigern, and as a result the solemn mockery would not be performed again until a small-scale revival at the Bridewell Theatre in 1996, mounted out of antiquarian interest in honour of the scandal’s two hundredth anniversary.92

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This belated reassertion of Kemble’s integrity as a Shakespearean – which could do nothing to exempt him from the charge of being knowingly privy to what amounted to a hoax – cost Sheridan a great deal of money, and it permanently soured relations between the actor-manager and the proprietor, already precarious after an incident in late 1795 in which Kemble had been arrested for some of Sheridan’s debts. From this point onwards, Kemble started purposefully to save money towards buying himself a position in which, as he hoped, his own artistic authority would be paramount. He resigned from his managerial duties at the end of the 1795–1796 season, and, despite a later patching-up of his quarrels with Sheridan and a brief period of renewed management, in 1801 he spent the enormous sum of £20,000 (much of it borrowed) on acquiring a one-sixth share in the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden. Here he would remain as actor-manager (taking his brother Charles, sister Sarah and nephew and niece Henry and Harriet Siddons with him) for the remainder of his career. After the Vortigern affair he undertook only one more new Shakespearean role at Drury Lane. In 1799 Kemble gave his first performance as a lowering, misanthropic Jaques in As You Like It, a part which after the pressures and disappointments of the preceding five years scarcely required any acting at all. As Elizabeth Inchbald observed, ‘it is one of those characters in which he gives certain bold testimonies of genius, which no spectator can controvert – yet the mimic art has very little share in this grand exhibition.’93 If Kemble thought that becoming a major shareholder as well as manager and performer would solve the problems of cultural authority which the Vortigern scandal had highlighted, especially the problem of maintaining the intellectual integrity of the Shakespearean stage while continuing to run it on a mass-market commercial basis, he would be sadly disappointed. Before taking up his new position, he reasserted his status as a cultured, respectable (and French-speaking) gentleman by taking advantage of the Peace of Amiens to carry out a mini-Grand Tour, with Priscilla, to Madrid and to Paris. In Paris he was feted by the Comédie Française, and he spent a good deal of time being shown the treasures of the Louvre by the tragedian regarded as his French counterpart, Talma, taking extensive notes about classical and neo-classical art for future use at Covent Garden. After his return, hoping to repeat his auspicious debut at Drury Lane 20 years earlier, Kemble gave his first performance at Covent Garden on 24 September 1803 in the role of Hamlet, but over the next two seasons less excitement would be generated by his account of the Prince than by that of ‘Master Betty, the Infant Roscius’

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(William Henry West Betty, b.1791). This child-star proved to be such a box-office draw that Kemble’s fellow-shareholders could not resist him (on one occasion William Pitt even suspended Parliament so that members could see Master Betty as Hamlet), and the fact that in the 1804– 1805 season he added two more Kemble roles to his repertoire – Macbeth and Richard III – can’t have soothed the newly installed actor-manager’s pique. Managing the longer-established Covent Garden players whose best roles Kemble and Siddons were now taking over was difficult too: Johanna Schopenhauer (the philosopher’s mother), for instance, provides a fine eyewitness account of one tricky occasion when Kemble, in the middle of a performance of Sheridan’s Pizarro, dismissed George Cooke from the stage for drunkenness and replaced him in the title role with Henry Siddons.94 Over the next few seasons, however, Kemble did what he could to restore his credentials as a Shakespearean. In 1804 he revived Henry VIII, one of the first Shakespeare plays in which he had showcased Siddons at Drury Lane, and after 1806 he took to playing Wolsey opposite her Queen Katharine, cutting the play to focus it more squarely on their antagonism. From 1811 onwards, splendour and propriety to the fore once again, he experimented with an unprecedented level of historical detail in this play’s pageantry and mise-en-scene.95 More controversially, Kemble flaunted his antiquarian qualifications in other directions too. Some of his pronunciation had always been regarded as slightly eccentric, but at Covent Garden his insistence on here and there adopting what he regarded as Elizabethan phonetics definitely became a mannerism. When he staged his own new acting version of The Tempest in 1806, which followed the advice Francis Gentleman had published in 1773 to the effect that a better play than either Shakespeare’s original or Davenant and Dryden’s 1667 adaptation might be produced by blending the two,96 Kemble seemed determined to compensate for the inauthenticity of its text by speaking Prospero’s surviving Shakespearean lines with all the authenticity he could manage. This included pronouncing the word ‘aches’ as a disyllable, ‘aitches’, in ‘Fill all thy bones with aches, make thee roar’ (in the original, 1.2.373), and while this was clearly more metrical than the modern pronunciation, and while Kemble could have produced any number of parallel Jacobean instances in his own vindication (of which his commonplace books are full),97 audiences took to jeering the line in the usually gratified hope of provoking Kemble into defiantly repeating it. The point wasn’t whether Kemble was right; the point was that he was perceived to be saying ‘aitches’ only to irritate them, performing his perceived superiority. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for instance, conceded in his ‘Notes

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on the Tragedies’ that ‘aitches’ would indeed have been the normal pronunciation in Shakespeare’s time, but then wrote ‘N.B. This is not meant to palliate, much less justify, Kemble’s insufferable coxcombry.’98 Kemble was now almost 50, his style of acting the inescapable status quo of the legitimate stage, and to some restive playgoers he was beginning to look like a caricature of his younger self. Having scrupulously identified themselves with the Establishment during their Drury Lane years, the Kembles and Siddonses were now very definitely theatre royalty, but, in a latently republican age liable to regard any hint of nepotism as a deplorable vestige of ‘Old Corruption’, that wasn’t always to their advantage. (William Hazlitt, for instance, waspishly remarked in 1816 that ‘we see no more reason why Mr Stephen Kemble should play Falstaff, than why Louis XVIII is qualified to fill a throne, because he is fat, and belongs to a certain family.’)99 Kemble soon found that after being regarded as ‘the Autocrat of Drury Lane’ at his previous place of work he was now identified with a specific, royal tyrant. One of the new nicknames he acquired among both company and audiences at Covent Garden – rather ambiguously honouring his regular performances as Shakespeare’s insecure and doomed usurper – was ‘King John’.100 In 1809 he was compelled to sign his Magna Carta. One recurrent problem with eighteenth-century theatres was that their proscenium-arch stages, with chimney-like flies above, not only resembled enormous hearths but behaved just like them in the event of fire, and in 1808 the auditorium which John Rich had built with the profits from Gay’s Beggar’s Opera more than 70 years earlier burned down so rapidly that even its famous organ, formerly used by Handel, could not be rescued from the blaze. Insurance covered only half the value of the building. Kemble was naturally horrified (‘Of all this vast treasure nothing now remains,’ he is reported to have exclaimed in his best high tragedy manner, ‘but the ARMS OF ENGLAND over the entrance of the theatre – and the ROMAN EAGLE standing solitary in the market place!’),101 but he seized the opportunity for a fresh start, at last able to commission a building which would match his elevated conceptions of the theatre both as an art-form and as an expression of proper social order. With money variously borrowed, donated by the Prince Regent and loaned by the Duke of Northumberland (who later waived any repayment), Kemble commissioned the architect Robert Smirke to design a true temple of dramatic art, complete with a portico, columns, reliefs influenced by the Parthenon friezes (at the time in the process of removal and shipment to London), and an overall shape modelled on the Parthenon itself. The poet and essayist Leigh Hunt, present at its opening, described the new building

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as ‘classical and magnificent throughout’, and he commented particularly on the classicism of its interior: the Ionic mock-porphyry columns up the grand staircase, the bronze Grecian-style lamps on tripods, the casts of famous classical statues in the lobby (among them ‘the Farnesian Flora, so justly celebrated for its magnificent breadth of drapery’), and the new statue of Shakespeare (by Rossi) in the ante-room. In the auditorium, he was impressed by the general air of ‘chaste and classical elegance’ (the lower circle of boxes was ‘ornamented with a simple Etruscan border in gold, and the rest with the Grecian honeysuckle alternately upright and inverted’), and by the decorative curtain across the stage which, ‘worthy the general classicality’, represented ‘a temple dedicated to Shakespeare, who stands in the vista in his usual attitude, while your eye approaches him through two rows of statues, consisting of the various founders of the drama in various nations, Aeschylus, Menander, Plautus, Lope de Vega, Ben Jonson, Molière, &c.’102 What impressed Hunt much less favourably, however, was the extent to which the new theatre’s private boxes – of which Smirke’s building incorporated 26 more than had its predecessor – occupied such a large proportion of its auditorium, greatly reducing the capacity of the gallery above. He was especially indignant that their aristocratic tenants were now able to take their places by separate entrances and staircases from the rest of the audience, and he was equally upset by the increased admission charges which the management had imposed in order to help pay for the building. So too, it transpired, were most of the rest of the theatre’s regular audience. This auditorium appeared to reify a conception of theatre’s place in society in which public taste was both owned and dictated by wealthy patricians. In the hopes of containing the ignorant mass-market whose power had been highlighted by the scandalous if short-lived success of the Ireland forgeries, Kemble, it seemed, had visibly affiliated the drama with the titled elite among whom he notoriously liked to socialize, and on whom he was now extensively (and to some, ignobly) dependent for capital. Rather than acknowledging their common fellowship in the national theatrical culture, the aristocracy would now grudgingly admit only a limited number drawn from the more plebeian orders of society to eavesdrop on their entertainment from the less desirable areas of the house. The good news for Kemble and his associates was that the inequalities in wealth and privilege which Smirke’s architecture made visible did not result in a repetition in London of the revolution that had swept Paris exactly two decades earlier. The bad news was that, starting on 18 September 1809, London went in for the Old Price Riots instead.

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Just as he had sought to repeat his Drury Lane debut by beginning his reign at Covent Garden as Hamlet, so Kemble chose to open this second new auditorium of his career with Macbeth. If the first time, in 1794, the production had been a great tragedy, the second, in 1809, it was a farce. ‘On Mr Kemble’s appearance in the dress of Macbeth, the character he was about to play’, reported Hunt a week later, he was received with a partial applause, which was instantly drowned in a torrent of execration, and after plaintively bowing, and looking as tenderly disconsolate as he could, for a minute or two, he was compelled to retire. The curtain then drew up, and the noise and outcry that followed were continued with an energy truly terrific the whole evening. It was impossible that more determined resistance could be displayed on any occasion . . . After the farce, some persons, said to be magistrates, appeared on the stage, but soon vanished before the general indignation; and it was not till two o’clock that the audience retired, growling as they went, like Homer’s lions, at those who had laid toils for them . . . ’Twas the same the next night, and the next, and the next . . . Each succeeding evening increased in noise: to catcalls were added horns and trumpets; and to a placard or two, banners all over the house covered with proverbs, lampoons, and encouragements to unanimity.103 The British public, it appeared, whatever it tolerated in the sphere of politics, would not tolerate this sort of treatment in the sphere of theatre, and though usually respectful towards King George they were prepared to resist King John by whatever carnivalesque means presented themselves. Demonstrators called for an immediate return to the old prices, and lots more besides. Some, outraged at aristocratic misuse of the privacy which privileged spaces in the auditorium could provide, used a journalistic abbreviation drawn from divorce courts where ‘criminal conversation’ was the current term for adultery: their placards demanded a remodelling which would feature ‘No Crim. Con. boxes!’ The catcallings, banner-wavings and other disruptive forms of protest continued for 67 consecutive nights. Becoming a shareholder, it transpired, rather than allowing Kemble to exert his artistic authority unchecked, had guaranteed only that he would attract a larger share of public opprobrium when that authority came to be challenged. As a performer as well as a manager, moreover, Kemble had no choice but to appear night after night before the angry crowds, inevitably the focus of

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their antagonism, and his attempts to display a cool professionalism by playing on regardless were interpreted as lordly contempt for the people. These performances, moreover, were usually followed by a rabble following him home to Great Russell Street and breaking his windows. Throughout the ‘O. P.’ crisis, Kemble was mercilessly pilloried in cartoons, ballads and pamphlets, whether as ‘King John’, as ‘Black Jack’, or as the usurping Macbeth. In one caricature by Isaac Cruikshank, Is This A Rattle Which I See Before Me?, Kemble is seen in his Macbeth costume recoiling in horror from an air-drawn watchman’s rattle (one of the noise-making implements most favoured by the rioters), above a caption in which his management of Covent Garden is likened to regal oppressions both Shakespearean and real: ‘. . oh then I must / forego my Schem[e]s of Power, of Rule, and Tyranny; / give up the Princely income which my Family / have long enjoyed.’ Another, by Charles Williams, A Parody On Macbeth’s Soliloquy at Covent Garden Theatre. Boxes 7/-, sees the riots as an instance of the libertarian gothic, the return of the politically repressed: the demand for a reinstatement of the old prices is described as ‘a forc’d creation / Proceeding from the hard oppressed people.’104 Espousing both the rhetoric and the methods of political radicalism, the Old Price rioters – their activities organized by, among others, Francis Place, a veteran of the pro-revolutionary Corresponding Societies of the previous decade105 – represented their cause as a struggle for the possession of the national drama between John Bull and King John.106 It was a confrontation between the old conception of Shakespeare as emblem of British liberty and Kemble’s anti-Jacobin sense of Shakespeare as up-market guarantor of constitutional conservatism. Compromise or surrender eventually had to come. Such sustained and well-co-ordinated consumer agitation could not be resisted forever, and on 14th December Kemble had no choice but to attend an ‘O. P. Banquet’ with the tribunes of the people at the Crown and Anchor Tavern. Here he agreed to reduce the private boxes to the number that had existed in 1802, to restore the old prices for admission to the pit, to drop all legal charges against the rioters, and to apologize to the public for the whole affair. He did not, however, reduce the price for admission to the boxes. From now on, wealthier theatregoers would be seen to be subsidizing the pleasures of the less wealthy, and Kemble would have to accept that the drama’s laws would henceforth be given by all of the drama’s patrons. When a vocal faction in the Covent Garden audience subsequently took to shouting for a restoration of Banquo’s ghost to the banquet scene, Kemble acquiesced without a murmur. Mildly, even.

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Ending as an Old Roman: Kemble and the Classical Whatever unpopularity Kemble experienced from the pit and gallery during the Old Price riots, he would always remain the actor of choice for gentlemanly connoisseurs of the arts, especially the visual arts. ‘In viewing the fine performances of Kemble’, wrote one, we have felt the same kind of pleasure, and experienced a renovation of the same pleasing train of ideas, into which we were led while we gazed upon the immortal glories of the Apollo or the Laocoon.107 The architect Sir John Soane, who had taught Robert Smirke, and who knew Kemble from seeing him at the Royal Academy dinners to which he was regularly invited, seems to have agreed. He kept a likeness of Kemble among a number of classical heads, including casts of the children from the Laocoon, on a table in his sculpture gallery, next to a bust of Augustus and near a reproduction of the Apollo Belvedere. Soane also bought Francis Bourgeois’s 1797 painting of Kemble as Coriolanus, which he hung opposite a depiction of the Pyramid of Caius Cestius in Rome and close to the artefacts he had brought back from Pompeii.108 Throughout his career, Kemble had always insisted on his classicism, and his career-long penchant for toga roles, from his own Belisarius to Addison’s Cato, together with an acting style consciously aloof from everyday-modern behaviour, resulted in a widespread sense that Kemble was to all intents and purposes an honorary Roman. Given his determination to be the pre-eminent Shakespearean actor of his day, it isn’t surprising that he gave special attention to Shakespeare’s Roman plays. Antony and Cleopatra, with its proliferation of short scenes and different locations, was regarded as unstageable in Kemble’s time (instead, he and Siddons occasionally played Dryden’s All for Love, though with little success), and Titus Andronicus was too tastelessly violent to touch. Kemble, however, had excelled in Coriolanus before its banning in the 1790s, and he was permitted to resume playing it at Covent Garden after 1805. The last item in his portfolio of Shakespearean Romans, however, had to wait until 1812: the noblest of them all, Brutus. The 1812 Julius Caesar – which was revived in every subsequent season until Kemble’s retirement in 1817 – was in many ways Kemble’s culminating achievement as a producer of Shakespeare. Committed as ever to splendour and propriety, Kemble found Shakespeare’s Rome brick, and

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left it marble. As was also the case with his Coriolanus, the designs Kemble commissioned for this play were knowingly anachronistic in the cause of superior pictorial effect: rather than depicting a particular city at a particular historical moment, the thirteen immense sets presented a perfected, super-Roman Rome in which buildings erected only in the time of Augustus and later were clearly and unashamedly visible. Flowing elegantly across this faux-marble cityscape, enormous crowd scenes dazzled the Covent Garden audience. Caesar’s entry in the second scene brought at least 71 people onto the stage (one version of the promptbook lists 106), who left through a full-scale triumphal arch, and the Soothsayer was given his own altar, complete with a sacred flame to tend. Before the assassination proper, the entire Senate was ‘discovered’ sitting in the Capitol, while Caesar sat enthroned between priests, lictors and guards; the Capitol was subsequently replaced by an equally lavish and populous recreation of the Julian Forum. John Ripley, author of the definitive account of this play’s stage history, describes how Kemble’s Julius Caesar artfully combined painted backdrops and carpentry with what he terms ‘living scenery’, consisting of processions and statuesque groupings of supernumeraries roughly comparable in function to draperies in beau idéal paintings. Costumes, based on antiquarian research, were relatively accurate, colours were simple and subdued, movement was kept to a minimum, and groupings were arranged according to the sculptural principles admired by Reynolds.109 This was just the sort of theatrical experience which Sir John Soane might have relished, and perfectly in keeping with the auditorium which Smirke had designed as a homage to Kemble’s neoclassical principles. Kemble’s multitude of carefully drilled human ‘draperies’ were carefully disposed around a characteristically measured, focussed and intense central performance. Cutting a quarter of the text, Kemble reduced the number of characters by 14, usually redistributing their speeches to others (Casca and Trebonius did especially well): in this way he both balanced the cast more equally between the Caesar–Antony faction and the conspirators, and imposed a properly classical unity which he felt Shakespeare had failed to achieve between the section of the play devoted to the assassination and that devoted to the subsequent civil war. (Hence the army led by Brutus and Cassius was essentially the conspiracy under military

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orders, with fewer new roles introduced in the fourth and fi fth acts). Unity was imposed on the central characters too, who were carefully deprived of any instances of ignoble or at least inconsistent behaviour, and who were much less irrationally interested in omens and the supernatural than their Shakespearean originals. This was especially true of Brutus, who in Kemble’s account of the play became a more uniformly stoical figure than in Shakespeare’s unaltered text and much more obviously the play’s tragic hero. As Ripley puts it, ‘the self-deceived fanatic, the impatient husband, the frightened general, the all-but maternal master, well nigh disappear.’110 This, clearly, was the sort of Roman Kemble would have liked to be, and his performance, which according to Boaden displayed ‘the purity of patriotism and philosophy’,111 was by all accounts a triumph of undeviating, almost robotic Romanitas. (Leigh Hunt, less excited than many, conceded that Kemble’s performance was ‘excellent as far as philosophic appearance and manner can make it so’, but complained that ‘this artificial actor does so dole out his words, and so drop his syllables one by one upon the ear, as if he were measuring out laudanum for us.’)112 The inflexible, attitudestriking nobility of this Brutus, however, was not without its share of pathos. ‘If it be surmised that Mr Kemble, from his strict attention to magnificence in deportment, which was his proud peculiarity, was thereby less effective in the delivery of passages, or even in the working up of entire scenes’, recalled one eyewitness, let us call to mind his interview with Cassius, where he relates the circumstance of the death of Portia: could any thing exceed the melancholy composure, the manly resignation, with which he delivered the three words, ‘Portia is dead!’ In a common Actor, these words would but convey the relation of a single fact! – melancholy indeed, and therefore affecting; – but as delivered by Mr Kemble, they are teeming with electric effect.113 This sounds very like the way in which Kemble played Macbeth’s reception of the news of the death of Lady Macbeth, a sudden break under intolerable pressure into a hitherto unexpected register. As in his handling of that play too, Kemble insisted that the character he played should finally be allowed to underline the moral of his fate with his dying breath, even if it meant retaining a non-Shakespearean interpolation in order to do so. Hence Kemble’s Brutus similarly died at the close of a speech that

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was not entirely authentic, if eminently well-judged to draw a round of applause: This was the justest cause that ever men Did draw their swords for; and the gods renounce it, – Disdaining life, to live a slave in Rome, Thus Brutus strikes his last – for liberty! – Farewell, Beloved country! Caesar now be still; I kill’d not thee with half so good a will.114 How far was Kemble consciously seeking to escape from the pressures of his own life and times in using Shakespeare as the passport to such an idealized version of Rome? Certainly by the end of his career this sort of dignified and elevating classical spectacle was one last area of the repertory in which he remained unchallenged. The sensational debut of the small, agile Edmund Kean at Drury Lane in 1814 served to remind contemporary audiences of the spontaneity, naturalism and dash which Kemble had never achieved, and Kean, in a further bid to sell himself as the modern alternative to his ageing rival, deliberately allied himself with the egalitarianism of the Old Price rioters into the bargain.115 Kean’s advent, coming as it did not long after the retirement of Mrs Siddons in 1812, clearly helped to hasten Kemble’s departure from the stage, but right to the end Kemble would yield to nobody when it came to wearing a toga, declaiming blank verse, and looking like a monument. It was only to be expected, then, that Kemble would choose one of Shakespeare’s Romans for the last of his farewell performances, on 23 June 1817, in a season that also saw him bid adieu to King John, Hotspur, Wolsey, Posthumus and Macbeth. What was less predictable was that Kemble, despite the sudden outpouring of public affection which greeted the news of his impending retirement, would choose not the calm, unalterably noble Brutus but a role of almost uninterrupted anger and disdain, a role, moreover, which could only serve to remind his audiences of his defiant assertion of managerial privilege throughout the Old Price Riots. But he himself was the best judge of his own strengths and his own feelings, and if ever there was an actor born to play Coriolanus – in fact, an actor who found it difficult not to – it was Kemble. ‘[I]t is not infrequent to hear it asserted’, as one enthusiast admitted, ‘that the cause of Mr Kemble’s excellence in this character is his close approximation to

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it in real life’.116 The role of Caius Martius required less paring for singularity and intensity of effect than did that of any other Shakespearean tragic hero, and it already fitted the pattern Kemble liked to find in the others, that of marching undeviatingly in a straight line until reaching a single, climactic breaking point – in this instance, Coriolanus’s yielding to Volumnia’s pleading in act 5. The play, furthermore, provided perfect opportunities for exquisitely choreographed massed crowd and battle scenes, notably Coriolanus’s victory procession in the second act, advertised on Covent Garden playbills as the ‘Ovation’, which Kemble supplied with an ‘Ode’, and into which he incorporated 200 extras.117 His own performance was similarly calculated for visual effect throughout – hence the fame, for example, of his pause at Aufidius’s threshold, disguised not only by his cloak but by the effect of shade produced by his placing of himself between the audience and an onstage fire (Figure 2.1). Kemble’s political views were clearly visible in his acting text’s removal of both lines and sympathy from the tribunes of the people – regarding Coriolanus as a menace to Roman civil society best banished as soon as possible was not supposed to be an option for Kemble’s audiences – and as elsewhere he built up the relative importance of his own role in proportion to the cuts he made in others. Volumnia’s great pleading speeches, for instance, following Thomas Sheridan’s earlier adaptation and incorporating many of its new lines, were greatly shortened, and the single scene into which act 5 was compressed achieved its effects by visual rhetoric as much as verbal, offering a careful tableau-like animation of Poussin’s history painting of the same incident.118 According to all the reviews of Kemble’s final performance – as the critics rushed to hail the departing hero as a national treasure, now that he was safely on his way out – his Coriolanus was unquestionably sublime, just as it always had been. ‘He entered into the conception of the poet’, wrote one, and gave us a Roman, such as Virgil would have drawn him. It is impossible to conceive of anything of more majesty. It was an epic painting, – not of what Rome was, and still less of what Coriolanus was; but of that beau ideal of Rome and Coriolanus, which existed in the imagination of Virgil, of Shakspeare, and of Mr. Kemble.119 ‘[T]he martial air, the patrician haughtiness, the impetuous vehemence, and the towering superiority of the valiant soldier’, wrote another, ‘were pourtrayed with a depth of feeling, a sustained grandeur, and an astonishing power of expression, which defy competition, and challenge the

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severest superiority of criticism’.120 ‘His style was essentially classical’, summarized The News, distinguished by the unity of design, the severe grandeur, the majestic simplicity which characterized the fine arts in the classic ages. It had nothing in it of the modern school, nothing of the romantic or the sentimental, no minor beauties, no second-rate decorations; it was massive, grand, severe and lofty, a whole, of majestic beauty and classic grace.121 In keeping with this last-minute upsurge of enthusiasm – what Salter would call ‘the general admiration of the whole country’ – the actor’s emotional speech of valediction after the close of his final performance as Coriolanus was interrupted by shouts of ‘No farewell!’ A weeping Talma then clambered onto the stage to present Kemble with a long and elaborate petition begging him not to retire.122 Four days later, on 27th June, an enormous dinner was held in Kemble’s honour, which followed much the pattern later adopted by the annual meetings of the Sheffield Shakespeare Club except with a larger budget and a more distinguished guest-list. Listening to the speeches, joining in with the songs, hearing an Ode and drinking the toasts were many peers, many artists (among them Turner, Soane, Lawrence, Haydon, West, Smirke and Westmacott), and many actors (among them Talma, Kean, and the now grown-up and obscure Master Betty). John Fawcett, replying to a toast to the performers at Covent Garden and making one to those at Drury Lane, declared that Kemble had raised the theatrical profession ‘to a degree of respectability which it never before possessed’ (Nobody mentioned Miss de Camp). A vase designed by Flaxman was presented to Kemble with an inscription crediting him with the stage’s ‘present state of Refinement’, and proclaiming that the theatre, ‘aided by his unrivalled Labours (Most worthily devoted to the support of the LEGITIMATE DRAMA, and more particularly to the GLORY OF SHAKSPEARE)’, had now ‘attained a degree of Splendour and Propriety Before unknown’.123 As Kemble left at the end of the evening, passing the cast of Shakespeare’s Stratford bust which had been borrowed for the occasion, the Company appeared to feel, that it was more than an ideal separation between the Poet and the Actor, and to think, that as the latter withdrew from the image of the Bard, his compositions would lose a prop of their fame, in the absence of so intelligent an expositor.124 After that, Kemble’s public career was over. In pursuit of better air for his ailing lungs, he and Priscilla settled in Toulouse, but they found living as Britons uncomfortable in post-Waterloo France. After revisiting England

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in 1820 to make over Kemble’s share in Covent Garden to Charles and Fanny née de Camp (and, as it transpired, to see Mr Salter play Hamlet), they moved instead to Switzerland, where Kemble’s old friend Lullin (now settled in Geneva on a generous British government pension) had dedicated himself to welcoming English expatriates and staging English plays (They bought a house in Lausanne, called Beausite, close to Lullin’s sister’s estate at Beaulieu).125 The exile’s wanderings, however, were not quite complete: there was still a world elsewhere. ‘His concluding ambition’, wrote Boaden, ‘was to tread the soil which his Coriolanus, his Brutus and his Cato had trod’,126 or, as Kemble put it more jauntily in a letter to Mrs Inchbald, ‘now I think I shall make out my tour to Italy, and end perhaps like an old Roman.’127 In the event he did just that, but in Helvetia. The atmosphere of the real Rome agreed with him less well than had that of the ideal, and a few weeks after his return to Switzerland, Kemble died of a stroke, in 1823.128 At Kemble’s retirement dinner, Lord Holland declared that Kemble had ‘done more for the permanent prosperity of the Stage’ than any of his predecessors: For as long as the British Theatre exists – as long as the plays of Shakspeare shall be represented in the metropolis, the result of his learning and industry will be seen in the propriety of the scenic decorations, in the improvement of the costume, and in many matters of apparently minor consideration; but which, when effected, shew the man of research, and of ability, and display the mind of the scholar and the critic.129 This was certainly true for the remainder of the nineteenth century. Not only did Kemble’s acting versions remain the basis for many subsequent productions (especially of Julius Caesar), but the pictorialism in which he had excelled remained their dominant style. What changed was that Kemble’s antiquarianism was taken much further by his successors. It had been enough for Kemble that his Shakespeares should consistently have looked like the best and most familiar pictures of the past – hence his Henry VIII was accurate about the Tudor period principally because Holbein was. For Kemble’s brother Charles, however, who commissioned J. R. Planché to produce newly authentic medieval designs for King John in 1823, and for Kean’s son Charles, who would make this kind of visual authenticity his stock-in-trade at the Princess’s in the 1850s, productions of Shakespeare should show their audiences what history had really looked like, rather than how they had already seen it represented by others. That

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antiquarian impulse has since shifted a stage further, from a desire to replicate the historical periods in which Shakespeare set his plays into a desire to replicate the plays’ own Elizabethan mise-en-scene. While Kemble would certainly have been appalled at the lack of illusionistic scenery on display at Shakespeare’s Globe and other venues which subscribe to the ‘original practices’ movement, he might just have recognized, during their occasional experiments in reviving authentic Elizabethan pronunciation to complement their authentic Elizabethan architecture, faint echoes of his own controversial aitches. Kemble’s most important inheritors, though, were not the theatrical archaeologists but the crowd-masters, exponents of total theatre determined to stamp their own large vision (encompassing sound, decor and movement) onto very large stages: figures like the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen and even Richard Wagner. (It isn’t inappropriate that Covent Garden, rebuilt in 1857 after another fire but still displaying Flaxman’s friezes, is now the home of grand opera.) As a producer of overwhelmingly visual Shakespeare, Kemble perhaps has heirs too in that most totalitarian and supernumerary-friendly medium of current Shakespearean production, the cinema: Zeffirelli, Luhrmann, Branagh. In the mainstream of contemporary theatrical production, though, Kemble was perhaps closest in aims and assumptions to those directors who have consciously sought, sometimes successfully and sometimes to universal derision, a symbiosis between the aesthetics of the academically informed Shakespearean stage and those of the through-composed West End musical: Trevor Nunn, Adrian Noble, Gregory Doran. In trying simultaneously to ally his interpretations of Shakespeare with the royal establishment, with his wealthy sponsors, with nationally popular entertainment and with intellectual prestige, Kemble was, after all, only anticipating the impossible trick which the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) is still obliged by its charter to attempt, season after season. Whether the RSC will ever see acting like Kemble’s, however, seems doubtful. His offstage Establishment manner (Figure 2.4) has perhaps survived among some distinguished classical actors granted the honours which in his day were almost entirely hereditary; Lord Olivier, for one, though in many respects more like Kean as a performer, was just as anxious to identify his Shakespeare with the monarchy, and Kemble would have been just as content as are the likes of Sir Donald Sinden and Sir Derek Jacobi to mingle with the great and the good at the Garrick Club. On stage, though, only Kemble’s perverse, wilful ingenuity with individual words and lines, and his enthusiasm for classical culture, have been occasionally glimpsed

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Figure 2.4 The Shakespearean actor as a gentleman; ‘J. P. Kemble, Esq.’ (c. 1817) from a drawing by Thomas Lawrence (1801). [property of the author]

in our time, in the work of John Wood, say, another great Brutus, or of Greg Hicks, another natural Coriolanus. Kemble’s defining belief that Shakespeare’s tragic heroes should be definitely larger and more titanic than mere mortals, however, has not been propounded on the English stage since the heyday of Sir Donald Wolfit in the 1940s. John Philip Kemble followed the comparatively naturalistic Garrick, and at the end of his career as a consciously great Shakespearean in the grand manner the pendulum swung back towards realism once again with the advent of Kean. Most of the history of Shakespeare’s tragedies on the stage since then have likewise been devoted to domesticating and psychologizing their protagonists, to making them more familiar rather than more astonishing. But if the pendulum ever does swing back towards the massive, grand, severe and lofty, to majestic beauty and classic grace, perhaps 89 Great Russell Street will finally get its blue plaque, and the pub on the corner of Bow Street will once again display the sign of Kemble’s head.

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Chapter 3

Sarah Siddons Russ McDonald

Four days after Christmas of 1775, the 20-year-old Sarah Siddons stepped hesitantly onto the stage at Drury Lane for the first time, as Portia in The Merchant of Venice. David Garrick, in his last year of management there, had identified her on a tip from Reverend Henry Bate, one of his talent scouts. Having accrued some experience in the provinces, she listed 23 roles she was prepared to present if engaged in London. Bate promised Garrick that ‘her face . . . is one of the most strikingly beautiful for stage effect that ever I beheld,’ claimed that her physical assets ‘are nothing to her action and general stage deportment which are remarkably pleasing and characteristic’, and declared that he knew of ‘no woman who marks the different passages and transitions with so much variety and at the same time propriety of expression’.1 Much was expected of her. Press and public, however, were disappointed: the debut was a flop. The next day the reviewer for The Middlesex Journal urged that she be sent back to the provinces forthwith: There is not room to expect anything beyond mediocrity. Her figure and face . . . have nothing striking, her voice . . . is far from being favourable . . . she possesses a monotone not to be got rid of; there is a vulgarity in her tones, ill calculated to sustain that line in a theatre she has at first been held forth in.2 Another was equally dismissive and more contemptuous: On before us tottered rather than walked, a very pretty, delicate, fragile-looking young creature, dressed in a most unbecoming manner, in a faded salmon-coloured sack and coat, and uncertain whereabouts to fi x either her eyes or her feet. She spoke in a broken tremulous

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tone; and at the close of a sentence her words generally lapsed into a horrid whisper, that was absolutely inaudible. After her first exit, the buzzing comment went round the pit generally. She certainly is very pretty, but then how awkward, and what a shocking dresser! Towards the famous trial scene, she became more collected, and delivered the great speech to Shylock with the most critical propriety, but still with a faintness of utterance which seemed the result rather of internal physical weakness than of a deficiency of spirit or feeling. Altogether, the impression made upon the audience by this first effort was of the most negative nature.3 Appearances in other parts over the next months failed to improve her standing with the public, and when at the end of the season she went off to Birmingham expecting details of re-engagement, she received word from the management that she would not be needed in the coming year. Given the heights Siddons was later to attain at Drury Lane, this initial season represents one of the most spectacular cases in theatrical history of ‘If at first you don’t succeed . . .’ We cannot recover all the circumstances behind Siddons’s failure in her first London effort, but the information we have provides clues to the icon she would become. From the beginning the engagement did not take advantage of her strengths, literal and professional. Considering that she had given birth to her first daughter some 8 weeks before, in November of 1775, physical weakness must have compromised her performance on that evening. The playing space, recently renovated and enlarged, was grander than the provincial houses to which she was accustomed, and apparently she did not manage to make herself consistently audible. It is also possible that she was unnerved by the importance of the occasion, or by the hostile atmosphere created by the established actresses in the company. She later complained that Garrick was deploying her as a weapon against Mrs Yates and Miss Younge, who were giving him trouble: ‘I really think it was meerly for the pleasure of mortifying others that he distinguished me!’4 More telling than any of these considerations, probably, was miscasting. The manager’s decision to present her in a comic part for the debut must be considered a blunder: Portia offers an actress no opportunities for pathos or grand passion. Siddons’s Reminiscences, composed at the very end of her life, are exceedingly brief and mostly so anodyne that they have not received much attention, but on this point the volume is revealing, indicating that she protested the role but was overruled so that Garrick could

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avoid offending his other star actresses. The manager, in those initial negotiations, objected to my appearing in any very prominent character, telling me that the fore namd ladies [Mrs. Yates and Miss Younge] would poison me if I did. I of course thought him not only an Oracle but my friend, and in consequence of his advice, Portia in the Mt. of Venice was fixd for my debut, a Character in which it was not likely that I should excite any great sensation. I was therefore meerly tolerated.5 Nor did her subsequent roles in the new year – Lady Anne to Garrick’s Richard III and leads in several comedies – require the histrionic effects for which she would soon be celebrated.6 ‘Power’ was the key to Siddons’s career, and London saw little of it in the season of 1775–1776. Her return to Drury Lane some six years later, in October 1782, was a triumph, the public abuzz, the press lavish in its praise. Appearing in a popular favourite, Isabella, or The Fatal Marriage, Garrick’s adaptation of Southerne’s original, she made the most of her climactic moment in the plot. Here is how James Boaden put it: ‘But the LAUGH, when she plunges the dagger into her bosom, seemed to electrify the audience; and literally the greater part of the spectators were too ill themselves to use their hands in her applause.’7 For the next three decades critics would continue to describe her affective gifts in just such terms, and indeed the critical register she normally inspired soon began to provoke a satiric reaction, as in the following account of her reception on the Dublin stage in 1788. One hundred and nine ladies fainted! Forty-six went into fits! And ninety-five had strong hysterics! The world will scarcely credit the truth when they are told that fourteen children, five old women, a one-handed sailor, and six common-council men, were actually drowned in the inundation of tears that flowed from the galleries, lattices, and boxes, to encrease the briny pond in the pit. The water was three feet deep, and the people that were obliged to stand upon the benches, were in that position up to their ankles in tears.8 Siddons commanded immense power, and her audiences eagerly submitted themselves, responding with tears, fits of hysteria, and loud encouragement. Among journalists and critics, diarists and letter-writers, references to Siddons’s ‘command’, ‘strength’, ‘force’ and ‘power’ appear everywhere. And yet it is vital that we recognize that this authority was exercised in

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Shakespearean parts only occasionally and, moreover, that our tendency to identify her automatically with Shakespeare is a distortion of theatrical history. My major aim in the following pages is to examine some distinctions between Siddons the Shakespearean actress, Siddons the sovereign of the London stage, and Siddons the cultural icon. Those roles all intersect, but they are not identical, and finally we are obliged to modify what we think we know about The Divine Sarah.

I The broad outline of Sarah Sidddons’s life will be familiar to some readers, but certain facts, events, and themes warrant rehearsing because they have a bearing on her work as a Shakespearean. The most salient of these is family: born Sarah Kemble on 5 July, 1755 , she entered the world in The Shoulder of Mutton Inn in Brecon, Wales, where her mother and father, both actors, were touring; at the age of 18 she married an actor, William Siddons, a member of her parents’ troupe; and not only she but her siblings also entered the family business. Indeed, so important a member of the London theatrical scene was her brother John Philip Kemble, both as actor and manager, that the period between the death of David Garrick (1779) and the emergence of Edmund Kean (1814) has become known as the Age of Kemble. (It may be said with some justice that it ought to be known as the Age of Siddons.) For three decades she acted regularly with her brother, playing Lady Macbeth to his Macbeth, Hermione to his Leontes, Volumnia to his Coriolanus, and paired with him in many nonShakespearean works. Her husband, however, soon came to recognize that he was less talented than Sarah or her brother, and while he continued to act now and then, his primary role shifted to something like that of business manager. This inferior status apparently produced some strain in the marriage, and one of the most incongruous details in the story of the virtuous Mrs Siddons – we learn about it from one of Hester Thrale Piozzi’s letters, gossipy but sympathetic – is that her straying Willy seems to have infected her with a case of the pox. That disease is significant because it is anomalous, an insult to the moral rectitude that early on became a dominant feature of the actress’s public persona. One of her notable achievements was to sustain her image as the chaste, maternal woman, a stance especially meaningful considering the amorous habits of most English actresses of the day. Although there were exceptions, most of her predecessors had been, and many of her rivals

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were still, the mistresses of powerful men, some of more than one or two. Indeed, throughout the eighteenth century the range of the luvvies’ lovers was very wide: many well-known actresses had begun as ordinary prostitutes; at the other end of the scale, however, Dorothy Jordan, Siddons’s counterpart in comedy in London of the 1780s and 1790s, became the mistress of the Duke of York. Mrs Siddons – I use the title advisedly – helped to make acting potentially respectable for women. The press, which seems to have differed little from our own tabloids, attempted to exploit two alleged amorous incidents. In the first, the Galindo affair, she was accused of having taken up with one of her protégés, an actor and fencing teacher in Dublin. In 1802 the 47-year-old Siddons was playing Hamlet to the dashing, young Mr Galindo’s Laertes. In 1809 his wife published letters allegedly from Sarah Siddons to Mr Galindo, claiming that the great lady had destroyed the happiness of the Galindo family. In 1804 the painter Thomas Lawrence, who around that time was carrying on disastrous liaisons with two of her daughters, was whispered to have conquered their mother’s heart as well. William Siddons purchased newspaper space offering money to anyone who could prove where these rumours were originating, and after a while the gossip subsided. Despite these loudly hurled charges of hypocrisy or impropriety, Mrs Siddons managed to maintain her reputation for righteousness. Confirmation of her personal integrity is found in The Siddoniad, a panegyric poem published in Ireland in 1784 following one of her tours there. In particular, the poet extols her performances in her great maternal roles, associating those portrayals specifically with her private life. But well may she assume sensations here, Who dignifies her state in PRIVATE sphere, The WIFE unblemish’d, and the MOTHER dear. ‘Tis FICTION which commands our stage applause, Practice in private life adorns her cause.9 A year later, in London, the poem was reprinted, amplified, and addressed specifically to the moral ambiguity of the London stage. Sacred Morality! how is thy reign Exalted! how the reign of Virtue bless’d, By SIDDONS’ delegated sway! SIDDONS! The admiration of the gazing world! Long had the genius of the comic-scene

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Usurp’d Brittania’s stage, and sunk the mind To love of vanity; but now, again, MELPOMENE awakes; and to the eye Of longing expectation raises up Her charms celestial; SIDDONS leads ’em on And ev’ry generous, British bosom burns With its own native fires.10 Such moral boosterism is audible throughout Siddons’s career, and it served to insulate her against the possible damage she might have suffered in the scandals associated with Mr Galindo and Thomas Lawrence. Her celebrated virtue made her a tempting target, but her enemies were unable to make their charges stick. Another side of her public image was perhaps less commendable: she was thought to be an incurable skinflint. A James Gillray cartoon, ‘Melpomene’ of 1784, depicts Siddons as the Muse of Tragedy straining to reach bags of gold suspended just over her head. One of her nicknames, in addition to The Divine Sarah and The Siddons, was ‘Lady Sarah Save-all’, a reference to her frequently repeated claim that it was her intention to save 10,000 pounds so that she could purchase a cottage. Mrs Piozzi disapprovingly tells a correspondent that Siddons should not insist on playing Lady Macbeth late in pregnancy, fearing that ‘people have a notion She is covetous, and this unnecessary Exertion to gain Money will confirm it.’11 Some of the exceptional industry for which she is famous must have derived from this acquisitive impulse. In 1784, having established herself at Drury Lane for two successful seasons, she undertook an ambitious tour of Scotland and Ireland lasting from May to September, returning home with takings of something like 4,000 pounds, this at a time when a leading provincial actor might have earned somewhere in the neighbourhood of 50 pounds over the same period. Some of these mercenary allegations were surely hyperbolic, but smoke almost always denotes fire, and the smoke was very thick. The most serious of the charges involved a contretemps in Dublin in 1784, when the press denounced Siddons for refusing to play a benefit for an ailing actor named Digges, and charged that when she finally agreed to help, she did so on such piratical terms that the act of charity was nullified. As she put it in her reminiscences, Alas! How wretched is the being who depends on the stability of public favour! I left London the object of universal approbation, and on my return, but a very few weeks afterwards, was recieved [sic] on my first

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nights appearance with universal opprobrium, – accus’d of hardness of heart, of the most sordid avarice, and total insensibility to evry thing and evry body, except my own interest.12 Word of the scandal followed her – indeed, seems to have preceded her – to Drury Lane. Her first performance in the 1784–1785 season, as Mrs Beverly in Edward Moore’s The Gamester, was disrupted first by shouting and unruliness, from which Kemble rescued and revived her, and then by chilly silence. Shortly thereafter letters arrived from Dublin that, when published in the press at her insistence, apparently exonerated her. But it seems clear that she was driven by financial fears, and these concerns were connected with her attachment to her family. As she said of the hostile audience on the night described, ‘but in consideration of my children, I never would have appeared again’.13 The combination of celebrity and accomplishment made Siddons one of the most important women in England. No actress before her had managed to attain such a level of fame and respect. She became arguably the first female English theatrical superstar, one of the earliest A-list actors in the tradition of Burbage, Betterton and Garrick. Dr Johnson, unable to go out, received her in his rooms: as she and her companions settled themselves, he flattered her by remarking that wherever she appeared there was a shortage of chairs. Her portrait was painted by Reynolds, Lawrence, Gainsborough, Romney and others; she made huge quantities of money by touring throughout the kingdom; and her comings and goings were of unfailing interest to the increasingly active British press. Having achieved theatrical sovereignty at Drury Lane and Covent Garden, she found herself associated with actual royalty: King George and Queen Charlotte both attended the theatre when she performed, and later in her career she was often summoned to the royal palace to read to them. William Hazlitt’s famous description of her cultural significance can scarcely be omitted in any treatment of her career. The homage she has received is greater than that which is paid to Queens. The enthusiasm she excited had something idolatrous about it; she was regarded less with admiration than with wonder, as if a being of a superior order had dropped from another sphere, to awe the world with the majesty of her appearance. She raised Tragedy to the skies, or brought it down from thence. It was something above nature. We can conceive of nothing grander. She embodied to our imagination the fables of mythology, of the heroic and deified mortals of elder time. She was not less than a goddess, or than a prophetess inspired by the gods. Power was seated on her brow,

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passion emanated from her breast as from a shrine. She was Tragedy personified. She was the stateliest ornament of the public mind. She was not only the idol of the people, she not only hushed the tumultuous shouts of the pit in breathless expectation, and quenched the blaze of surrounding beauty in silent tears, but to the retired and lonely student, through long years of solitude, her face has shown as if an eye had appeared from heaven; her name has been as if a voice had opened the chambers of the human heart, or as if a trumpet had awakened the sleeping and the dead. To have seen Mrs. Siddons was an event in everyone’s life.14 The Romantic cast of the prose conveys distinctly the force of Siddons’s effect on her audiences, and by implication on the culture at large: ‘Power was seated on her brow’; she ‘hushed the tumultuous shouts’, ‘quenched the blaze’; the utterance of ‘her name’ made it seem ‘as if a trumpet had awakened the sleeping and the dead’. Hazlitt’s enthusiasm, while certainly emphatic, is not unrepresentative. At the other end of the literary scale we find a different proof of Siddons’s cultural centrality. In the 1788 edition of Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, an annotated catalogue of prostitutes available to ‘Gentlemen of Pleasure’, complete with sexual specialties and prices, we find a young woman calling herself ‘Miss Sarah Siddons’: She is about twenty-three, light hair and eyes, a good skin, and size completely adapted for this season, and which seems to please the greatest part of her friends and customers, who think two arms full of joy twice as good as one; she is remarkably good-natured and affable to those who favour her with a visit, and will take almost any sum rather than turn her visitor away; but if you absolutely bilk her, beware of the consequence; for she is so well convinced that she does not merit such treatment, that she will, if possible, avenge the injury.15 Probably to have seen Miss Siddons was not an event in everyone’s life, but the whore’s appropriation of the famous name is a marker of its commercial power.

II The ‘brow’ where, according to Hazlitt, ‘power was seated’ was an attractive one, and Siddons’s physical appearance surely contributed much to her

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success. Thomas Campbell, her biographer, offers an illustrative episode that occurred on a journey he made to Paris with Siddons and Kemble after her retirement. His recollection of their visit to the Louvre to see the Apollo Belvedere, occupying some 4 pages of his book, is valuable less as a record of what they saw than for what it says about their being seen: When we walked round to other sculptures, I observed that almost every eye in the hall was fixed upon her, and followed her; yet I could perceive that she was not known, as I overheard the spectators say, ‘Who is she? – Is she not an Englishwoman?’ At this time she was in her fi fty-ninth year, and yet her looks were so noble, that she made you proud of English beauty, even in the presence of Grecian sculpture.16 Siddons seems to have been the observed of all observers. Even allowing for Campbell’s partiality, the anecdote captures the visual charisma, especially the air of nobility, that everyone seems to have felt in Siddons’s presence. Lady Greatheed, for example, for whom the teen-aged Siddons worked as a maid and governess, ‘felt an irresistible inclination to rise from the chair when Sarah came in to attend her’.17 What did she look like? According to the Frenchman Jacques Henri Meister, who recorded his impressions in 1799, ‘she exceeds most women in height’, and he continues by urging that her tall stature entails no awkwardness or disproportion.18 Walpole, seeing her act late in his life and prejudiced by memories of the performers of his youth, thought her ‘a good figure, handsome enough, though neither nose nor chin according to the Greek standard’.19 The numerous visual representations left by the greater and lesser artists of the age, both those that depict her in a fictional role and those that do not, convey something of her monumentality. It is significant that Reynolds’s portrait of her as The Tragic Muse (1784) borrows her posture from Michelangelo’s representation of the prophet Isaiah on the Sistine ceiling. An anonymous writer responding to her second Drury Lane debut in 1782 and cited by Boaden years later comments that ‘There never, perhaps, was a better stage figure than that of Mrs. Siddons.’ After mentioning her ‘energy and grace’, the writer goes on to remark on the harmonious blend of her features. The symmetry of her person is exact and captivating. Her face is peculiarly happy, the features being finely formed, though strong, and never for an instant seeming overcharged, like the Italian faces, nor coarse and unfeminine under whatever impulse. On the contrary, it is so thoroughly

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harmonized when quiescent, and so expressive when impassioned that most people think her more beautiful than she is.20 She was striking, it seems, rather than perfectly beautiful. Her face was a vehicle for her celebrated expressiveness, and a major asset therein was her pair of black eyes. Michael Booth notes that reviewers regularly commented on their ‘piercing’, ‘brilliant’, ‘flashing’ quality,21 and Campbell’s biography includes an anecdote about an actor who, having played with her in Henry VIII in Edinburgh, confessed that he never wanted to share the stage with her again, so unnerved was he by her penetrating gaze.22 The impact of the eyes was enhanced by her extremely white skin. Clearly she was proud of this feature, as her report of an exchange with King George III indicates: ‘the King, who had been told that I used white paint, (which I always detest,) sent me, by my friend, Sir Charles Hotham, a condescending message, to warn me against its pernicious effects. I cannot imagine how I could be suspected of this disgusting practice.’23 She also reports that when Reynolds, in finishing The Tragic Muse, had wanted to darken her skin slightly, she objected. According to Walpole, ‘her hair is either red, or she has no objection to its being thought so, and had used red powder,’ but Siddons in her Memoirs denies it, differentiating herself from other actresses who employed red powder and pomatum.24 One of her most effective histrionic instruments was her voice. Her first season at Drury Lane had generated complaints that her speaking was inadequate, that the voice was incapable of carrying sufficiently. Horace Walpole, while he described it as ‘clear and good’ declared that he ‘thought she did not vary its modulations enough’.25 But these views seem not to have been shared by most of her contemporaries. In conversation, Fanny Burney found her voice ‘deep and dragging’.26 Judith Pascoe has recently attempted to complicate our thinking about Siddons’s voice: that it would have changed more than once over the course of her 50-year career on the stage, and that the enlargement of the London playhouses accompanying the transition from the Georgian into the Romantic theatre would have required adjustment and would have conditioned the way that she sounded.27 Despite the occasional sniping, there was mostly unanimity about the commanding effect of her voice upon a crowded playhouse. She was, apparently, a potent speaker of Shakespeare’s verse. Boaden records ‘the solemn and melodious dignity of her declamation’, and we have the benefit of abundant commentary on the way she used her voice and its contribution to her success.28 Professor G. J. Bell, a Scottish barrister devoted to the stage and fascinated with Siddons, has supplied precise annotations

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for her vocal effects as Lady Macbeth and Queen Katherine. In Macbeth, for example, in the early encounter when Macbeth wishes to abandon the scheme, her question, ‘Was the hope drunk / Wherein you dressed yourself?’ was spoken ‘Very cold, distant, and contemptuous’; and the subsequent ‘From this time / Such I account thy love’ was delivered with a ‘Determined air and voice. Then a tone of cold contemptuous reasoning’.29 Similar notations of tone and volume and pitch, as well as a record of the words emphasized, are found in Bell’s account of her performance in Henry VIII. The distinctive quality of the voice seems to have had something to do with her particular bent for tragedy. One commentator remarks that ‘her voice is naturally plaintive, and a tender melancholy in her level speaking denotes a being devoted to tragedy.’30 Anthony Pasquin (a pseudonym for the satirist and rake John Williams), mocking her Rosalind in 1785, complained that ‘Her hoarse awful accents were never design’d / To lighten those cares which obtrude on the mind.’31 Although her speaking voice was neither especially deep nor powerful, it seems to have had a distinctive tint, a suggestion of darkness – ‘hoarse’ and ‘awful’ – that helped to reinforce her general impression of gravity. This consistency is suggested by Meister’s comment that ‘there is a certain force of expression in her eyes and mouth which can only be compared with the tone of her voice, which is at once melodious, clear, articulate, and thrilling.’32 Whether attributable to the innate quality of the instrument or to her remarkable use of it, her speaking voice frequently called forth in reviewers and correspondents some version of that participle ‘thrilling’. Concluding his biography in 1827 – his subject is still alive – James Boaden devotes himself to a description of Siddons’s person, borrowing the language of a FOREIGN WRITER of her own sex; and I shall annex it in the original language, claiming only the praise for first presenting to the British nation, so eloquent a description, and so admirable a likeness: ‘Elle étoit grande et de belle taille, mais de cette grandeur qui n’epouvant point, et ne sert qu’ à la bonne mine. Elle avoit le teint fort beau, les cheveux d’un châtain clair, le nez très-bien fait, la bouche bien taillée, l’air noble, doux, enjoué, modeste, et pour render sa beauté plus parfaite, les plus beaux yeux du monde. Ils étoient noirs, brillans, doux, passionnés, pleins d’esprit. Leur éclat avoit je ne sais quoi qu’on ne sauroit exprimer. La mélancholie douce y paroissoit quelquefois avec tous les charmes qui la suivent. Lenjouement s’y faisoit voir à son tour, avec tous les attrais que la joie peut inspirer. Son esprit étoit fais exprés pour

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sa beauté, grand, doux, agréable. Elle parloit juste et naturellement, de bonne grace et sans affectation. Elle savoit le monde, et mille choses don’t elle ne faisoit pas vanité. Elle avoit mille appas inevitable; de sorte qu’unissant les charmes de la vertu a ceux de la beauté et de l’esprit, on pouvoit dire qu’elle meritoit l’admiration qu’on eut pour elle.’ [Though she was tall, with a fine figure, it was a height that never startled [the word means to frighten – as a ghost might frighten], serving only her fine features. She had a beautiful complexion, light chestnut hair, a perfect nose, a well-defined mouth, an air of nobility: gentle, modest, and, to render her beauty even more perfect, the most beautiful eyes in the world. They were dark, shining, sweet, passionate, full of intelligence that shone with a je-ne-sais-quoi impossible to catch. Sometimes a gentle melancholy appeared, with all the charms that belong to it. Then gaiety took its turn, with all joy’s winning attractiveness. Her intelligence seemed made for her beauty: large, sweet, sympathetic. Her speech was appropriate and natural, graceful and unaffected. She knew the world, and a thousand other things about which she was never vain. Her thousand charms intertwined the attractions of virtue with those of beauty and mind; one could say that she deserved the admiration she enjoyed.] The reader will be delighted, I have no doubt, with so fine a likeness, and require only to be told the name of the fair and eloquent writer. But it is with pride and pleasure I inform him, that for this portrait, Mrs. SIDDONS never sat, however striking the resemblance. It is the sketch, still of one of the greatest, and best of women – of Madame de MAINTENON, by her friend Mademoiselle de Scudery.33 Boaden’s clever device not only exalts Siddons by internationalizing her, associating her with a legendary European beauty and suggesting that a noble foreign tongue is required to capture her dignified appearance, but it also takes advantage of the frequency with which Siddons sat for portraits – ‘so fine a likeness’ – by the great painters of the day.

III Siddons’s reputation as probably the greatest English actress, combined with Shakespeare’s status as the greatest playwright, has generated an inevitable identification between the two. This connection is misleading. It is worth remembering that – always excepting the role of Lady Macbeth – Siddons’s fame was built not exclusively and perhaps not even chiefly on the great Shakespearean parts. When she triumphed as Lady Macbeth in

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the third season at Drury Lane (February 1785), the anonymous reviewer for The Public Advertiser welcomed her conquest for serving to ‘gag the drivellers who . . . ventured a sweeping prophecy of condemnation, that “the Siddons never could play Shakespeare” ’.34 Such an opinion, although it seems incomprehensible given the way we think of her now, probably arose from her repeated portrayals, to increasing acclaim, of tragic heroines featured in plays nowadays mostly forgotten. Euphrasia in Arthur Murphy’s The Grecian Daughter, Mrs Beverly in The Gamester, Isabella in Garrick’s Isabella, Belvidera in Thomas Otway’s Venice Preserved, Calista in Nicholas Rowe’s The Fair Penitent, and the title part in Rowe’s The Tragedy of Jane Shore – these were the roles in which she triumphed and for which she was continually in demand. If few of them depended upon a complex characterization, all were nevertheless showcases for the tragic actress. They required immoderate emotional expression, usually some form of grief or fear or rage, and the opportunities for lamentation or pathos were legion: Siddons was celebrated not only for the laugh mentioned earlier but for the shrieks uttered at a climactic moment in The Fatal Marriage, and for her pitiable representation of the heroine’s physical distress in Jane Shore. It is with her Shakespearean roles that this chapter is concerned, however, and in this arena her experience was broad if not comprehensive. She played about 20 Shakespearean parts, although it must be added that different biographers count differently: should Katherina be included, for example, since the version of Shrew she played was not Shakespeare’s but Garrick’s adaptation? The following list counts Ariel, her first recorded role, performed with her parents’ troupe when she was 9 (but apparently she forgot it and failed to mention that early experience to Thomas Campbell); and the Prince of Denmark in Hamlet, which she did not present in London but in the provinces and in Dublin. (Reverend Bate impishly warned Garrick that she might challenge his ownership of the role.)35 In the tragedies, she played Juliet, Ophelia, Gertrude, Desdemona, Cordelia (in Tate’s adaptation), Lady Macbeth and Volumnia; in the histories, Lady Anne and Queen Elizabeth in Cibber’s version of Richard III, Constance in King John, the Princess of France in Henry V and Queen Katherine in Henry VIII; in the comedies, Portia, Beatrice, Olivia, Rosalind, Isabella, Imogen and Hermione. Some of these performances were undertaken early in her career and some not given in the capital. Her portrayal of Beatrice, for example, was seen early and only once, before her return to London in 1782: Henderson came through Bath on a provincial tour and she performed Much Ado with him there.36 Juliet she did not play in

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London until she was 34 years old, in 1789, and she reserved Hermione, Gertrude and Queen Elizabeth until quite late in her career. Her most important characterizations, those she performed most often and for which she received the greatest adulation, were Lady Macbeth, Constance in King John, and Queen Katherine in Henry VIII. Indeed, Michael Booth proposes that these were the only Shakespearean representations ‘considered outstanding in her time’. 37 This may be going too far. The discourse of reviewing in the period differs markedly from the writing we are accustomed to: critics tended to express themselves hyperbolically, and sometimes the disappointment either stated or implied has to do with the high expectations that accompany a star actor’s status. Thus the newspapers often complain about acting that may have been, by almost any other standards, extremely effective. On the other hand, some of the praise she regularly garnered must be taken with modified scepticism, and it is unwise to trust entirely the hagiographic biographers, Thomas Campbell and James Boaden. What is most helpful is saturation in the theatrical journalism of the day accompanied by an effort to read the reviews with a historical sensitivity. It is instructive to contemplate some of the parts Siddons did not play, a rather surprising list. Despite her talent for heroics, there was no Cleopatra, although she did play the part in Dryden’s All for Love, which throughout the eighteenth century was preferred to the original. Campbell addresses (but does not regret) this gap in her career: . . . would Shakespeare’s Cleopatra have suited Mrs. Siddons’s powers? I am pretty sure it would not. The energy of the heroine, though neither vulgar nor comic, has a meteoric playfulness and a subtle lubricity in the transition of feelings, that accords with no impression which can be recollected from Mrs. Siddons’s acting.38 Likewise, she never played Shakespeare’s shrew but did appear in Garrick’s adaptation, Catherine and Petruchio. Neither Titania nor any of the women in Dream was in her repertory, nor Viola nor Adriana nor Helena in All’s Well. Some of these omissions are attributable to the fluctuating popularity of certain titles. Much Ado about Nothing did not achieve the popularity it now enjoys until the days of Irving and Terry at the Lyceum, although Garrick and Hannah Pritchard had played it successfully; apart from the Bath performance with Henderson, Siddons left Beatrice alone. Georgian audiences apparently cared little for Twelfth Night, now one of Shakespeare’s most admired comedies, and The Comedy of Errors, Love’s Labour’s Lost,

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Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Tempest were given much less frequently than nowadays. The three Henry VI plays were known only to readers, and Richard III was played in Cibber’s adaptation. To some extent this phenomenon of limited repertory is a function of gender. Decisions about what was produced usually rested in the hands of the actor-managers, and since these were invariably male, dramas without a strong masculine lead were less likely to be scheduled. Repertory also depended obviously upon commercial considerations, deriving from the need to keep a powerful performer happy, whether male or female. Had Siddons been a brilliant comic actor, for example, then her choices would have shaped the repertory of the day in that direction. Commercial considerations also manifested themselves in open competition between actors. It seems that the decision to stage Cymbeline for her at Drury Lane arose from the ongoing public comparison of Siddons and Dorothy Jordan, who was acting Imogen at Covent Garden. One of the London reviewers ventured to offer Siddons some career advice on the basis of her Lady Macbeth. ‘[T]o this line of magnificence, Mrs. Siddons should adhere; the softer tones of nature are not suited either to her voice, or her countenance; the big passion of love is not within her capability of excellence; but the majestic, the terrible, is all her own.’39 This is the keynote struck by most critics of the day. It was generally acknowledged that Mrs Siddons was not much of a comedienne. After her retirement, the author of the biographical article in Oxberry’s Dramatic Biography summarized the consensus: Whilst saying thus much of the talents of this truly ‘wondrous woman,’ candour compels us to add, that her sphere of acting was a confined one. Tragedy was not only her forte, but the only line for which she had any aptitude. It was the Mediterranean of her mind, whilst her comedy was like a small stream, full of bubbles, and pursuing its course, without attracting or deserving any particular notice.40 Such an analysis helps to contextualize the disappointment of that first Portia in The Merchant of Venice for Garrick, and it explains the relative lack of enthusiasm about her portrayal of Shakespeare’s other comic heroines, notably Rosalind, Olivia, Isabella in Measure for Measure, Imogen and Hermione. For none of these was she greatly admired. One source of the problem was not gender but sex. The more the role depended on vivacity and sexual attraction, the less likely was Siddons to triumph in it. A precise statement of this deficiency was recorded by

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Anna Seward, poet and correspondent known as the Swan of Lichfield, after seeing Siddons perform Rosalind: ‘the playful scintillations of colloquial wit, which most strongly mark that character, suit not the dignity of the Siddonian form and countenance.’ Seward adds that the actress didn’t look the part either, since her refusal to flaunt her body meant that in the Ganymede outfit she ‘seemed neither male nor female’.41 Another difficulty was Siddons’s competitor in the role, the adorable Dorothy Jordan. Quick, sexy, irresistibly charming, Jordan was acknowledged even by Siddons’s champions, even by Boaden and Campbell, to be the superior Rosalind.42 This view of the incompatibility of Siddons’s talent and the style required was shared by one of her colleagues, the famous comedian Jack Bannister. Here Thomas Campbell reports on a conversation with the retired actor: [He] had at first, I thought, a delicate reserve in touching on the subject of her talents for comedy, and suffered me, without contradiction, to say, that surely some passages of her Rosalind must have been respectable; but, when I requested of his candour to tell me whether her comic acting had, in any character, or in the smallest degree, ever pleased him, he shook his head, and remarked, that the burthen of her inspiration was too weighty for comedy.43 Isabella in Measure for Measure was evidently more convincing because the character’s religious vocation demands little in the way of wit and proscribes overt sexual allure. It was the first Shakespeare part she undertook at Drury Lane after her victorious return there in 1782, and she waited until the second season. Isabella’s ‘inborn purity creates a dignity beyond that of power, and . . . moral energy . . . unequalled in the volumes of Shakespeare’ says Boaden, his diction indicating that the critic’s conception of the character has been shaped by the approach of his favourite performer.44 Hermione in The Winter’s Tale and Imogen in Cymbeline seem to have been generally if not excessively admired. It is pertinent that both these plays represent a special kind of comedy, known today as tragicomedy or romance; also, both characters are married women, and so the need for overt flirtation is absent. Siddons was 47 when she first played Hermione, appearing with Kemble as Leontes; while some coquetry with Polixenes might have been appropriate in the opening scene, nothing of the kind is mentioned. Reviewers instead concentrate on the dignity and gravitas that made her memorable in the statue scene. The part was also akin to the suffering nonShakespearean heroines for which she was celebrated. Moreover, Hermione was the last new role she undertook, a decade before her retirement, and by

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this time the newspapers had effectively stopped reviewing in very specific terms the phenomenon known as The Siddons. As for Imogen, aspects of that part suited her quite well, especially the indignation she visits upon Iachimo and her incredulity and emotional pain at Posthumus’s treachery. At the same time, Dorothy Jordan’s competing Imogen benefited from the disguise required from Act Three to the end of the play: costumed as the boy Fidele, she was able to show off her legs. Apparently, then, each actress brought something to the part that the other could not.45

IV In the first year of her conquest of Drury Lane, the autumn of 1782, Siddons did not play Shakespeare at all. The suffering heroines served her well – she was presenting them to the London public for the first time – and it is possible that she harboured bitter feelings about her Shakespearean flops of seven years before. But the neglect of his major female parts was fostering comment and doubt. Finally, on 3 November 1783, she appeared as Isabella in Measure for Measure, performing to what Campbell calls ‘undivided applause’ and repeating the part shortly thereafter for the pleasure of the King and Queen. A month later, gratifying the royal request that she and Kemble appear together in King John, she added Constance. The notes she left for Campbell adumbrate her thoughtful conception of the part. My idea of Constance is that of a lofty and proud spirit, associated with the most exquisite feelings of maternal tenderness, which is, in truth, the predominant feature of this interesting personage.46 Most of the several pages of commentary enlarge upon this combination of nobility and tenderness. But into this mix Siddons introduces a significant term, one to which she frequently reverts: ‘abstraction’. The noun seems to mean something like ‘concentration’, the nearest OED definition indicating a separation of inessentials. It also connotes, in the case of Constance, what Campbell describes as ‘imperiously holding the mind reined-in to the immediate perception of those calamitous circumstances which take place during the course of her sadly eventful history’.47 In other words, she seeks to differentiate among the multiple states of mind through which the beleaguered woman must pass. To illustrate this requirement, she describes an efficacious psychological aid:

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I never omitted to place myself, with Arthur in my hand, to hear the march, when, upon the reconciliation of England and France, they enter the gates of Angiers to ratify the contract of marriage between the Dauphin and the Lady Blanche; because the sickening sounds of that march would usually cause the bitter tears of rage, disappointment, betrayed confidence, baffled ambition, and, above all, the agonizing feelings of maternal affection to gush into my eyes. In short, the spirit of the whole drama took possession of my mind and frame, by my attention being incessantly riveted to the passing scenes.48 Such a holistic approach to character would have been unknown to most of her predecessors, except perhaps Garrick. Shakespeare depicts Constance as a powerless victim of international politics: her efforts to promote the monarchical claims of her son Arthur and then to protect his life are ultimately futile, and the frustrations in which the part is grounded allow the actress much space for heightened expression. KING PHILIP Patience, good lady! Comfort, gentle Constance! CONSTANCE No, I defy all counsel, all redress, But that which ends all counsel, true redress, Death, death. O, amiable, lovely death! Thou odoriferous stench! Sound rottenness! Arise forth from the conch of lasting night, Thou hate and terror to prosperity, And I will kiss thy detestable bones, And put my eyeballs in thy vaulty brows, And ring these fingers with thy household worms, And stop this gap of breath with fulsome dust, And be a carrion monster like thyself. Come, grin on me, and I will think thou smil’st And buss thee as thy wife! Misery’s love, O, come to me!49 For a tragic actress specializing in victimized mothers, this offers tempting possibilities. Further in the scene, moreover, Constance first binds up and then unbinds her hair: according to Campbell, ‘The true actress is in every thing an artist; the genius before us dishevelled even her hair with

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graceful wildness.’50 Constance served Siddons well, and vice-versa, particularly because the writing afforded her the chance to exhibit the kind of maternal suffering she had employed in many of her contemporary roles. Of the revival in 1800 – Siddons continued playing the part until late in her career – one of the London newspapers commented, ‘We have scarcely ever witnessed a more admirable display, even of her great talents, than she exhibited in this arduous character; her reproach of the Duke of Austria, and her grief for the loss of her child, were expressed with great force and beauty.’51 Siddons triumphed also as Queen Katherine of Aragon in another comparative rarity, Henry VIII, Shakespeare’s last history play and a collaboration with John Fletcher (although it was not widely recognized as such until the nineteenth century). Like King John, it was more popular on the eighteenth- than on the twenty-first-century stage, partly because Siddons was so memorable in it. She undertook the role, with Kemble as Cromwell, 5 years after her first London Shakespeare, having performed in the meantime a number of his other roles, including Lady Macbeth. That revival, on 25 November 1788 was lavish and well prepared, The Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser disclosing to its readers that ‘The rehearsal of Henry the Eighth on Monday took up nearly five hours. After this, no one can venture to assert that the play was brought out without much previous pain to render it worthy of the publick approbation.’52 Despite the relative brevity of the role, Siddons made Queen Katherine one of her signature portrayals. Although the histrionic range is more restricted than with Constance and certainly more subdued than in tragic non-Shakespearean parts, Katherine offers great opportunities for unbowed dignity and noble suffering. Several witnesses reported a memorable turn in her treatment of the text, the following account taken from the biographical essay in Oxberry’s Dramatic Biography and Histrionic Anecdotes (1825): . . . the line ‘Lord Cardinal, to you I speak,’ had always been spoken as we have pointed it; but Mrs. SIDDONS employed a little stage trick, with admirable effect, exclaiming, ‘Lord Cardinal,’ on which Cardinal Campeius approached her, when she, darting her electric looks at Wolsey, exclaimed, ‘to you I speak.’53 This talent for rejecting the familiar, for making the lines seem both new and self-evident, is one of the qualities that surfaces repeatedly in treatments of her distinctive gifts.

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Campbell omits his own recollection of her Katherine in favour of one apparently written by Daniel Terry, an actor-associate of her brother Stephen Kemble. This account emphasizes her characteristic gravity and command – useful attributes in playing the proud but humiliated Spanish queen – but also the clarity with which she rendered her character’s emotions. Speaking of her entrance into the Council-Chamber, he writes: This is a quiet scene, affording no opportunities for energetic exertions, or flashes of effect, but displaying those excellencies which Mrs. Siddons alone possesses, – that quiet majesty of deportment, arising from the natural majesty of her form and mind, which imposes reverence and commands subjection; and that clear and intelligent harmony of unlaboured elocution, which unravels all the intricacies of language, illuminates obscurity, and points and unfolds the precise truth of meaning to every apprehension. This unrivalled excellence was illustrated in every speech of the scene.54 This analysis is helpful because it comes from an actor, emphasizing particularly the care Siddons has taken to make her words perspicuous. She continued to act the part, choosing it for her benefit in March 1792, when the take for that night alone was £493 16s. Given that her normal fee was £30 per performance around this time, this was a substantial sum and a testimony to her commercial clout. The Shakespearean role for which she remains most famous is Lady Macbeth. She waited to introduce the part in London until the third season of her second stint at Drury Lane, although she had first played it in the provinces some 10 years before. Here is her description of how she prepared that very early effort. It was my custom to study my characters at night, when all the domestic cares and business of the day were over. On the night preceding that in which I was to appear in this part for the first time, I shut myself up, as usual, when all the family were retired, and commenced my study of Lady Macbeth. As the character is very short, I thought I should soon accomplish it. Being then only twenty years of age, I believed, as many others do believe, that little more was necessary than to get the words into my head; for the necessity of discrimination, and the development of character, at that time of my life, had scarcely entered into my imagination. But, to proceed. I went on with tolerable composure, in

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the silence of the night, (a night I never can forget), till I came to the assassination scene, when the horrors of the scene rose to a degree that made it impossible for me to get farther. I snatched up my candle, and hurried out of the room, in a paroxysm of terror. My dress was of silk, and the rustling of it, as I ascended the stairs to go to bed, seemed to my panic-struck fancy like the movement of a spectre pursuing me. From this memory she proceeds to the admission that her youthful Lady was not what it should have been and to allow that she learned from that episode the folly of procrastination. Her assumption of the part at Drury Lane in February 1785, however, was one of the great nights in the annals of theatre history. There was much hoopla leading up to the premiere. Although Macbeth had never left the repertory, this production was seen as a major revival: many patrons remembered well the pairing of David Garrick and Hannah Pritchard, and those who had not seen it were not allowed to forget that they had missed something. Siddons’s partner in this first series of performances was William ‘Gentleman’ Smith, a respected actor who apparently spoke well enough but (as his nickname intimates) never really became the character. He seems to have made little impression at all, especially next to the memory of Garrick’s blazing impersonation, or rather the characterization was unconvincing. A year later, a satiric poem entitled The New Rosciad reported on his portrayal: When stung by conscience’ wound, the fell Macbeth Feels keen remorse for good King Duncan’s death, What frog-like anguish shakes his tortur’d soul! His hair stands upright, and his eye-balls roll.55 Reviewers agreed that Siddons overwhelmed Smith, that the strength and fresh complexity of her portrayal effected a dangerous imbalance in the dynamics of the performance. Once in that same season, John Philip Kemble took the title part for his benefit, and when Smith retired 3 years later, Kemble became the proprietor of the role for the next two decades, creating with his sister a partnership that took its place with, and may even have supplanted, that of Pritchard and Garrick. The anxiety of influence weighed heavily on Siddons as she prepared the role. Since she was by this time well on her way to becoming the great tragedienne of the age, her taking on the part of the ‘fiend-like queen’

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caused much anticipation. Specifically, great excitement attended the rumour that had emerged from rehearsals, that Lady Macbeth in the sleepwalking scene would set down the candle. This was unprecedented, violating as it did the canons of tradition and convention. The eighteenthcentury theatrical public had established exactly the way it liked its major classical parts performed, that is, more or less the way they had been performed before. And thus the idea of introducing such a radical change was decidedly risky. In her memoirs, Siddons recounts at length the story of receiving Thomas Sheridan, the manager of Drury Lane, in her dressing room moments before the first performance was to begin and of his begging her not to take the extraordinary step of putting the candle down onto the table. As she tells it, however, she had no choice: she had already conceived of the moment in this way and, inclined though she might be to respect Sheridan’s experience and authority, she could not instantaneously alter the way she had rehearsed the Lady’s movements in that crucial scene. After the show, the doubter confessed his error: ‘Mr. Sheridan himself came to me, after the play, and most ingenuously congratulated me on my obstinacy.’56 The press and public were agog, as the anonymous reporter for the Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser attests: By the simple circumstance of putting the candlestick on the table, she acted as consequentially as Shakespeare meant her to do; and as we all of us know is done in actual slumbers of agitation. Thus the two hands being at liberty, she can and does go through her accustomed action, and seems to be washing her hands. This improvement may also be transferred into the performances of other actresses.57 Siddons’s portrayal of Lady Macbeth sealed her status as the greatest tragedienne of the age. ‘Her acting was by far the finest heroic we have ever seen – and yet we have seen and not forgotten Mrs. Pritchard – but Mrs. Pritchard sinks into comparative futility, when the sublime and terrible graces of Mrs. Siddons are before us.’58 The setting down of the candlestick is the most celebrated moment in Siddons’s portrayal, but there is more to see if we examine reports of the performance and scrutinize the role in greater detail. Critics have got themselves into unseemly quarrels over the conflict between, on the one hand, Siddons’s description of how she thought about the character and, on the other, the press reports and spectators’ memoirs that seem

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to contradict that conception. In Siddons’s Remarks on the Character of Lady Macbeth, which Campbell included in his Life, the most puzzling passage comes near the beginning of her sketch: According to my notion, it is of that character which I believe is generally allowed to be most captivating to the other sex, – fair, feminine, nay, perhaps even fragile. . . . Such a combination only, respectable in energy and strength of mind, and captivating in feminine loveliness, could have composed a charm of such potency as to fascinate the mind of a hero so dauntless, a character so amiable, so honourable as Macbeth.59 Charm and ‘femininity’ underpin her characterization, but those qualities are overpowered by her monstrous ambition: citing the speech about dashing out the brains of the nursing child, she claims that ‘Even here, horrific as she is, she shews herself made by ambition, but not by nature, a perfectly savage creature.’60 It is the savagery, however, that dominates records of her performance, for all the talk of femininity. Professor Bell concluded that her Lady was marked by ‘turbulent and inhuman strength of spirit’,61 and that she was ‘not the affectionate aider of her husband’s ambition, but the fell monster who tempts him to transgress, making him the mere instrument of her wild and uncontrollable ambition’.62 James Boaden saw in her portrayal ‘the daring steadiness of her mind, which could be disturbed by no scruple, intimidated by no danger. . . . She is as thoroughly prepared in one moment, as if visions of greatness had long informed her slumbers; and she had awaked to meditate upon every means, however dreadful, that could secure her object’.63 This apparent clash of conception and effect is reconciled in a detailed, thoughtful article by Joseph Donohue about the pairing of Kemble and Siddons in the tragedy. Donohue makes two significant assertions. The first is that the brutal power of her performance becomes excessive ‘when the role of Macbeth is in the hands of an inferior actor’ – i.e., in the run of performances before Kemble replaced Smith.64 And it is true that the press reports of Smith’s Macbeth almost uniformly acknowledge her tendency to dominate him. Donohue’s second sensible notion is that ‘Siddons is not writing conventional literary criticism but, on the contrary, describing a private image helpful in creating her role . . . as every piece of evidence contributes to show, Mrs. Siddons has discovered an initial concept of the character against which she can play from the moment she steps on stage.’65 The problem of reconciling these opposing features of the character has

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troubled most actresses who have since undertaken Lady Macbeth, most notably Ellen Terry and Judi Dench. Professor Bell’s notes on inflections and pieces of business, while coloured with romantic hyperbole, offer aural and visual snapshots of the performances of both Kemble and Siddons. The reporter is often impatient with him, writing of the first scene between the two (the end of 1.5), ‘Kemble plays it not well, yet some things good.’66 His enchantment with Siddons, however, is almost invariable.67 Although he sometimes introduces italics or accent marks into the text itself – but without The illness should attend it: what thou wouldst highly, That wouldst thou holily; wouldst not play false, And yet wouldst wrongly win.68 – most of his commentary is confined to his footnotes to the dialogue of the scenes in which Lady Macbeth appears. One of the fullest illustrates her line about Duncan’s not leaving the palace: O, never . . . (never) Shall sun that morrow see!15 15

‘O, never’. A long pause, turned from him, her eye steadfast. Strong dwelling emphasis on ‘never,’ with deep downward inflection, ‘never shall sun that morrow see!’ Low, very sustained voice, her eye and her mind occupied steadfastly in the contemplation of her horrible purpose, pronunciation almost syllabic, not unvaried. Her self-collected solemn energy, her fixed posture, her determined eye and full deep voice of fixed resolve never should be forgot, cannot be conceived nor described.69 Bell’s notes derive apparently from later performances, and it is worth recalling that Siddons apparently shaped her characterizations over the course of a run, but they are nonetheless invaluable as a guide to how the performance must have sounded. The adulation of Boaden and Campbell and Bell is not atypical, but the brilliance of the acting did not blind all reviewers into uncritical acceptance. The reviewer for The Morning Chronicle and Advertiser, writing on 14 February 1785, tinges his valentine with some complaint: But, were there no defects? There were defects. And defects that we wonder at, as well as lament.

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In the reading of the letter, the surprise does not come sufficiently soon, nor stay sufficiently long. ‘Give him tending.’ ‘He brings great news.’ Evidently, not both lines to the servant; the first, only to him. The great news, is to herself; a visiting of nature on her fell purpose. The taunt following from ‘Was the hope drunk?’ was a little underdone; the hypothetical dashing of the infants brains out, was overdone. Bating these few minute defects, which, like the few maculae on the surface of the sun, scarcely do not at all dim its radiance, and are not perhaps discoverable without much magnifying power – bating these defects, the Lady Macbeth was every thing, of which the art was capable!70 Such reservations were unusual, and the effectiveness of performance generally has led to a virtually automatic identification between Siddons and Lady Macbeth. To cite the famous phrase of Charles Lamb, ‘We speak of Lady Macbeth, while in reality we are thinking of Mrs. S.’71 Following Lady Macbeth, she made a considerable success in the role of Volumnia in Coriolanus, Kemble’s adaptation of two earlier versions, by James Thomson and Thomas Sheridan. Whereas Bell’s notes on her Lady Macbeth and Queen Katherine tend to emphasize the voice, apparently in this role she made herself unforgettable by means of various physical tactics. The testimony of the actor Charles Mayne Young provides a clear picture of these efforts. I remember her coming down the stage in the triumphal entry of her son, Coriolanus, when her dumb-shew drew plaudits that shook the building. She came alone, marching and beating time to the music; rolling (if that be not too strong a term to describe her motion) from side to side, swelling with the triumph of her son. Such was the intoxication of joy which flashed from her eye, and lit up her whole face, that the effect was irresistible. She seemed to me to reap all the glory of that procession to herself. I could not take my eye from her. Coriolanus, banner, and pageant, all went for nothing to me, after she had walked to her place.72 Apparently the partnership with Kemble as mother and son was one of their most effective pairings. It should also be emphasized that Siddons was hardly the aged Gorgon we sometimes imagine Volumnia to be: in

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fact she was 34 years old, that same season playing Juliet to her brother’s Romeo.

V Debate over whether or not Siddons deserves her exalted reputation, whether she was ‘better’ than Fanny Kemble or Ellen Terry or Peggy Ashcroft, is idle. The fact is that she has it, justly or not. It is worthwhile, however, to analyse her contribution to the profession of Shakespearean acting and to assess the value and meaning of those achievements. The first thing to be said is that Siddons was the first great Shakespearean actress, the first woman to be identified – again, rightly or wrongly – with Shakespearean parts. Her predecessors, from Mrs Betterton and Mrs Cibber to Hannah Pritchard and Mrs Crawford, had performed some of Shakespeare’s major roles to great acclaim, and Mrs Pritchard, as I have indicated, was celebrated for her portrayal of Lady Macbeth, in partnership with Garrick. But Siddons on her own stamped the role with her distinctive interpretation, before she had acquired in Kemble an adequate partner. And once she established that supremacy, her title to foremost Shakespearean tragedienne was uncontested. Not only should we call her the first great Shakespearean actress, but we should also recognize the implications of that judgement. She managed to impress audiences in ways that, until this point, only men had been able to do. Burbage, Betterton, Macklin, Garrick – these men occupied a plane of their own, a histrionic pre-eminence separating them from their ordinarily talented male – and from all their female – colleagues. Siddons was the first woman permitted to join their fraternity. That she did so is attributable largely to her having transcended the confines of gender. Her effect upon audiences, in other words, especially in her great tragic parts, was as powerful as that which only a few male predecessors had been able to create. To use the diction of the time, her acting achieved a level that her contemporaries described as ‘sublime’. According to Edmund Burke, [T]he passion caused by the great and sublime in nature . . . is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other.73 This description is implicated with notions of gender. Contemporary thought associated the Sublime with masculinity, strength, infinity. The

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Beautiful, on the other hand, implied femininity, elegance, restraint. Numerous writers employ such a vocabulary to describe the effect of Siddons’s work in tragedy: William Godwin, for example, father of Mary Shelley, found ‘her conceptions . . . of her characters . . . more sublime than anything even in Garrick’s action’,74 and Fanny Burney met her at the Royal Lodge in Windsor and ‘found her the heroine of Tragedy – sublime, elevated and solemn’.75 Siddons possessed the ability to generate the astonishment Burke describes, although the Shakespeare canon afforded her relatively few roles requiring such power. Attention to this aspect of her talent helps to explain why Lady Macbeth, Constance, and, in another key, Queen Katherine were her greatest Shakespearean successes. One of Siddons’s lasting contributions to the performance of Shakespeare’s plays was the seriousness with which she took her contribution to the whole enterprise. She imagined her character as existing in a network of other persons, actions and words, and this sort of reticulation was novel. Without providing here a lengthy survey of eighteenth-century acting – and indeed it would be necessary to speak not of an acting style in the period but of changing acting styles – it is safe to suggest that most players were concerned mainly with their own performances and not with the integration of all roles and participants into a harmonious artistic whole. The ideal of an ensemble, of several performers creating a stylistically coherent presentation of a theatrical text, takes hold much later in the history of the theatre. (Exactly when it comes to prominence is difficult to determine, but certainly there was little sense of collaboration in the late eighteenth century.) Often the star actor made no effort to interact with fellow players unless it was to the star’s advantage, or the advantage of the star’s character; many famous actors merely lounged about the stage until the time came for their big moments; often players would greet latecomers from the platform or nod to friends in the house, disdaining the idea of theatrical illusion. Siddons in thus taking the entire text seriously repudiated the cavalier attitude of her most famous predecessor. Hannah Pritchard, it was said, declined to read scenes in which she did not appear and was ignorant of what happened at the end of Macbeth. Siddons’s consciousness of this difference appears in the attention she devotes to the story in her memoir, and to the source of the tale, a visit with Dr Johnson: When I beggd to know his opinion of Mrs. Pritchard’s acting, whom I had not seen, he said, ‘Madam, she was a vulgar idiot. She never read any part of the Play, except her own part, . . . . ’ Is it possible, thought I, that Mrs. Pritchard, the greatest of all the Lady Macbeths should

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never have read the Play? I concluded that he must have been misinformed, but I was afterwards told by a gentleman, an acquaintance of Mrs. P., that he had sup[p]ed with her one night after acting that Part and that he then heard her say she never had read that Play. I cannot believe it.76 Whether she believed it, and whether or not it is exaggerated, the fact that such astonishing solipsism can be mentioned at all is worth mentioning. Siddons’s unparalleled sense of professional responsibility emerges from the reports of all her biographers. To begin with, she immersed herself in her characters, never permitting the temptations of her celebrity or the personal atmosphere of the theatre to distract her. Such discipline is verified in Boaden’s description of her performance in the short scene in Macbeth when Lady Macbeth welcomes Duncan to Inverness Castle: ‘The honoured hostess received his Majesty with all the exterior of profound obligation. She was too pure an actress to allow a glance of triumph to stray towards the spectators.’77 Boaden’s delight in her self-control clearly implies what the norm seems to have been. Second, Siddons thought about each of her roles in relation to the whole text, as part of a narrative and theatrical network. In King John her listening backstage to the sickening march that forecasts her son’s demise bespeaks her seriousness of purpose. It is further notable that in that same play she took a dressing room near the stage and left the door ajar: Constance is on stage very little, and by this stratagem Siddons afforded herself the chance to monitor the performances of the other characters. Such commitment to the fiction was forward-looking in the 1780s. Although all such judgements are relative, it appears that she did not over-act, exercising noticeable restraint even in roles where it might not have been expected. Notwithstanding the emphasis on Siddons’s talent for powerful expression, the critics are also agreed that she did not indulge in the unearned or meretricious tactics that other performers seem to have employed. According to Michael Booth, ‘Siddons was rarely included in the animadversions against English tragic actors by domestic and foreign critics, who objected not only to loudness but also to overdeclamatory speech or rant, mechanical movements, a stress upon and lengthening of cries and exclamations, sudden tricksy starts, and, in the women, a forced vibrato and an artificial heaving of the breasts.’78 And contemporary corroboration of this self-discipline is found in a letter from the actor Charles Mayne Young to Thomas Campbell, who included it in the later version of his biography: Young recalled that Siddons ‘never

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sought by unworthy means to entrap her audience. She disdained to apply any of the petty resources of trickish minds, in order to startle or surprise her hearers’.79 Siddons’s devotion to the whole theatrical enterprise was a concomitant of her larger work ethic. She was tireless in meeting the multiple demands of marriage, motherhood, professional actor and public celebrity. Before her second Drury Lane contract, her schedule in the provinces was punishing as she performed a vast range of parts, learned and rehearsed new roles (usually late in the evening and into the early morning, after the show), travelled between towns, cared for her children, and received the attentions of the social elite encamped at Bath. In the three seasons between 1779 and 1782, working mainly in Bath and Bristol, she performed some one hundred roles while at the same time bearing three children, one of whom died in infancy. Once settled in London she continued to exhibit this formidable industry, acting constantly in a wide array of parts, making herself an element in (if not a centrepiece of) London society, undertaking summer tours to Edinburgh and Dublin, and still varying her repertory as age and popular taste dictated. Whether this tremendous energy was financially or artistically motivated makes little difference. Her performance of her great Shakespearean heroines throughout the kingdom kept potentially marginal roles and plays before the public, and the tours also allowed her some liberty not appropriate to London: for example, in 1802 (at the age of 47!) she chose Dublin in which to return to the title role in Hamlet. Siddons also brought to the Shakespearean text an exceptional intelligence and independence of approach. In one of his scouting letters to Garrick, Reverend Bate praises her exceptional intellect: ‘She is the most extraordinary quick study I ever heard of: – this cannot be amiss, for if I recollect right we have a sufficient number of the leaden-headed ones at D. Lane already?’80 Not only could she learn a role rapidly, as her description of preparing her fi rst Lady Macbeth reveals, but she was known for her scrupulous thinking about how to communicate the words of the part. She regularly applied that intelligence to the new roles she undertook and those she elected to re-study. This would seem to be an obvious way of proceeding for almost any actor, particularly in Shakespeare, but at the risk of rehearsing the familiar I would reiterate the eighteenth century’s attachment to tradition and convention. All the great popular dramatic texts, especially those of Shakespeare, consisted of moments known as ‘points’: speeches, lines, episodes, reactions, even pauses and gestures to which the audience could look forward and on

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which an actor’s work might be compared with that of others, particularly favourite performers of the past. Every new assumption of a part, every revival of a familiar play, entailed a contest between tradition and innovation. An actor was expected to observe the conventions associated with a role but also – delicately, acceptably – to stretch the possibilities. As Alan S. Downer puts it, ‘Throughout the eighteenth century, this strange paradox of the actor persists. The art of acting is traditional, conventional, hereditary, yet the art of the individual actor is a constant revolt against tradition, convention, heredity.’81 If the performer took a liberty that pleased the house, the moment would be rewarded with applause; if not, the response was hissing. Garrick had succeeded in elasticizing his roles, altering the conventions that his predecessors had observed, especially the dignified James Quin, and Siddons performed such service for female parts. The putting down of the candle in Macbeth is a good example of a radical innovation that worked. Siddons throughout her career displayed impatience with received ways of reading, an attitude she shared with her brother John. The exchange in Henry VIII between Queen Katherine and the two Cardinals illustrates her fresh approach to a familiar line, and reviewers frequently mention her ingenuity in speaking well-known bits. Playing Portia to Kemble’s Bassanio at Drury Lane in 1786, for example, she impressed careful listeners by altering her approach to the character’s most famous point, ‘The quality of mercy’ speech. As the critic for the Morning Chronicle reported, the speech was delivered ‘as it certainly should be spoken – but as in truth we never heard it spoken – as a reply to “On what compulsion must I?” From every other Portia it has always appeared as a recitation, prepared for the occasion’.82 Such an imaginative address to the text is one of the repeated themes in Professor Bell’s annotated record of her Lady Macbeth and Queen Katherine. A careful reading of Bell’s notes suggests that her stresses, pauses, pitches and variations in volume sound manifestly right to the modern ear – by this I mean the lines as Bell represents them sound as we would expect them to sound when we go to the theatre. And the fact that Bell records a particular stress or variation must in certain cases imply that it is new, that it struck him because it had not been done that way before. In other words, I would suggest that we are hearing the beginning of what we would recognize as ‘modern acting’. Siddons also took seriously the words she spoke, and her fidelity to the text was much remarked upon. After the revival of Coriolanus at Drury Lane for her and Kemble in 1789, The Morning Chronicle and Advertiser printed a

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letter from someone styling himself ‘Quintilian’ who, having first taxed Kemble for an alleged mispronunciation, objects to what he considers an uncharacteristic textual error by Siddons. The details of the controversy are muddled, but what is significant is the writer’s tribute to Siddons’s concern for accuracy: ‘She has always appeared to me so faithful to her text [that] I ask for information.’83 We must remember that such fidelity existed within the confines of Georgian theatrical convention: many of the Shakespeare plays in which she acted had been modified by the likes of Cibber and Tate. This Coriolanus, as I have indicated, was Kemble’s own combination of the Shakespearean original with at least two earlier adaptations. Sheridan’s (1755) was actually called Coriolanus, or the Roman Matron, and perhaps this elevation of the female role contributed to the extraordinary success Kemble and Siddons made of it. One more observation from the Reverend Bate: in his initial report to Garrick on the 20-year-old Sarah Siddons’s talent, he emphasizes her skill with ‘transitions’. While this may seem to us a self-evident criterion in the appreciation of great acting, the word is loaded with special significance in the last quarter of the eighteenth century because it hints at what would become a new kind of psychological verisimilitude on the stage. The reviewer of The Merchant of Venice is applauding much the same skill when he praises Siddons for not delivering ‘The quality of mercy’ as if it were a ‘recitation’. Despite the conventionality of acting in the period, the theorists and critics repeatedly appeal to ‘nature’ as the basis for judging theatrical representation; it seems clear that almost no sense of the term ‘natural’ as it is now understood would be applicable to Georgian acting. We might do better to replace that adjective with an alternative – perhaps ‘psychologically plausible’. That phase of theatrical history in which the conventions of neo-classical performance began to yield to what is now called ‘Romantic acting’ was exactly the period in which Siddons came to prominence and dominated the London stage. No single contemporary document articulates her contribution to this shift, but reading over the range of reviews and commentaries does suggest a metamorphosis in process. Our wider perspective allows us to trace the gradual loosening of style that was invisible to those observing it from within, as it happened. Kemble’s celebrated dignity – the probably malicious suggestion that he had great dignity and nothing else – may have retarded this transition from Garrick to Kean, but on the female side Siddons appears to have hastened it. Recognition of these competing energies helps to elucidate our sense of Siddons’s cultural importance. Some of the indicators I have mentioned

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remind us of how thoroughly enmeshed in London culture she was at the end of the eighteenth century – the great portraits, the connection to the king and queen, the friendship with major literary and artistic figures, the adulation recorded by the likes of Hazlitt and Godwin. But Siddons may also be seen as reflecting not just a theatrical transition but as participating in the greater cultural shift from Neo-classicism to Romanticism. Critics have long debated, and continue to debate, exactly when the former mode of thought yielded to the latter. Earlier in the twentieth century critics used to speak of Pre-Romanticism, finding in the 1770s and 1780s evidence of the now-familiar emphasis on nature and authenticity that Wordsworth and others would celebrate. For a time, this interpretation based on continuity was succeeded by belief in a more radical break, with critics discounting early signs of change and finding instead a paradigm shift that ushered in the Romantic age. More recently, a modified version of the older, ‘transitional’ viewpoint seems to have emerged. Whichever model one prefers, in her particular arena, the stage, Siddons represents elements of both cultural strains. The paintings and other visual representations depict her as subscribing to the two different styles: we see in the Gainsborough portrait (1785), for example, the distinctive Georgian dress and style generally, whereas the Harlow portrait of Lady Macbeth shows her in an Empire gown with a more nearly ‘natural’ coiffure. Her acting style was formal, conventional and neo-classical, except that her memoir and the early biographers suggest that she was also personal and individualistic. She was powerful and yet female, conventional and yet distinctive. She reconciled contradictions. And she unites the three other figures in this volume. At the beginning of her career she acted with David Garrick; throughout she performed with John Philip Kemble; at the end she appeared with the very young Edmund Kean.

VI Siddons lived for the stage, and thus she found that she had great difficulty in leaving it. She announced her retirement for the end of the 1811– 1812 season, in her 57th year, in the role of Lady Macbeth; everyone knew that she had achieved, in Paul Prescott’s phrase, ‘a possessive synonymity with the part’.84 The response of the house was so powerful that after the sleepwalking scene the performance was suspended. This was the official farewell, but informally Siddons continued to act for the next five years,

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appearing occasionally in benefit performances, in which she repeated a few of her most celebrated roles, and giving readings both private and public. These late stage appearances may have been ill-advised, or so thought the anonymous author of the entry in Oxberry’s Dramatic Biography: The last time she appeared, (as Lady Macbeth, we think, in 1817), the loss of teeth rendered her articulation very indistinct, and she occasionally whistled, which, as the character is not a musical one, was by no means effective.85 Such venomous commentary was mostly exceptional, although it is worth noting that Hazlitt’s extravagant praise (quoted earlier) occurs in an essay urging her to face the fact of mortality and quit the public stage. She tried sculpting, and clearly she enjoyed the company and attention of friends, but according to her niece, the actress Fanny Kemble, the last years of her aunt’s life consisted of ‘vapid vacuity’. Despite her personal dissatisfactions, Siddons remained a kind of national monument until her death in June of 1831, as the spectacular funeral accorded her confirmed.86 And she has sustained that status over the past two centuries.

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Chapter 4

Edmund Kean Peter Thomson

The new actor had come from nowhere, bearing nothing. That, at least, was the supposition of most of the people who attended the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane on 26 January 1814, without much in the way of expectation, to witness yet another revival of The Merchant of Venice. They were wrong, of course, but that wrongness provided the initial impetus for the Kean legend. Here was the untutored genius, mysteriously inspired, an actor, not by nurture, but by nature. The excitement generated in London by Kean’s performance of Shylock owed something to a preceding discontent about the state of the London theatre in general and of Drury Lane in particular. Hungry for a new sensation, the faithful were delighted to find one; and while there is no doubt that Kean’s Shylock was startling in some of its details, it is equally certain that his general approach met the approved standards laid down by connoisseurs of great acting. Had his innovations been as revolutionary as some of his contemporaries and many later theatre historians have claimed, he would have been rejected by a stubbornly conservative public. The model remained David Garrick, in recognition of whose genius Robert Lloyd had expressed in rhyming couplets what was already a commonplace in prose: To this one standard make your just appeal, Here lies the golden secret; learn to FEEL. Or fool, or monarch, happy, or distrest, No actor pleases that is not possess’d.1 Lloyd’s poem was written in 1760, but its insistence that ‘Nature’s true knowledge is [the] only art’ of the actor was as much a truism in 1814 as it had been in the first year of old (mad) George III’s reign. And as an exemplar of the actor ‘possessed’, Kean has understandably displaced Garrick. The displacement occurred with astonishing rapidity. Despite resistance

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from some quarters, it was almost complete by the summer of 1814. The underlying purpose of this chapter is to explore how and why this came about. It is not possible wholly to detach the ‘real’ Edmund Kean from his legend, not least because biographical information is scanty and often unreliable, and the legend so pervasive.2 Legend and truth were already intersecting during his lifetime: the confusion is evident in Francis Phippen’s hastily produced and misleadingly titled Authentic Memoirs of Edmund Kean, rushed through the press in 1814 to capitalize on his triumphant first season at Drury Lane. It is not unlikely that this assemblage of tales of mischief and derring-do had Kean’s blessing. Phippen, after all, was a cut above the green-room gossips who compiled scandalous ‘biographies’ of stage favourites to satisfy prurient readers in Regency England. His later investigation of the craft of dowsing would carry him into the inquisitive pages of Notes and Queries. If we knew more of the secret history behind the publication of the Authentic Memoirs, the knowledge would probably confirm Kean’s shared culpability in the myth-making that distorted his achievement while he was alive and superseded it after his death. The cockily confident actor treading the path to certain triumph whom Phippen portrays is a figure from fiction. Two things are certain: first, that Kean’s seminal influence on the reception of Shakespeare’s plays in nineteenth-century England dates from his breakthrough performances at Drury Lane in 1814 and, secondly, that the nature of those performances was conditional on the dreary history of his earlier struggles. Edmund Kean was born unwelcome in 1787, the illegitimate son of Ann Carey, a jobbing actress who supplemented her income by prostitution. Her grandfather, Henry Carey, had been prominent in the 1730s as the authorcomposer of such musical burlesques as Chrononhotonthologos (1734) and The Dragon of Wantley (1737), but his mental instability culminated in his hanging himself in 1743. Like his great-grandson, he would probably have been classified, in a later generation, as a manic depressive. There is uncertainty about which of three brothers Kean fathered Edmund: the oldest, Aaron, was an alcoholic, the second, Moses, a moderately successful mimic and entertainer, the third (and likeliest, since his name, too, was Edmund) was articled to a surveyor at the time of Kean’s birth, but committed suicide in 1793. Ann Carey seems to have left her son’s upbringing to other women, most consistently to Moses Kean’s mistress, Charlotte Tidswell. As a minor, but long-serving member of the Drury Lane company, ‘Aunt Tid’ brought Kean into early acquaintance with the theatre. It is probable that she fostered his evident talent by promoting his childhood performances

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in taverns or middle-class drawing rooms. The story is that she set him to rehearse face-to-face with a portrait to heighten his awareness of dramatic address. She was well aware that her charge was attractive – small, darkeyed and athletic – and unafraid of being the centre of attention. If she was being put to the expense of bringing up another woman’s child, she would have thought it reasonable to look for some financial return, and, at the time, young Kean probably relished being put on display as ‘Master Carey’, the infant prodigy. The drawbacks of that kind of exposure tend to manifest themselves in adolescence or adulthood. To some extent, Kean’s uncommonly retentive memory compensated for his patchwork education, though his attempts to disguise his lack of learning during his years of fame are tinged with pathos. The straightforward fact was that he needed to earn his keep, and that meant seeking paid employment as a performer. There is some evidence that, presumably through Aunt Tid, he made occasional appearances as one of a chorus of children (once, perhaps, as Cupid, and just possibly as Prince Arthur to John Philip Kemble’s King John) at Drury Lane. For a time, he was certainly one of John Richardson’s boys on the portable booth-stage that Richardson’s troupe carted from fair to fair. His athleticism was his main asset, whether as tumbler or acrobat, but Richardson featured cut-down versions of plays alongside more raucous forms of entertainment. Kean would later credit him with giving him his first outing in a major role, that of Young Norval in John Home’s Douglas. He was probably in his early teens.

Provincial Playing Working for Richardson did nothing to prepare Kean for Shakespeare, but it provided him with basic training for the acrobatic (generally silent) role of Harlequin in the pantomimes of the period. His regular provincial employment as Harlequin may have mortified him as much as he later claimed, but it was probably what won him his first engagements, in Sheerness in 1804 and Belfast in 1805, and kept him mostly in work despite a gathering reputation as a difficult company member. One of the more persistent legends is that Kean, while rehearsing a tumbling sequence (sometimes an equestrian routine) with Richardson, broke a leg (sometimes both legs) so badly that he carried an impediment for the rest of his life. This is the kind of ‘fact’ that intrigues myth-makers, but it is difficult to reconcile it with a decade of provincial popularity as Harlequin. Kean’s gracefulness, his dancer’s lightness of foot, was singled out by most of the

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reviewers of his Drury Lane appearances in the Shakespearean roles that made him famous. It was an essential part of his appeal, acquired in youth by diligent exercise and sustained through his often overlooked years of provincial touring. For the stock companies which conducted their theatrical business in regional circuits, versatility was a precious asset in an actor. To local newspapers, like the Exeter Flying Post in 1811, it mattered that Kean was ‘equally at home in tragedy, comedy and pantomime. He dances well, shows great activity and bids fair to be a great favourite with the public’.3 Once he was famous, Kean confined his appearances to major roles, but both the legend and the factual traces speak to his earlier delight in exhibiting his versatility to provincial spectators. J. F. Molloy, a biographer who made no effort at original research, lists Kean’s activity during a single night’s benefit performance in Waterford: the title role in Hannah More’s Percy, interludes of tight-rope dancing and sparring with ‘a professional pugilist’, singing the lead in a musical sketch and concluding with ‘Chimpanzee the monkey in the melodramatic pantomime of La Perouse’.4 The problem was that, at about 5’ 6” (1.67 metres), he was too short to play the model hero. It was, allegedly, Kean himself who spread the story that Sarah Siddons, on one of her provincial tours, told him, ‘You have played very well, sir, very well. It’s a pity, but there’s too little of you to do any thing.’5 If the story is true, he waited until he was famous before spreading it. There is no reason to doubt the ferocity of Kean’s ambition during his years of struggle. Often forced into secondary roles, he strove to make them remarakable – and there is no quicker way to make enemies of senior actors. If Mrs Siddons did pay him the barbed compliment he reported, it was most likely because she had found his bid for attention irritating: the little man didn’t know his place. Kean’s perception of acting as a fight for public favour had probably become habitual during his years in the provinces, linking his profession to his hobbies of fencing and boxing. Other actors were his adversaries, and he tilted at them. Nor was this adversarial style confined to the stage. It conditioned his whole demeanour, leading to quarrels with theatre managers, and even, as at Sheerness in 1807, with local grandees. The emergent egalitarianism that was, in part, the English reaction to the French Revolution had, in Kean, its supreme theatrical representative. That is not to say that he developed a coherent political philosophy, only that he instinctively sided with the oppressed. He felt himself to be one of them, an underdog straining against the power of privilege, and his first response to authority, sometimes even to the authority of the popular voice, was defiance. It was their adversarial quality that gave to Kean’s performances a peculiar edginess, both before and after his rise to celebrity. But there is

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a contradictory impulse that needs to be borne in mind. Despite his occasional outbursts against the aristocratic occupants of Drury Lane’s boxes, Kean had an irrational yearning to be one of them. Why else would he have put it about that his true father was Charles Howard, 11th Duke of Norfolk (with whom Aunt Tid may have had a brief liaison), and named his two sons Howard and Charles as a kind of baptismal affirmation? And why else would he have subjected Charles to the mockery of fellow pupils by sending him to school at Eton? Kean was well enough aware of the contradiction to despise it in himself, and fully conscious that the claiming of aristocratic parentage was mere bluster. What deserves attention, though, is the likely effect of these conflicting impulses on his reading of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes. There are issues of belonging in the three parts in which he certainly excelled – Shylock, Richard III and Othello – as well as in Hamlet, in which some critics thought him supreme. Kean’s marriage to Mary Chambers was, in his intention, a step towards gentility. They had met in 1807 or early 1808 when working for William Beverley’s company on the Gloucester circuit. Of Irish extraction, Mary was 8 years his senior and sufficiently stagestruck to be diverted from her employment as a governess. What attracted Kean was probably her possession of two things he lacked, education and social ease. The probability is that she fell under Kean’s spell while playing Columbine to his Harlequin in Harlequin Mother Goose. They were married hastily in July 1808. If Kean was hoping for a substantial dowry, he was disappointed. The marriage was probably doomed anyway, but the theme was poverty. Looking for theatrical employment as a pair was not easy – there is no evidence that Mary had much more than looks on her side – and the birth of two sons (in 1809 and 1811) thrust new responsibilities onto Kean, whose characteristic response to difficulty was to run away from it. A pattern of prolonged drinking bouts, casual liaisons and absences from home was established early. It was a pattern he would try – and fail – to change for the rest of his life. It came near to reducing him to begging by the end of 1811, before the theatrical engagement that, largely by coincidence, would change his fortune. Once Kean’s place at the head of his profession was established, his years of hardship took their place in the legend. They are ringingly incorporated into Pierce Egan’s dedication to his now-eminent friend of his picaresque novel The Life of an Actor (1825): With the vicissitudes of the stage, and the LIFE OF AN ACTOR, no person, sir, connected with the drama possesses such a competent knowledge, or who can have acquired more experience upon the

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subject – in fact, who can be said to be so completely up in the part throughout the various changes of the Dunstable Hero to the kingly Richard, as yourself – the booth, the assembly room, the barn, the circus, and provincial playhouse, have all been overtopped by the exertion of your genius and splendid talents. You have not only, sir, been the architect of your own fortune, but in the day of trial proved yourself a hero among heroes. By the time Egan, the first great journalist of bare-fist boxing, wrote this fulsome dedication, Kean was wealthy enough to join the ‘flash’ in betting heavily on prize fights. We can only speculate on the drink-loosened conversations that lay behind it, but Kean had evidently regaled Egan with narratives that figure, however ornamented, in The Life of an Actor. The career of the book’s hero, Peregrine Proteus, shadows Kean’s in reaching its climax with ‘The Strolling Player metamorphosed into the King’s servant’ at one of London’s ‘royal’ theatres, and by a route that closely resembled Kean’s. Richard Hughes, manager of the Exeter circuit, had employed Kean before, and thought well enough of him to offer leading roles: Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, Richard III – and Harlequin. The pay was never more than adequate, and much of it was squandered in the nearby Turk’s Head tavern, but Kean persevered (and Hughes compromised) for 2 years. There are different accounts of the circumstances that brought Kean back to London and to fame. Dr Joseph Drury, retired headmaster of Harrow and friendly with members of the Drury Lane committee, appears in most of them. He saw Kean performing in the Teignmouth playhouse and recommended him. The Drury Lane committee, at a point of financial crisis, sent its acting manager, Samuel Arnold, to Dorchester, where he saw Kean in John Philip Kemble’s part of Octavian in George Colman the Younger’s limping tragicomedy The Mountaineers. The introverted but dignified Octavian was not a role suited to Kean, and Arnold had his reservations. The position was further complicated by the fact that Kean had already accepted an offer from the manager of the Olympic, one of London’s growing number of illegitimate theatres. He may have concealed this from Arnold, whose offer of employment at Drury Lane he duplicitously accepted. There were exonerating circumstances: the Keans’ elder son was desperately ill and would, indeed, be dead within a week. Poverty had hampered his recovery from measles, and Drury Lane paid more than the Olympic. But the inevitable outcome was that, when Kean arrived in London early in December 1813, there was a dispute about his employment, during which he remained

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unpaid for six weeks. The legend is that he hovered about Drury Lane, destitute and ignored, until a compromise was reached. This involved a downward adjustment of Kean’s promised salary in order to pay compensation to the manager of the Olympic, Robert William Elliston. Elliston would figure significantly in Kean’s subsequent career. The point to be stressed here is that Kean’s debut as a leading actor at Drury Lane was fraught with controversy in advance. He felt embattled and he chose to fight. The years of struggle, a failing marriage and a 2-months-dead son might have weighed him down. Instead, they became part of his weaponry. Kean was 26 years old and had nurtured, against the odds, a conviction of his own special gifts for at least ten of them. An inchoate they – the theatrical establishment, the privileged classes, the ranks of polite society – had held him down. Now, if ever, it was pay-back time.

26 January 1814: Shylock The timing of Kean’s debut as Shylock was auspicious. Two days earlier, Napoleon had left Paris to join his depleted army in a desperate attempt to salvage his empire. The tide had turned, and there was a mood of triumphalism in London, not shared by at least one member of the Drury Lane Committee that had given formal approval to Kean’s engagement. ‘Buonaparte has lost all his allies but me & the King of Wirtemberg,’ Lord Byron had written to Lady Melbourne on 4 November 1813. Byron took his work for Drury Lane more seriously than anyone can have expected, but he was away from London on 26 January. Returning in February, he confided to his journal (18 February) his current thoughts: Napoleon! – this week will decide his fate. All seems against him; but I believe and hope he will win – at least, beat back the Invaders. What right have we to prescribe sovereigns to France? Oh for a Republic! ‘Brutus, thou sleepest.’ The next night’s journal entry includes Byron’s first recorded response to Kean, though it was the second time he had seen the new actor’s Richard III: 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.

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And on 20 February, Kean was still on Byron’s mind. The journal entry here is sadly prescient: An invitation to dine at Holland-house to meet Kean. He is worth meeting; and I hope by getting into good society, he will be prevented from falling like Cooke.6 He is greater now on the stage, and off he should never be less. There is a stupid and under-rating criticism upon him in one of the newspapers. I thought that, last night, though great, he rather under-acted more than the first time. This may be the effect of these cavils; but I hope he has more sense than to mind them. He cannot expect to maintain his present eminence, or to advance still higher, without the envy of his green-room fellows, and the nibbling of their admirers. But, if he don’t beat them all, why, then – merit hath no purchase in ‘these coster-monger days’. No one was better placed than Byron, whose newly published ‘Turkish tale’ The Corsair was simultaneously selling like hot cakes and being savaged by the Tory press, to know the fickleness of the public voice, and there is evidence of real insight into the theatrical world in this spontaneous reflection. Kean could only have been the winner if the incipient friendship between poet and actor had flourished. In the event, he had too few mental resources to cope with the sudden change in his life-style. Having arrived unrecognized in a London buzzing with rumours of war, he found himself, 2 months later, dining with the country’s most famous poet – and a Lord at that – at the home of the most politically active of the Whig grandees.7 Whether he knew it or not, Kean was being sized up as a potential vote-catching recruit to the Whig party in opposition. It is possible that Kean was alert to the political subtext. He must, certainly, have been aware of the Whiggish leanings of the Drury Lane Committee and the contrastingly Tory affiliations of Covent Garden, now operating in open rivalry with Drury Lane. When Kean came to London, Covent Garden was under the active management of the age’s leading tragedian, John Philip Kemble. Like Kean, Kemble had served his apprenticeship in the provinces, but he had been established in London since 1783 – before Kean was born. And the redoubtable Sarah Siddons was his sister. They both belonged to the Prince Regent’s social circle. To the striving Kean, it must have seemed that the whole Kemble family had been silver-spooned to success. In reaction, he came to Shakespearean tragedy like an invader, not an adherent. He had seen Kemble act, and knew where he could not rival him. Kemble was comparatively tall and shapely,

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and quite handsome enough to suit the image of a hero. The athleticism of his youthful performances was behind him by 1814 – he was, after all, well into his 50s – and he had learned to replace it with a stateliness that contemporaries, some admiringly, others vituperatively, called statuesque. But not even his detractors questioned his gentility, a quality highly valued in the fashionable circles of Regency London. In the new year of 1814, Kemble had reason to be serenely confident of Covent Garden’s supremacy over the frenetically back-tracking Drury Lane. Even if he had heard rumours of it, he was certainly not fearing the advent of Kean at the rival playhouse. But there is an important story here, one that not only fuelled responses to Kean’s Shylock on 26 January 1814 but also shaped the furious debates about relative merit that would occupy theatregoers for the next 20 years. Late in 1809, Kemble had been the focus of popular hostility over the increase in admission charges to the rebuilt Covent Garden. Through the course of the Old Price Riots, he had been identified with the ‘old corruption’ of the ruling classes. His whole demeanour during the long disruption of performances – better understood as an attempt to retain some kind of dignity under immense pressure – was read as disdain for the citizenry. And in the end, on behalf of the theatre management, he was forced to compromise. The loss of face had hit Kemble hard, and as soon as circumstances allowed he had taken a 2-year leave of absence from the London stage. His comeback performance, in his favoured role of Coriolanus, had taken place on 15 January 1814. The decision was not without risk: the Coriolanus who scorns the Roman plebs carried echoes of the ‘Black Jack’ who had attempted to ignore the Old Price rioters. But the consensus was that Kemble was back in command. What was Drury Lane going to do about it? Traditionally, challengers for theatrical supremacy would step forward in a role that was ‘possessed’ by the actor they wished to challenge, but Kean was shrewd enough to know that he was ill-equipped to dispossess Kemble of Coriolanus. He chose to put himself forward in the role of an underdog, in stark contrast to Kemble’s Shakespearean overlord. The decision was a wise one. Kean was always at his most effective in playing strong characters whose fate it is to be ultimately outmanoeuvred by people who can better manipulate the rules of the establishment. Shylock, Richard III, Othello, Sir Giles Overreach (in Massinger’s A New Way to Pay Old Debts 8), even King Lear are all victims of what we might now call insider dealing. There are signs of the paranoia that contaminated Kean’s life in his ready identification with outstriven strivers.

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Kean’s Shylock startled people, though it is not always clear why. Douglas Jerrold said that it was ‘like a chapter of Genesis’,9 which is clever but imprecise. William Hazlitt, the best writer and the most searching of the firstnight reviewers, was immediately confident that ‘no actor has come out for many years at all equal to him.’10 Hazlitt was 9 years older than Kean, and still unproven. A. C. Grayling has made the compelling point that ‘the rapid ascent of Hazlitt as a critic and Kean as an actor was something of a double act.’11 It is a coincidence that underpins Kean’s commonly recognized status as the exemplary Romantic actor. Hazlitt’s stance on Shakespeare was as fresh as his stance towards acting. For him, playwright and actor should cast the rules aside and operate in the service of truth, not in order to reproduce life as it is lived but to penetrate its deceptive surface. For that reason, his admiration of Kean’s Shylock was balanced by doubt: ‘There was a lightness and vigour in his tread, a buoyancy and elasticity of spirit, a fire and animation, which would accord better with almost any other character than with the morose, sullen, inward, inveterate, inflexible malignity of Shylock.’12 It was Kean’s energy that Hazlitt found irresistible: ‘in giving effect to the conflict of passions arising out of the contrasts of situation, in varied vehemence of declamation, in keenness of sarcasm, in the rapidity of his transitions from one tone and feeling to another, in propriety and novelty of action, presenting a succession of striking pictures, and giving perpetually fresh shocks of delight and surprise, it would be difficult to single out a competitor.’13 That so much of the historical appraisal of Kean’s acting should be encapsulated in a single review, and after a first encounter, is nothing short of astonishing. But Hazlitt thought it proper to check the legitimacy of his recollection by attending Kean’s second performance of the role on 1 February. His style of acting is, if we may use the expression, more significant, more pregnant with meaning, more varied and alive in every part, than any we have almost ever witnessed. The character never stands still; there is no vacant pause in the action; the eye is never silent. For depth and force of conception, we have seen actors whom we should prefer to Mr Kean in Shylock; for brilliant and masterly execution, none. It is not saying too much of him, though it is saying a great deal, that he has all that Mr Kemble wants of perfection. He reminds us of the descriptions of the ‘far-darting eye’ of Garrick.14 It was not Hazlitt’s intention to denigrate Kemble, whose ‘depth and force of conception’ he admired, but, finding comparison irresistible, he was

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in the vanguard of writers who, by placing Kean among the Romantics, have frozen Kemble, who may belong more properly to the ‘picturesque’, into the posture of the ‘classic’. Looking back over 30 months of theatre reviewing, Hazlitt would summarize his position for readers of the Examiner on 8 December 1816: ‘We wish we had never seen Mr Kean. He has destroyed the Kemble religion and it is the religion in which we were brought up.’15 Kean’s was a Shylock for what has been termed ‘the Age of Reform’, against whose challenges Kemble had closed the shutters of his mind before he retired from the stage in 1817. It was a performance that implicitly questioned the appropriateness of English law. For some few of the audience, it may have pointed a quizzical fi nger at the London Society for the Promotion of Christianity among the Jews, founded as recently as 1809 in the pious hope of providing an emancipatory escape route into the professions.16 Kean’s was more an emotionally revelatory than a theatrically revolutionary Shylock. Charles Macklin had stripped the role of its comedic accretions as long ago as 1741 in a performance that humanized a stage grotesque. In preparation, Macklin had not only paid observational visits to London’s Jewish quarter but also read Josephus’s History of the Jews. The possibility that Macklin’s performance contributed to the passing of the Jewish Naturalisation Act of 1753 cannot be discounted. But the Act, familiarly decried as the Jew Bill, was repealed within months. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, there was a measurable renewal of sympathy for the Jewish community in London, much of it in response to the pugilistic feats of Daniel Mendoza (1764–1836). Kean knew the slightly built Mendoza, may even have taken lessons in boxing under his guidance during his attachment to Richardson’s troupe. The fact that his father, whether Aaron, Moses or Edmund Kean, was almost certainly Jewish must have some bearing on the choice of Shylock for his debut. The Jewish Encyclopedia reminds us that his contemporaries ‘alluded frequently to Kean’s Jewish physiognomy’, and though he was never inclined to research of the Macklin kind, relying rather on his own intuitive reading, expressive face and speaking gesture, he had no need of it in preparing his Shylock. If he modelled his performance on anyone, Mendoza is the likeliest candidate.17 Kean was an expert mimic, but never a slavish one. Bryan Waller Procter,18 his fi rst serious biographer, was convinced that he ‘owed . . . as little to the example of others as any actor who ever appeared before the public’.19 The belief was widely shared. It was on the promise of novelty that Drury Lane was packed to capacity for the second performance

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of The Merchant of Venice. ‘His body thought’ was one observer’s resonant comment on Kean’s Shylock. 20 It was a simple vocal stress that brought Kean his first applause on 26 January 1814. To Shylock’s ‘I think I may take his bond,’ Bassanio has answered, ‘Be assured you may.’ A slight pause, and then, ‘I will be assured I may’ (1.3.26–28). Prolonged applause was the customary way for the audience to signal its approval of a successful innovation. What was being recognized on this occasion was a Shylock in command of himself, the dictator of his own will. But Kean’s eye for detail carried further. In modern editions, the full sentence is usually punctuated thus: ‘I will be assured I may, and that I may be assured, I will bethink me.’ That is not how Kean spoke it. The applause over, he started again: ‘I will be assured I may, and that I may be assured I will – bethink me.’ The antithetical patterning of the spoken sentence rides over the comma. It was always the detail rather than the whole of a part that drew the best out of Kean. This was something both recognized and relished by John Keats. Instead of thinking constantly of the ‘sum-total effect’ (Keats is referring to actors in the school of Kemble), ‘Kean delivers himself up to the instant feeling, without a shadow of a thought about anything else. He feels his being as deeply as Wordsworth, or any other of our intellectual monopolists’: Surely this intense power of anatomizing the passion of every syllable – of taking to himself the wings of verse, is the means by which he becomes a storm with such fiery decision; and by which, with a still deeper charm, he ‘does his spiriting gently’.21 The quality of Kean’s voice, assessed in musical terms, was not high, and it was already registering the effects of dissipation by 1814 – but if Kemble could make the sound of the meaning more melodious, no one rivalled Kean’s ability to point up the meaning of the sound, to make individual words dance. His vocal transitions were as sudden as his physical transitions. Typical was the drop in the voice, after the cataloguing of Antonio’s abuses and the interrogative ‘and what’s his reason?’, on ‘I am a Jew’ (3.1.53–54). This short scene – in which Shylock defies the mockery of Bassanio’s friends, unleashes his ‘Hath not a Jew eyes?’ tirade and goes on to mix with Tubal the anguish over the loss of his daughter (and his ducats) and a fierce relish at the sinking of Antonio’s ships – is punctuated by staccato transitions, tailor-made for Kean’s ‘electric, colloquial, sometimes vulgar virtuosity’.22 It confirmed the authority of Drury Lane’s new star.

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Romantic Shakespeare It was the general intention of Shakespearean productions, from the Restoration right through to the Regency, to smooth the rough edges of a too profuse genius. Even Garrick, whose preparedness to behave ‘in the moment’ was exceptional, set about regularizing Shakespeare in the versions he prepared for performance. Kemble’s comparatively scholarly pursuit of the ruling passion was an actor’s bid to unify plays threatened by too much variety. So far as the theatrical conventions of the time allowed, he interested himself in Shakespeare’s dramaturgy, while Kean, lacking the steadiness of purpose that distinguished Kemble at his best, sought only to exploit the emotional range. His impulse, in preparing himself for each new public display, was to ransack a role on the page in search of its peaks. Most of his memorable ‘points’ were inspired footnotes in action. I have in mind a dangerously enthusiastic scholar who undertakes to prepare an edition of a whole play because he knows of a dozen passages for which he can supply original interpretations. It was, then, Kean’s good fortune to reach London at a hospitable time. ‘Grand manner’ Shakespeare, a neoclassical compromise with the Burkean sublime, 23 was increasingly under scrutiny: with all his faults, George Frederick Cooke had tempted theatregoers with a quirky alternative. Cooke had struggled to survive on the comparatively placid stage of the early 1780s, but the after-effects in England of the French Revolution had changed everything. Shakespeare’s troubled kings had now to be re-imagined, and ‘imagination’, even before Coleridge had placed it at the centre of the Romantic aesthetic, was on the way to displacing ‘sublimity’ as the best evidence of genius. For the artist Henry Fuseli, writing in the wake of the storming of the Bastille, it was ‘an age pregnant with the most gigantic efforts of character, shaken with the convulsions of old, and the emergence of new empires: whilst an unexampled vigour seemed to vibrate from pole to pole through the human mind, and to challenge the general sympathy’.24 Fuseli (1741–1825) was old enough to have seen – and painted – Garrick in action, and sufficiently long-lived to witness Kean in his early glory. He stands as far outside the school of Sir Joshua Reynolds as Kean stood outside the school of Kemble, and his Shakespearean paintings, while telling us nothing specific about contemporary performance, are both theatrically uncanny and uncannily theatrical. ‘What Fuseli really discovered in Shakespeare, apart from his immense dramatic variety, was the mysterious, secretive, orphic nature of the theatre.’25 Kean’s capacity

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to leave his audiences awestruck says much about the rawness of sensibility in Regency London. Emotion was being legitimized as an aesthetic response as well as being vaunted as a creative imperative. Fuseli’s 200th ‘Aphorism’ might almost be read as a commentary on Kean’s style of performance: Consider it as the unalterable law of Nature that all your power upon others depends on your own emotions. Shakespeare wept, trembled, laughed first at what now sways the public feature; and where he did not, he is stale, outrageous or disgusting.26 It was considered entirely appropriate, both before and during Kean’s career, to link actors and painters – ‘ut pictura poesis’ was regularly trotted out as a truism that embraced actors as well as poets. Garrick had commissioned Hogarth, instructed Hayman and cultivated Zoffany with a view to publicizing himself in the present and pictorializing his acting for posterity. Kemble’s staging drew inspiration from the canvases of Nicolas Poussin and the English history painters, and he himself was monumentalized in portraits by Thomas Lawrence. Unlike these illustrious forebears, Kean numbered no notable painters among his erratic circle of friends. George Cruikshank, who drew Kean brilliantly,27 dated his addiction to theatre from a boyhood appearance with him (date unrecorded) – in the kitchen of a public house owned by a theatrical publisher – in Blue Beard.28 They were occasional drinking partners long before Cruikshank’s unlikely conversion to the ranks of the Temperance Movement. But Kean, conscious of his own shortcomings, was generally ill at ease in the company of the culturally sophisticated. The artist who most vividly reflects Kean’s influence in his Shakespearean paintings was not English. Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) saw him as Shylock, Richard III and Othello in 1825, when French Romanticism was at its height, and the performances contributed to his own ‘romantic’ assessment of Shakespeare: Is disproportion one of the conditions that compel admiration? If Mozart, Cimarosa, and Racine are less striking because of the perfect proportion in their works, do not Shakespeare, Michelangelo and Beethoven owe something of their effect to the opposite quality?29 The Shakespeare of Delacroix – and of Kean – achieved a semblance of unity through irregularity: a ‘multitude of separate details’ that ‘seems

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nevertheless to make a single, unified impression on the mind’.30 If Kean’s performances made a unified impression on the minds of his audiences, that apprehension of unity owed more to the audience than to the actor. His admirers celebrated him for his painterly moments: Hazlitt and Procter think most often of Titian, G. H. Lewes of his ‘mingling strong lights and shadows with Caravaggio force of unreality’.31 Coleridge’s much quoted obiter dictum – ‘To see him act, is like reading Shakspere [sic] by flashes of lightning’ – is of the same painterly kind. Part of Coleridge’s unverifiable Table Talk, it is too often cited as the expression of unqualified admiration. The sentences his future son-in-law actually recorded in 1823 are hedged with reservations. Coleridge was, after all, well aware that sitting in a dark room and waiting for lightning is not the best way of reading one of Shakespeare’s plays: Kean is original; but he copies from himself. His rapid descents from the hyper-tragic to the infra-colloquial, though sometimes productive of great effect, are often unreasonable. To see him act, is like reading Shakspere [sic] by flashes of lightning. I do not think him thorough-bred gentleman enough to play Othello.32 The third of these sentences, robbed of its context, is regularly trotted out as the supremely brief summary of Kean’s acting style. Tracy C. Davis was sufficiently antagonized by this practice to argue that Coleridge was using ‘flashes of lightning’ in its contemporary colloquial sense of ‘glasses of gin’.33 Her claim is that Coleridge was not voicing any kind of admiration, but expressing his contempt for Kean’s low-life addiction to cheap alcohol. An ingenious reappraisal of a famous judgement, the essay is nonetheless unconvincing.34 It would be, after all, the ‘reader’ of Shakespeare (Coleridge, not Kean) who imbibes ‘flashes of lightning’ while holding the playbook – an addict (partially reformed) drunkenly contemplating an unregenerate toper. It is safer to accept, however reluctantly and despite its critical framing, the greater probability that the favoured sentence records the visual (and aural) impact of Kean’s ‘Caravaggio force’ amid the lights and shadows of Drury Lane’s unevenly illuminated stage. He was a subject for a Romantic artist, not for Reynolds. When Coleridge delivered his series of lectures on Shakespeare in 1811– 1812, he did so in the knowledge that Milton’s invitation to hear ‘sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy’s child / Warble his native wood-notes wild’35 had become a commonplace of criticism. Coleridge’s Shakespeare, by contrast,

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was a moral philosopher whose understanding of human nature disciplined his creation of dramatic characters: Shakspere [sic] has this advantage over all other dramatists – that he has availed himself of his psychological genius to develop all the minutiae of the human heart: shewing us the thing that, to common observers, he seems solely intent upon, he makes visible what we should not otherwise have seen.36 It was a recognition developed in greater detail in Hazlitt’s Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays (1817), and one which played into Kean’s hands. Hazlitt valued the plays for their emotional truth and Kean’s performances for their grasp of it. Through the variety of his passions, Kean presented images of psychological complexity to audiences newly alerted to the tricks of the human mind. For John Keats, the effect was irresistible. ‘One of my Ambitions’, he wrote, ‘is to make as great a revolution in modern dramatic writing as Kean has done in acting’.37 He had the actor in mind throughout his collaboration with Charles Brown on their five-act tragedy, Otho the Great (1819), despite the touching uncertainty of his conditional, ‘If he smokes the hotblooded character of Ludolph’.38 In the event, and for whatever reason, Kean did not ‘smoke’ Ludolph, and Keats tried again with King Stephen, a project abandoned less than 200 lines in when he read of Kean’s plans to tour America. Keats’s dramatic model, unsurprisingly, was Shakespeare, whose Troilus and Cressida he was reading, or had just read, when he wrote his famous letter on the ‘poetical character’: As to the poetical Character itself (I mean that sort of which, if I am any thing, I am a Member; that sort distinguished from the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime; which is a thing per se and stands alone) it is not itself – it has no self – it is every thing and nothing – It has no character – it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated – It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the camelion poet.39 Hovering above this letter is the vision of a selfless Shakespeare creating ‘selves’ for actors to embody, a poet who must have felt, like Keats, ‘as my imagination strengthens, that I do not live in this world alone but in a thousand worlds’.40

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Of the second generation of Romantic poets, Keats had the greatest affinity with Kean. They even looked alike, both small men with vivid eyes and restless energy, and both, in Keats’s words, living ‘in gusto’. They had similar temperaments, too: both binge-drinkers, both given to running away when life became too threatening for comfort and both running the risk of burning themselves out through some kind of inner compulsion. Keats recognized, and to some extent shared, Kean’s street-fighting impulse: ‘Though a quarrel in the streets is a thing to be hated, the energies displayed in it are fine; the commonest Man shows a grace in his quarrel.’41 Dining with Horace and James Smith, celebrated wits of the period, and hearing them denigrate Kean for the low company he kept, ‘Would I were with that company instead of yours said I to myself’.42 It was, above all, the ferocity with which Kean threw himself into a part that excited Keats’s admiration. He saw it as an abandonment of the self comparable with that of the ‘camelion poet’. This may have been a misjudgement – it would be easy to mount a case for placing any great actor in the camp of the ‘egotistical sublime’ – but it is not without an element of truth. The stage provided Kean with an escape from his unruly self, often enough an escape into grandeur. Unlike Keats, Byron, a Romantic by association more than by inclination, had dealings with the off-stage Kean, and was favourably impressed at first. Two weeks into the actor’s second season at Drury Lane (on 17 October 1814), he wrote to Lady Melbourne: Kean (the Kean) & myself dined together. – Kean is a wonderful compound – & excels in humour & mimicry – the last talent is rather dangerous – but one cannot help being amused with it: in other respects – in private society – he appears diffident & of good address – on the stage he is all perfect in my eyes. Inside Drury Lane, though, the diffidence soon evaporated, and Byron was infuriated the next year by Kean’s rejection of his recommendation that the company should stage William Sotheby’s Ivan. The memory was still rankling on 2 April 1817, when Byron wrote from Venice to his publisher, John Murray. By then Kean, towards the end of his third season at Drury Lane, was tasting failure, and reviewers blamed his performance for the weak showing of Charles Robert Maturin’s second play, Manuel.43 Byron was unsurprised: ‘they ought to act [Sotheby’s] “Ivan” – as for Kean he is an “infidus Scurra”44 and his conduct on this occasion is of a piece with all one ever heard of him.’ Even so, at least three of Byron’s plays – Werner, Cain and The Deformed Transformed – are indebted to Kean’s Richard III,

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and Manfred, where it smoulders, owes something to the same performance. It is in the charismatic figure of the Byronic hero that Kean’s impact might best be felt by a modern reader. Byron’s Shakespeare lacked the subtleties of Coleridge’s or Hazlitt’s. His taste, like Kean’s, was for the bold strokes, and there is food for thought in Alan Downer’s striking suggestion that Kean ‘played Shakespeare’s heroes as if they had been created by Lord Byron’.45

Richard III The decision to follow Shylock with Richard III was a sensible one. It was a part in which Kean felt secure, and one to which he was physically wellsuited. There was the further advantage that it was outside Kemble’s familiar repertoire.46 Royal misdemeanours were no longer a well-kept secret during the Regency. George III had finally been declared unfit to rule in early 1811, and the Prince Regent’s view of marriage was quite as cynical as Richard III’s. Of the old king’s twelve surviving children, few were free from scandal by 1814, and none of his wayward sons could seriously aspire to be, like Hamlet, ‘the mirror of all Christian kings’. Public regard for the monarchy was as low as it had ever been, and would sink lower in the immediate aftermath of George IV’s accession, but that served only to heighten sensitivities, as Mary Russell Mitford would discover in 1825, when she submitted her play Charles the First to the Covent Garden management. By way of justifying his banning of performance, George Colman the Younger, Chief Examiner of Plays, referred to dialogue that was ‘democratical, most insulting to Charles, in particular, and to the Monarchy in general’.47 Shakespeare’s historical plays may have been, through sheer theatrical usage, exempt from censure, but actors who played his kings continued to be measured against idealized concepts of regality. Just how far Kean associated himself with radical republicanism is unknown. He is, though, on record as publicly taking Queen Caroline’s side in her antagonistic marital relationship with George IV as Prince of Wales, Regent and King,48 and there was to be nothing definably ‘kingly’ in his approach to Richard III. That would be the recurrent complaint of the minority of critics who found his interpretation objectionable. The argument over kingliness dated back to Garrick, whose London debut in the role had been received as revolutionary in 1741. It had raged again more recently, and in more overtly fervent times, during George Frederick Cooke’s seasons (1800–1803) at Covent Garden. Here, too, the

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Kemble style had been set up in opposition. James Boaden, friend and biographer, speaks for Kemble: A too apparent CUNNING, broadly marked out to the spectator, Kemble always thought improper, and vulgar in acting. He rightly conceived that the daring ‘Son of York,’ who deceived so many, and moulded all to his purposes, must have been refined in his manners, and, indeed, every thing to all men.49 It was along these lines that Charles Lamb complained of Cooke’s Richard that ‘The hypocrisy is too glaring and visible. It resembles more the shallow cunning of a mind which is its own dupe, than the profound and practised art of so powerful an intellect as Richard’s.’50 What Boaden and Lamb neglect to say is that Cooke’s performance of the role thrilled audiences as Kemble’s never did. And Cooke was Kean’s precedent. It should be borne in mind that the script of Richard III that Kean employed incorporated some of his own emendations to Kemble’s version of Colley Cibber’s adaptation (1700) of a text that had not proved itself sufficiently theatrical to hold its place on the post-Restoration stage. In reconfiguring the title role, Cibber had probably in mind the most effective of contemporary stage villains, the notoriously ugly Samuel Sandford – a ‘villain from necessity’, as Robert H. Ross has reminded us.51 Cibber so cut and pasted the play as to make it a cautionary tale of evil that perishes, scorpion-like, by stinging itself to death. Shakespeare’s variety has been pared down, and for an actor to succeed in the role, as Garrick, Cooke and Kean did, the demand is for extraordinary energy. The problem is clearly expressed in Hazlitt’s review: It is possible to form a higher conception of this character (we do not mean from seeing other actors, but from reading Shakespeare) than that given by this very admirable tragedian; but we cannot imagine any character represented with greater distinctness and precision, more perfectly articulated in every part. Perhaps, indeed, there is too much of this; for we sometimes thought he failed, even from an exuberance of talent, and dissipated the impression of the character by the variety of his resources. 52 And always available was the familiar complaint: ‘in Richard he was unkingly’ was Crabb Robinson’s reminiscence after the end of Kean’s astonishing first season at Drury Lane.53 Significantly, the theatregoing public ignored the handful of detractors. Richard III had opened on 12 February

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1814. For its third performance on 19 February, the free list was suspended (‘no orders will be admitted’ was pasted across the playbills), and the next week an urgent request went out from the management to ‘all persons, to whom a free admission has been granted . . . to abstain from the use of it on the nights of Kean’s performance’.54 Looking back, in 1821, on his career so far, Kean had good reason to call Richard III ‘that character which has been the foundation of my fame and fortune’.55 The survival of detailed notes – amounting almost to a personal promptbook – allows us to come closer to reconstructing Kean’s Richard III than any of his other characters, though these notes tell us little about the impact of his performance.56 They were taken down by the American actor James Hackett (1800–1871) over a series of Kean’s New York appearances in 1825–1826. In them, Hackett claims, ‘I have noted all of the business and readings of Mr Kean in this play, during at least a dozen of his performances of Richard, which will be found here recorded with remarks & readings of my own throughout.’ There is no doubt about the detail. Hackett purports to have underlined each word Kean stressed and, in the margins, to have described every significant movement and gesture. The eyewitness evidence of a fellow professional has a value distinct from, and complementary to, the written responses of reviewers, and although Hackett saw the actor at the latter end of his career, there is good reason to accept that, once he had established himself in a character, Kean aimed to reproduce, not to vary, his performance of it. His rule of thumb, when acting Richard on tour with a stock company of which he had no personal knowledge, was that no actor should come within an arm’s length of him – until the duel with Richmond – and the persistent story is that his ‘rehearsal’ in the new venue was restricted to counting out his paces on the unfamiliar stage. We cannot, of course, know exactly how Hackett measured vocal stresses, and his system of underlining is not sophisticated, but his marking up of the opening soliloquy – delayed until the second scene in Cibber’s adaptation – is indicative of his method. Kean entered to stage centre, ‘hastily – head low – arms folded’: Now is the winter of our discontent Made glorious summer by the sun of York; And all the clouds, that lower’d upon our house, In the deep bosom of the ocean – buried. And here, he ‘unfolds his arms and walks the stage’. As the soliloquy progresses, and always at the same points, he ‘stops short’, ‘grins and frets’,

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‘pulls on his gauntlets tighter and keeps the centre writhing his body R & L and using his right hand’, ‘plays with his sword belt’, ‘starts and crosses’, ‘swings his right arm’, ‘strikes his breast 3 times & points to his forhead’, ‘chuckles’ and exits hastily after the line, ‘And my first step shall be [here he “hesitates”] on Henry’s head’. Hackett’s notes explain and verify Hazlitt’s initial response to Kean’s Shylock: ‘The character never stands still; there is no vacant pause in the action; the eye is never silent.’57 They also go some way to revealing the mechanics of some of Kean’s most famous ‘points’, the clap-traps that punctuated his performance. Bursts of applause were an obligatory audience response to well-made ‘points’, and trained eyes and ears in the auditorium both anticipated and rewarded them. An actor was expected to follow the established rules of stage business at key moments in the play – to make the traditional ‘points’. Kean added new ones, and it was these that his admirers most relished. There are, for example, no references to his killing of Henry VI – a significant interpolation in Cibber’s version, and one which militates against ‘kingliness’ – which culminated in ‘thrusts sword perpendicularly thro’ his body several times’; but few reviewers failed to mention Kean’s conduct on the entrance of Lady Anne. Hackett’s note is mechanically prosaic: ‘Goes to R. H. 1st wing & leans – doffs cap & listens to Lady A.’ G. H. Lewes is much more graphic: Who can ever forget the exquisite grace with which he leaned against the side-scene while Anne was railing at him, and the chuckling mirth of his ‘Poor fool! what pains she takes to damn herself!’ It was thoroughly feline – terrible yet beautiful.58 For the generally unimpressed Crabb Robinson, this scene with Ann was Kean’s finest, ‘And his mode of lifting up her veil to watch her countenance was exquisite.’59 Hackett fills in the gaps of unrecorded ‘points’, as when Richard and Buckingham are plotting the route to the throne: Kean ‘approaches Buck[ingham] and leans on his left shoulder biting his half bent forefinger sideways’. This is the ‘unkingly’ Richard in action, as he was again in the scene with the Lord Mayor. The complaint was that he acted too much there, not only when he was speaking, but also when he was listening. The act of listening gave scope to Kean’s relish of emotional pantomime. This is Hackett’s description of his reaction to Buckingham’s line, ‘Long live our sovereign, Richard, king of England’: ‘Richard loses his self-command at the word “King”, from over-joy, squeezes his book to his breast, then

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instantly checks himself.’ The violent flinging away of the Bible after the departure of the Lord Mayor’s party was an inherited ‘point’: it would have been presumptuous to omit it. But the two most admired of Kean’s innovations came towards and at the end of the play. The first was an insight into Richard’s state of mind on the eve of the Battle of Bosworth. It followed his instruction to Catesby, ‘An hour after midnight, come to my tent, / And help to arm me.’ Hackett’s note reads, ‘pauses & marks out the Battle on the stage with his sword. Stops abruptly & bids “good night”.’ Hazlitt was touched by the ordinariness of the moment as a counterpoint to crisis, and featured it in his comments on Richard III in his Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays: His manner of bidding his friends ‘Good night’, after pausing with the point of his sword, drawn slowly backward and forward on the ground, as if considering the plan of the battle next day, is a particularly happy and natural thought.60 His review for the Morning Chronicle added that, in Drury Lane, it ‘received shouts of applause’. Leigh Hunt, who had been in prison during Kean’s opening season, saw his Richard III in February 1815. It was his first encounter with the actor of whom he had heard so much, and his review for the Examiner is largely taken up with expressions of disappointment, but . . . it would be impossible to express in a deeper manner the intentness of Richard’s mind upon the battle that was about to take place, or to quit the scene with an abruptness more self-recollecting, pithy, and familiar, than by the reverie in which he stands drawing lines upon the ground with the point of his sword, and his sudden recovery of himself with a ‘Good night’. Here, for Hunt, was a rare example of Kean’s ability ‘in a very happy manner to unite common life with tragedy – which is the great stage-desideratum’.61 Hunt was soon to be won over by Kean’s knack of introducing lifelike elements without lessening the intensity of tragedy. Byron needed no persuading. His ‘Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte’, written in April 1814, transports a stage gesture from Drury Lane to the island of Elba by inviting the poem’s subject to ‘trace with thine all idle hand, / In loitering mood upon the sand, / That Earth is now as free’. And the memory was still with Byron when he put the finishing touches to his play Werner in January 1822. It is recaptured in a stage direction: ‘Siegendorf first looks at the Hungarian,

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and then at Ulric, who has unbuckled his sabre, and is drawing lines with it on the floor – still in its sheath.’ Few items of stage business have such an extended literary life, and fewer have been so universally admired. There was clearly something in the little man’s manipulation of his body during the ominous silence that he had himself created that fired the imagination of onlookers. It was often the case, particularly as his health began to fail, that a supreme effort in one scene led to a falling off in the next, and Kean made suprisingly little of the subsequent confrontation with the ghosts of his victims. Hackett tersely notes – evidently as an afterthought, written with a different pen – that ‘Kean’s is a failure in this scene, universally acknowledged.’ There is the further possibility that he was storing energy for the supreme effort of the second of his most admired innovations. Death scenes, not least Kean’s, are easily parodied, and the detail of the play’s final moments is unlikely to appeal to modern sensibilities. At the time, though, his acting out of Richard’s death at the hands of Richmond was a stunning effect. Crabb Robinson’s comment that ‘his sudden death fall was shockingly real as I should suppose men fall on the field’ is an understatement of the emotional impact in performance. Hackett gives a blow-by-blow account of the single combat from Kean’s perspective: fights furiously back & forth – in turning loses balance, falls on his knee, & fights up – in turning, receives Richmond’s thrust – lunges at him feebly after it – clenching is shoved from him – staggers – drops the sword – grasps blindly at him – staggers backward & falls – head to R. H. turns upon right side – writhes – rests on his hands – gnashes his teeth at him (L. H.) – as he utters his last words – blinks – & expires rolling on his back. It goes without saying – the age demanded it – that Richard was given a dying speech of ten lines which Cibber had culled from Othello (‘Perdition catch thy arm’) and his commonplace book, and that the performance came quickly to an end after a single speech from the victorious Richmond and his proclamation by the Earl of Derby as ‘Henry the Seventh, king of England’. Crabb Robinson, who attended the performance on 7 March 1814, was irritated that, after such a death, Kean got up, not only to take a curtain call but also to repeat the ‘spurious lines’ of his dying speech. If there was a precedent for this kind of self-display – Kean might have passed it off as an actor’s generous gratification of the clamour for an encore – Robinson seems not to have known of it.62 The epilogues of the

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Garrick stage were no longer customary. Instead, a leading actor would come before the curtain to ‘give out the play for repetition’, subject to the approval of the audience. Kean might justifiably have taken such approval for granted in 1814, but a wiser man would have hesitated longer before resurrecting his dead self. The legitimate inference is that, over the month that separated his Drury Lane debut as Richard III and Robinson’s visit, public adulation was beginning to go to Kean’s head. It might be argued in his defence that the performance of this part in particular made on him demands comparable with those made on athletes and sportsmen. To cap it with the physical challenge of a fight like this would probably have induced euphoria, a vulnerable condition in which to make rational decisions. Hazlitt, a more discerning judge than Robinson, had nothing but praise for Kean’s physical exertions throughout: He gave to all the busy scenes of the play the greatest animation and effect. He filled every part of the stage. The concluding scene, in which he is killed by Richmond, was the most brilliant. He fought like one drunk with wounds: and the attitude in which he stands with his hands stretched out, after his sword is taken from him, had a preternatural and terrific grandeur, as if his will could not be disarmed, and the very phantoms of his despair had a withering power.63

Othello Kean is the only major British actor to have settled on Othello as his signature part:64 and the choice is all the more surprising because he was, in conventional terms, so ill-suited to it. Coleridge, as we have already seen, did not consider Kean enough of a ‘thorough-bred gentleman’ to play Shakespeare’s Moor, and his physique should have ruled him out even if his claims to gentility had been undeniable. The Othello of convention is a muscular hero, destroyed by the wiles of a man who is both literally and metaphorically smaller. But, as the stage history of the play makes clear, the actor of Iago has a singular advantage over him – he has a licence to make contact with the audience. An opportunistic and legitimately playful Iago is always in a position to make mincemeat of his Othello. Henry Irving did it to Edwin Booth in 1881 after he had, with apparent generosity, invited Booth to alternate the roles at the Lyceum. At the time, although Booth’s season at the small Princess’s Theatre in Oxford Street had been financially unrewarding, there was a groundswell of opinion that he was a finer

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Shakespearean actor than the undisputed champion of England, Irving himself, by now regularly accompanied by Ellen Terry. Louis Napoleon Parker was there for the first night: We were all agog to welcome our Henry and our Ellen. Incidentally we were quite ready to be polite to our American guest, but I think I can honestly say we never saw him. There was, to be sure, a pleasant gentleman representing Othello, but he was timid, he acted in corners; he seemed to beg us not to look at him. And, indeed, it was difficult to see him as all the time our Henry was doing clever bits of by-play, eating grapes and spitting out the pips in a significant manner, which rendered Booth invisible.65 Irving, despite his Victorian respectability, was as capable of mischievous ambition as Kean, whom he considered the greatest of all his predecessors. But even Iagos innocent of malice can obliterate their Othellos. My own memory of watching Bob Peck play Iago opposite Donald Sinden at Stratford in 1979 is very similar to Parker’s at the Lyceum. It is a decent human response, when someone is making a fool of himself in public, to try to divert attention from him, and I left the theatre that night with a strong sense that Peck had been trying to save the show even if it meant annihilating the star. Kean must have known the magnitude of the risk he was taking when he chose Othello as the fourth Shakespearean role of his first Drury Lane season. Either to please the management, or to prove himself for the first time in a role that was currently in Kemble’s possession, he had come out as Hamlet on 12 March 1814, when his novelty value was at its height, and had been rewarded with generally favourable reviews. There was no crying need to hazard another major Shakespearean role as his first season at Drury Lane drew to its end. After all, he had already, single-handedly, transformed a theatre threatened with bankruptcy into a profitable outfit. Why risk burn-out? The opening of Othello was timed for 5 May 1814, during a period when the annual actors’ benefit performances were interspersed with the established repertoire. Benefits traditionally allowed sponsored actors to take risks in front of an abnormally tolerant audience: a comedian might indulge his hankering for tragedy or a tragedian try his voice in a singing role. It may just be that Kean was cautiously slotting his unexpected Othello into the season of good will, but that seems unlikely. With Shylock, Richard III and Hamlet behind him, he was closer to being fearless than he had ever been. It was comparatively easy to chalk up another success in Iago – the

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transition from Richard III to Iago is a natural one – but Kean’s impulse, like Byron’s or Napoleon’s (the heroes of 1814), was less to gratify expectation than to exceed it. Even so, there is presumptive evidence that his success as Othello exceeded his expectations. He had already determined, as back-up, to switch to Iago for the second performance of the play, and he continued to make occasional appearances in that part, to different – and always indifferent – Othellos until 1822. For anyone who saw both, Kean’s Iago bore a family resemblance to his Richard. He played him, as Irving evidently and Peck certainly did, as ‘a cordial, comfortable, easy, humorous villain’,66 while displaying enough of the ‘diseased intellectual activity’67 to satisfy Hazlitt. There were, of course, fine touches. Perhaps taking a hint from Cooke, Kean ensured that the audience did not miss the importance to Iago that Roderigo should not recover from his wounds to give the game away: He therefore, though he at the same time converses coolly with those about him, throws his eye perpetually towards the prostrate body . . . sometimes he walked by it carelessly, and surveyed it with a glance too rapid to be observed: sometimes he deliberately approached it, and looked at it with his candle . . . and thus he continued to hover over and watch it till he leaves the stage.68 Eloquent pantomime of this kind was always the product of careful study, and must sometimes have signalled a disregard for those on stage with him. But there were ensemble touches, too: at the end of the play, his arms pinioned by guards, Kean’s Iago used the power of his eyes to direct Othello’s gaze towards the dead Desdemona. ‘Was not Iago perfection?’ wrote Byron to Thomas Moore the day after the 7 May performance, ‘particularly the last look. I was close to him (in the orchestra), and never saw an English countenance half so expressive’. The role of Iago is the least strenuous in Kean’s repertoire of major Shakespearean characters. He could have continued playing it effectively even when his health and memory were failing, were it not for a major drawback. Iago wins. Kean’s sympathetic imagination fastened on characters who resist the way things are and go their own angular way about challenging the status quo. In the fullness of time, such men fall victim to conservative forces. The outsider, whatever the present promise, is never fully assimilated. It was through intuitive fellowfeeling that Kean insinuated himself into the psychology of his favourite Shakespearean characters during his first season at Drury Lane. Shylock tries to work the Venetian system – and fails. Richard III, born to be an

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outsider, worms his way brilliantly to the centre, only to be overwhelmed by what we might now call insider dealing. Hamlet, with all his subtlety, is ultimately defeated by the Danish system. And Othello is no match for Iago when it comes to the politics of everyday Venetian life. What Kean’s ‘last look’ signified to Othello and to the audience was, ‘if you want proof of the power of the system, there it lies’. The invitation to express – at some length – the full pathos of defeat is sufficient to explain Kean’s preference for Othello; but there is more. The year of Kean’s birth, 1787, was also the year in which the London Abolition Committee was founded. He was 20 when the slave trade was formally abolished, but it was not until 1834, the year after Kean’s death, that slavery itself was outlawed in all British dominions. Throughout his life, then, slavery was a hot issue, and its abolition precisely the kind of cause that excited his radical engagement. It is only Kean’s instinctive championing of oppressed races that explains and justifies his embarrassingly exaggerated delight in being appointed an honorary chief of the Huron Indians while he was performing in Quebec in 1826. The fact that the Moors were not an enslaved people is of no relevance here. Othello was received, on the early nineteenth-century stage, as the noble representative of an ignorant race. Apart from his military credentials, he would not have been distinct, even in the minds of the competently educated, from Olaudah Equiano (c. 1745–1797), whose activities in England had given significant impetus to the abolitionist movement. Othello is black either because Shakespeare thought Moors were black, or because ‘black’ is a synonym for ‘non-white’, and he is admirable, in the fi rst place, because he has risen in society despite the disadvantages of his race and colour. Kean was among those for whom this kind of admiration brought the axioms of ‘society’ into question. William Cowper, a self-elected outsider who lived not far from Equiano and was, like him, embroiled in Methodism, had taken up the cause in 1788 with ‘A Negro’s Complaint’: Deem our nation brutes no longer Till some reason ye shall find Worthier of regard and stronger Than the colour of our kind. Slaves of gold, whose sordid dealings Tarnish all your boasted pow’rs, Prove that you have human feelings Ere you proudly question ours.

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It is possible (I have found no useful reference to his reading habits) that Kean had access to the 1806 edition of Cowper’s works, which contains Fuseli’s powerful illustration to this poem. The posture of Fuseli’s negro is one to catch the eye of an actor, and there is no doubt that Kean pictorialized his creation of Othello with particular care. As Richard, he was over-elaborately dressed, but there was always freedom for movement in his intricately embroidered Othello-tunic. His skin was coffee-tinted, not black, and his flamboyant ear-rings combined exoticism with a hint of the street-arab. This was to be an Othello whose passion, once aroused, released an impulse to take revenge on his oppressors.69 The literature of the period is peppered with noble savages, from Robert Bage’s Hermsprong (1796) to Fenimore Cooper’s last of the Mohicans (1826). There is an early theatrical sketch in Cumberland’s The West Indian (1771) and another in the younger Colman’s Inkle and Yarico, first staged in the year of Kean’s birth. Thomas Southerne’s Oroonoko (1695), too, held its place in the national repertoire into the nineteenth century. (Kean demanded its revival in January 1817.) It is true that these plays, to which might be added Thomas Morton’s The Slave (1816), rely on cardboard stereotypes and tend to exonerate the English. Without such a compromise, they would have been censored, since the spirit of something that could seriously be called egalitarianism was not readily welcomed on the early nineteenth-century stage. The significant point is that, despite their prevarications, they relied for their popular reception on a wave of sentiment that was as powerful in the slave ports of Bristol and Liverpool as it was in London. It was this wave that Kean’s Othello rode. Leigh Hunt considered it ‘the masterpiece of the living stage’,70 and Hazlitt supposed it ‘the finest piece of acting in the world’.71 Even the sceptical Crabb Robinson was persuaded: ‘Of all the characters in which I have yet seen Kean – Othello is the one for which he is by nature the least qualified. And it is that in which he has most delighted me.’72 Robinson’s is a significant voice here. He was not alone in being surprised into admiration. So early in his London career, Kean had turned the tables on his would-be detractors. His fondness for Othello is best understood in competitive terms. It was a role that even his supporters feared was beyond him. More even than his unknown Shylock at the opening of his season, his Othello was the victory of an underdog. The price of Kean’s success was his paranoia – but paranoia may also have been the condition of his success, the undetected factor that gave his performances their overpowering edginess during the 6 or 7 years that he had it under control. More even than Richard III, Othello became his weapon in the constant theatrical warfare in which he felt himself engaged. The

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most famous example occurred during Kean’s third season at Drury Lane. In the search for a rival attraction, the Covent Garden management had lighted on Junius Brutus Booth (1796–1852), who had schooled himself on Kean and threatened to outshine him. With Kean’s connivance, and on the opportunistically seized pretext of a salary dispute, Booth was enticed to play Iago at Drury Lane. What followed was a hatchet job. The general view is that honours were even for the first two acts, while Kean prepared himself for the tumultuous confrontation in Act Three. Then, as Procter recalls, Kean ‘glared down upon the now diminutive Iago; he seized him and tossed him aside, with frightful and irresistible vehemence’.73 We should give credit to Procter’s retrospect on the fierce choreography of this on-stage combat, since it is variously recorded in so many contemporary accounts. ‘There is no doubt’, he writes, ‘that Kean was excited on this occasion, in a most extraordinary degree; as much as though he had been maddened by wine. The impression which he made upon the audience has, perhaps, never been equalled in theatrical annals’. This prize-fight defeat of 20 February 1817 was a disaster for Booth. By the evening of the scheduled repeat performance, two days later, he had left London and had to be replaced by Kean’s regular whipping-boy and drinking partner, Alexander Rae.74 Over the years that followed, when challenged by a rival talent, Kean would routinely arrange for him to play Iago and allow him to build up his confidence before pulverizing him in Act Three. This was still the case in 1822, by which time Kean’s dissipated lifestyle had destroyed his stamina. Under its impulsive new manager – Charles Lamb’s ‘great lessee’, Robert William Elliston75 – Drury Lane was again in crisis, and Elliston hit on the ruse of pairing Kean with the last great relic of the Kemble school of rhetoric, Charles Mayne Young (1777–1856). There is an aura of pathos around Kean’s reaction. He hated to admit, even to himself, that he was already past his best. ‘Aut Caesar, aut Nullus is my text,’ he wrote to Elliston. ‘If I become secondary in any point of view, I shrink into insignificance.’76 There was no denying that Young’s was the finer voice,77 and the contrast promised to be the classic one, replayed in the twentieth-century rivalry of Olivier and Gielgud, between the actor you see (the essentially pantomimic actor that Kean was) and the actor you hear. Later in the 1822–1823 season, Kean would complain to James Winston of having to ‘play again with that bloody thundering bugger’.78 But the contentious issue to be resolved was the choice of play for their first appearance together. Young’s preference was for Venice Preserved, with himself as Pierre opposite Kean’s Jaffeir. ‘If Mr. Young is ambitious to act with me,’ wrote Kean, ‘he must commence with Iago . . . I have doubtless

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my choice of weapons. He must play Iago! Before I act Jaffeir. I am told he is extraordinarily great in Pierre – if so – I am beaten – this must not be – I cannot bear it. I would rather go in chains to Botany Bay – I am not ashamed to say – I am afraid of the contest.’79 The language of weaponry and contest has taken on a defensive tone which it would never have had when Kean was at his peak. At least, though, he won the first phase of the battle. It was in Othello, on 27 November 1822, that Young and Kean made their first appearance together, and once again in Act Three that the possessed Othello threatened to blow his Iago away. If Young survived, it was because of the quality of ‘repose’ that he had inherited from Kemble. Even his admiring son and biographer concedes that Young ‘hardly ever astonished’.80 When Kean failed to astonish, he was nothing. In repose, or when coasting to preserve his energy for the next physicalization of passion, he came increasingly to border on the inert. It was, perhaps, because Act Three of Othello produced from him the most sustained piece of impassioned acting he ever attempted that his performance stood out – primus inter pares. ‘I have gotten a box for Othello tonight, and send the ticket for your friends,’ Byron told Thomas Moore on 26 May 1814. ‘I seriously recommend to you to recommend to them to go for half an hour, if only to see the third act.’ The history of Kean’s Othello is as long as his active life. G. H. Lewes remembers his playing the part opposite Macready, late in his career and coping with a gouty hobble and a drinker’s hoarseness, but still ‘irradiated with such flashes that I would again risk broken ribs for the chance of a good place in the pit to see anything like it’.81 And it was in a gesture of public reconciliation – characteristically mixed with pique at the Drury Lane manager’s refusal to extend him a loan – that, on 25 March 1833, he crossed to Covent Garden to play Othello to his respectable son’s Iago. Charles Kean had never hidden his disapproval of his father, openly taking his mother’s side over the scandal of their separation and establishing a life-style in pious contradiction of the paternal example. He had defied his father by becoming an actor, and hated to be compared with him – not surprisingly, since any comparison was likely to be detrimental. But Charles was no fool. It was the family connection that had raised him to unearned prominence. They had played together in the provinces, and their joint engagement at Covent Garden was calculated to bring in the crowds. The reiterated story of what happened on the night of 25 March is almost too bad to be true – legend blurring with history. As usual, Kean glided through the first two acts, but the exertions of Act Three were too much for him. He got no further than ‘Othello’s occupation’s gone’

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before being forced to lean on Charles for support, and whispering, ‘I am dying – speak to them for me.’ Or so they say. What is certain is that he was dead within two months. It is tempting to speculate on the possibility that he might have lived a little longer if he had opted for Iago rather than for Othello. His personal investment would have been measurably smaller. For Kean, Othello was as much a slogan as a role. The Moor stood in for the victimized and the rejected, which is to say that he stood for Kean.

Other Shakespearean Roles Kean got away with Hamlet in the heady atmosphere of his opening season, although Hazlitt, who paradoxically praised the performance, questioned the overall interpretation: ‘we think his general delineation of the character wrong. It was too strong and pointed.’82 Charles Kemble, John’s younger brother, similarly criticized Kean’s Othello: ‘If the justness of the conception had been but equal to the brilliancy of the execution it would have been perfect; but the whole thing was a mistake; the fact being that Othello was a slow man.’83 Kean’s eye was always for detail rather than consistency. He travelled through character like a picaresque hero through circumstance, plucking possibilities on his way. Hazlitt alludes to one of his footnote-like innovations: ‘In the scene where he breaks from his friends to obey the commands of his father, he keeps his sword pointed behind him, to prevent them from following him, instead of holding it before him to protect him from the Ghost.’84 Unlike Kemble’s, Kean’s Hamlet met his father’s ghost with filial love rather than mortal fear. Of his other innovations, perhaps the most theatrically exciting was his decision to abort his exit, after he has condemned Ophelia to a nunnery, by rushing back to kiss her hand before leaving the stage precipitately. But Hamlet burns slowly. It was not a part for Kean, who preferred to blaze. His remedy was to simmer like a Byronic hero, nursing the knowledge of a secret guilt, and caring little about the effect on others of his bizarre behaviour. His conduct during the play-within-the-play was too graceless for the Herald reviewer: During the mimic representation, Mr. Kean so far forgot that inalienable delicacy, which should eternally characterize a gentleman in his deportment before the ladies, that he not only exposed his derrière to his mistress, but positively crawled upon his belly towards the King like a wounded snake in a meadow, rather than a Prince openly indulging himself in moral speculation in the salon of a royal palace.85

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For the dissentient minority, it was a source of gratification to see through the Prince of Denmark to the guttersnipe behind the costume. His playing of Hamlet is a crux for those who stand in judgement, for or against, Kean. Reiko Oya makes it the focus of her discussion of Kean’s cultural significance in the Romantic assault on the values of the eighteenth century,86 but she is unaffected by the moral dilemma that confronted his contemporaries and, much more radically, the Victorian generations that followed. From the vantage-point of 1845, the splendidly outspoken ‘Old Playgoer’, William Robson, calls on Colley Cibber as a witness for the prosecution in his case against Kean for presuming to play Hamlet. What Cibber had said about George Powell, who ‘was something in the Kean vein’, applies here: ‘the briskest loose liver, or intemperate man, though morality were out of the question, can never arrive at the necessary excellence of a good or useful actor.’ Robson’s case is proven: Kean was a vulgar actor [who] might keep the denizens of the Coal-hole87 in a roar, and be followed to the theatre by his troop of ‘wolves;’ but such orgies could never qualify him to represent that Prince who was ‘the glass of fashion and the mould of form; the courtier’s, scholar’s, soldier’s, eye, tongue, sword’.88 Coleridge, whether or not Tracy Davis has rightly interpreted him, was saying much the same thing 20 years earlier. Kean’s Macbeth, the first new role of his second season at Drury Lane, was a curate’s egg, strongest when sinking to the depths of bewilderment or rising to the heights of determination. Romeo, which he reluctantly agreed to take on in competition with the successful revival of the play at Covent Garden (Eliza O’Neill as the Juliet of men’s fantasies), was even less within his compass. There was nothing of the naive lover about his stage persona. For the last Shakespearean outing of his second season, Kean selected the title role in the rarely performed Richard II. The text used was mangled beyond recognition, and his performance elicited from Hazlitt one of his most celebrated formulae: ‘Mr. Kean made it a character of passion, that is, of feeling combined with energy; whereas it is a character of pathos, that is to say of feeling combined with weakness.’89 Hazlitt seems always to have been capable of holding Shakespeare in his head while watching and listening to a garbled version, and he had an indisputable point to make. The fact would seem to be that Kean lost his access to feeling whenever he forfeited his energy. Unlike Kemble and Young, he could not feel in repose.

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The craze for Kean was already on the wane by the end of the 1814– 1815 season, which is not to say that he had fallen out of favour, only that novelty has a limited time-span. He was now established as Kemble’s only serious contender for the crown of tragedy, and confident enough to choose his own friends rather than hover, cap in hand, on the fringes of fashion. It was in the summer of 1815 that he founded the Wolves Club at the Coal Hole Tavern in Fountain Court. So many rumours and scandals attached themselves, during its short life, to the activities of this hard-drinking society that its raison d’être has been obscured. Kean spelt it out, with calculated pomposity, in his address to members at the fi rst official meeting: When men consider they were created for each other, not only for themselves, the interests of mankind must be blended with individual speculation, and in everyone that bears the human form each man must be a brother; and it is my wish to instil these sentiments into the minds of our little community, that no insignificant distinctions shall have weight when we can (with personal convenience) serve a fellow creature; or worldly exaltation prevent us from mixing with worthy men, whom I must conceive the great Author of all being intended for equality.90 Stripped of its bluster, this is a declaration of radical opposition to privilege. The Wolves knowingly satirized the manners and attitudes of the gentlemen’s clubs on which their ‘society’ was mockingly modelled. It was a gentlemen’s club from which gentlemen were excluded. Instead, prize-fighters mingled and drank with actors and tradesmen. There is no clearer evidence of Kean’s political position than the attacks to which he and the Wolves were subjected in the Tory press. Although surviving proof is scarce, A. C. Grayling is surely right in saying that, at least until fear silenced him, ‘Kean vociferously publicized his radical political views off-stage.’91 More concerned to shore up his reputation than to risk it, Kean took on no new Shakespearean roles during his third season. Early in his fourth (1816–1817), though, he persuaded the management of Drury Lane to stage Timon of Athens. Leigh Hunt surmises that the managers agreed because of ‘the great success of Mr. Kean in characters of a certain caustic interest’.92 For Kean, always careless of dramaturgy, the title role had ‘outsider’ appeal, and he was still confident of his ability to carry a shaky play. The Hon. George Lamb, a member of the management committee,

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had already abridged the text, and it was Kean’s established custom, when working up a play for performance, to eliminate any remaining material that threatened to shift the focus away from him. He had done so successfully, at the end of the 1815–1816 season, with Maturin’s Bertram (the staged version was quite as much Kean’s as Maturin’s). Why not with Timon? The audience responded respectfully, but without enthusiasm, and Timon left the repertoire after seven performances. By the summer of 1817, Drury Lane was again in financial crisis. Kean was now powerful – and bloodyminded – enough to limit his appearances to the agreed number, and it was no longer true that the box-office income on his performance nights compensated for the shortfall elsewhere. In the desperate hope of persuading him to appear more often, the managers gave him free choice of plays for his fi fth season (1817–1818). Even at the time, and certainly in retrospect, that was a mistake. Herman Merivale’s squeezing of the Henry VI plays into the single Richard Duke of York provided Kean with a pallid reflection of Richard III – it lasted for seven performances – and as King John, a Kemble part in the year of Kemble’s heralded retirement from the stage, he had his first outright Shakespearean failure. The production struggled through three nights. Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, with Kean as Barabas, fared better (eleven performances) and a dramatization of Byron’s poem, The Bride of Abydos, was repeated fourteen times. This was the only play in which Kean openly took on the role of a Byronic hero. By the end of the season, receipts at Drury Lane had fallen £4,000 below the running costs. Despite his aspirations and his confidence that he could do better than the gentleman-amateurs who were running the theatre, Kean had no aptitude for management. The gentleman-amateurs knew that. When, in the summer of 1819, they offered up Drury Lane for rent, Kean’s application was rejected and the lease went to Elliston. Kean’s years of undisputed greatness were few. By 1820, the best were behind him. It was probably in that year that he began the protracted affair with Charlotte Cox that would reach its shattering conclusion in his January 1825 trial for ‘criminal conversation’ with a married woman. It was also in 1820 (24 April) that he made his London debut as King Lear, the last of his Shakespearean roles to retain any historical interest. Two months earlier, a victim of his own competitiveness, he had been spurred to rival Macready’s Covent Garden Coriolanus, widely received as second only to Kemble’s. The inevitable comparisons favoured Macready and fed Kean’s paranoia. In context, the determination to play Lear was brave. Charles Lamb was not alone in believing the play unperformable

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and better unperformed. Reviewing Kean’s performance for the London Magazine, Hazlitt hedged his bets: There are pieces of ancient granite that turn the edge of any modern chisel; so, perhaps, the genius of no living actor can be expected to cope with Lear. Mr. Kean chipped off a bit of the character here and there; but he did not pierce the solid substance, nor move the entire mass.93 For Hazlitt, ‘the third act of Othello and the three first acts of Lear, are Shakespeare’s great master-pieces in the logic of passion.’94 Kean, never a logical actor, had surprised him in the third act of Othello, but it was not until Kean’s Lear fell to his knees, with his head thrown back ‘like the figure of a man obtruncated’, to curse Goneril that Hazlitt felt his first ‘electric shock’.95 Other observers were more positive and some reviewers adulatory. For them, this was a supreme example of the actor’s craft of self-abandonment. The Blackwood’s critic found Kean’s Lear ‘most purely unaffected and untheatrical’, F. W. Hawkins placed it second only to Othello among his characters, and Elliston was gratified by full houses at last. Kean had considered restoring the tragic ending, but settled for following custom with Nahum Tate’s prettier resolution. In 1820 he was not as defiant as he had been in 1815. The Wolves Clubman had become a Freemason.96 It was a relief to Kean, after the 1819–1820 season of disappointed hopes, to escape to America, where he did the round of his favourite Shakespearean roles, made a lot of money, and offended Bostonian pride by refusing to perform Richard III to a sparse audience (it was the summer of 1821, and the well-heeled of Boston had left the city). Elliston shrewdly made a grand procession out of his return to Drury Lane, but the 1821–1822 season was a bitter one. Kean’s Wolsey in Henry VIII was coldly received, and he was an unhappy Posthumus opposite Young’s Iachimo in Cymbeline. He would have liked to prove himself equal to Garrick’s versatility by playing comedy, but shrewd opinion was against it: ‘he had no playfulness that was not as the playfulness of a panther, showing his claws every moment’ was G. H. Lewes’s cautionary retrospect.97 With a single exception, the rest of his Shakespearean career was confined to the repetition of the public’s favourite roles: Shylock, Richard III, Othello and occasionally Hamlet. The exception was the occasion for one of the saddest episodes in an increasingly sad story. Kean had been living wildly for well over a decade when the Cox v Kean trial opened in January 1825. Prurient interest was fed by the reading in court of some of his extravagant love-letters, and the verdict, unsurprisingly, went against him, His sense of being hunted

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in London was not new – he had acquired a house and 20 acres on the Isle of Bute as a bolt-hole and love-nest in 1822 – but now it frequently overwhelmed him. Worst of all, his memory was failing him. He was comfortable with his familiar roles, but new ones eluded him. He ought to have known that. The fiasco of his attempt at his friend Thomas Colley Grattan’s Ben Nazir in May 1827 had shocked him as much as it had shocked Grattan. But Kean was a fighter, and it galled him to hear reports of Macready’s growing repertoire of roles at Covent Garden. Like a veteran boxer on the comeback trail, he needed to show the public that he could still measure up. He needed to prove it to himself, too. Even so, without the assistance of an abnormally wide self-destructive streak, Kean would never have attempted Henry V at Drury Lane in March 1830. He struggled through for as long as he could on smatterings of half-remembered lines against hisses from the auditorium, but, despite his pleading apology before the final act, there was no hope of recovery. Abject, he wrote to his friend W. H. Halpin, editor of the Star: Fight for me, I have no resources in myself; mind is gone, and body is hopeless. God knows my heart. I would do, but cannot. Memory, the first of goddesses, has forsaken me, and I am left without a hope but from those old resources that the public and myself are tired of. Damn, God damn ambition. The soul leaps, the body falls.98

Non-Shakespearean Roles Kean’s arrival in London coincided with the flowering of melodrama as the dramatic mode most accommodating to the taste of the time. Shylock, Richard III and Othello are comparatively easily tilted towards the melodramatic, as is the finest of Kean’s non-Shakespearean roles, that of Sir Giles Overreach in Massinger’s A New Way to Pay Old Debts. Contemporaries were persuaded by great acting that they were privileged to be present at great drama – a sleight-of-hand that inflated the reputation of Maturin’s Bertram and the younger Colman’s The Iron Chest. Because Kean shone in them, these ‘modern’ plays were accorded a place in the tragic repertoire, and yet, however advertized to their first audiences, they are melodramas. It is clear enough how tragedy is dramaturgically different. It follows through with the logic of its own dire narratives instead of setting up the inevitable and then avoiding it. But the distinction is not so clear when approached from the perspective of the actor. What, for example, of King Lear, in the

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form in which Kean’s company played it? Nahum Tate preserves the old king to ‘gently pass our short reserves of time / In calm reflections on our fortunes past’, and ensures the country’s future prosperity by marrying a healthy Cordelia to Edgar. Kean would not have changed his ‘tragic’ style because the ‘tragedy’ had been mangled into melodrama. He played it, as he played every part that mattered to him, as if it was his life that was on the line. Even John Kemble acknowledged that: ‘our styles of acting are so totally different, that you must not expect me to like that of Mr. Kean,’ he told James Boaden, ‘but one thing I must say in his favour, – he is at all times terribly in earnest.’99 Hazlitt, who knew the difference between a good play and a bad one, nevertheless felt the force of Kean’s Sir Edward Mortimer in The Iron Chest: The last scene of all, his coming to life again after his swooning at the fatal discovery of his guilt, and then falling back after a ghastly struggle, like a man waked from the tomb, into despair and death in the arms of his mistress, was one of those consummations of the art, which those who have seen and have not felt them in this actor, may be assured that they have never seen or felt anything in the course of their lives, and never will to the end of them.100 The implicit slur on anyone who could see Kean act without being moved was a common one. It gave rise to quarrels, even among friends, and cemented the rivalry of Keanites and Kembleites.101 What can be said with confidence is that Kean knowingly worked on his audience. There was no fourth wall in his Drury Lane, and the auditorium was not separated from the stage by darkness. It is a different experience of theatre if you can see (and hear) the reactions of people around you as well as those of the actors, and an actor who must milk an audience he can see as well as hear must know how to read the signs. It was Kean’s good fortune to arrive in London at a time when theatregoers were attuned by melodrama to excess. His admirers were convinced that he, more than any other actor – ever, knew how to carry the emotional truths of tragedy into their consciousness. For them, perhaps he did. But we need to be wary of neat distinctions between tragedy (which appeals to the emotions) and melodrama (which plays on the nerves) when we speculate on the nature of Kean’s achievement. Hazlitt’s response to his death scene in The Iron Chest (but, this being melodrama, Mortimer survives) demands further consideration. The Iron Chest failed on its first production at Drury Lane in 1796. Among the reasons for that failure was John Kemble’s fumbling inadequacy in the

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role of Sir Edward Mortimer. It may be that he had overdosed on laudanum – a treatment for the asthma that increasingly afflicted him – or it may be that he was drunk. (Despite the aura of respectability that surrounded him, Kemble was almost as indulgent as Kean, but wise enough to get drunk with his social superiors rather than before them.) Colman took Kemble to task in an angry preface to the published play, and its reputation was rescued when the author revived it at the Haymarket, of which he was then manager, with the versatile Elliston in Kemble’s role. It would have been a special delight for Kean to succeed in 1816 where Kemble had failed 20 years earlier. Colman called The Iron Chest a tragedy, but it is a melodrama avant la lettre, and Mortimer is interesting only because he transposes the ‘secret guilt’ of Gothic plays into a less rarefied world. The source was William Godwin’s novel Caleb Williams (1794), from which Colman had scrupulously expunged anything that might ‘inculcate levelling principles, and disrespect for the Laws of our Country’.102 What remains is a reasonably well made, but utterly routinized, mixed drama, with songs and low comedy interspersing scenes of pathos and extremity. Whenever Mortimer is on stage, he carries inner turmoil with him, and the eventual revelation of his guilt produced from Kean a representation of human pain that Hazlitt registered as ‘one of those consummations of the art’ of acting. The ability to perform so affectingly without serious support from the play has to be seen as remarkable. When Irving, the supreme exponent of secret guilt, set out to emulate Kean at the Lyceum in 1879, his playing of Mortimer was similarly singled out, but times had changed and the play was found wanting. As one admirer of Irving observed, The Iron Chest is ‘a vehicle for a great actor’s performance, in which he can succeed only if he has an overpowering personality’.103 A ‘personality actor’, like Kean and like Irving, never disappears into a part: he relocates himself in it. Sometimes even more is needed: since Colman neglected, or failed, to endow Mortimer with any character of his own, Kean and Irving (and even Elliston) had to fill the hollow with their own ‘personality’. And when, as became increasingly obvious with Kean, the personality is so manifestly a damaged one, theatricality and psychopathology combine to stimulate an irresistible curiosity. The test case is that of Sir Giles Overreach in A New Way to Pay Old Debts. So long as Kean was fit to perform it, Massinger’s play was an essential item in the national repertoire, and the descent into madness of Sir Giles Overreach had an effect on Kean’s audiences comparable with that of his writhings as Sir Edward Mortimer. The routinely cited case is that of Lord Byron, who purportedly had a fit (or, alternatively, fainted) at a

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performance in 1816. Legend and truth are tangled here, and Byron’s own recollection invites scepticism. Writing to John Murray from Bologna on 12 August 1819, he provides a more probable explanation: Last night I went to the representation of Alfieri’s Mirra – the last two acts of which threw me into convulsions. – I do not mean by that word – a lady’s hysterics – but the agony of reluctant tears – and the choaking shudder which I do not often undergo for fiction. – This is but the second time for anything under reality, the first was on seeing Kean’s Sir Giles Overreach. ‘Reluctant tears’ and a ‘choaking shudder’ are evidence enough of an actor’s impact, and Kean was clearly able to uncover in Massinger’s villainous capitalist – a blueprint for the heartless landlords of nineteenth-century melodrama – an emotional profundity that threatened the play’s status as a comedy. He had seized on Shylock with a similar rapacity, but the selfidentification with Overreach was even more compelling. The play was not Kean’s discovery. Garrick had revived it, and Kemble had played it during the previous century, but dropped it from his repertoire after unfavourable comparisons with Cooke, until unwisely reviving it, in conscious competition with Kean, a few weeks after the Drury Lane première. Kemble had no temperamental affinity with Overreach, no personal sense of the ‘strange antipathy / Between us, and true gentry’ (2.1.88–9). For Kean, the contradiction at the heart of the role was an expression of his own confusion. Overreach’s contempt for the aristocracy is matched by his determination to marry his daughter into it: ‘All my ambition is to have my daughter / Right honourable’ (4.1.99–100). (Kean sends his son to Eton.) A New Way to Pay Old Debts is almost exclusively concerned with issues of class. (So was the Wolves Club, founded a few months before Kean’s London debut as Overreach.) Massinger scattered into Overreach’s lines the words ‘Lord’ and ‘honourable’. ‘We think Mr. Kean never shewed more genius than in pronouncing this single word, Lord’, wrote Hazlitt after his second visit to the Drury Lane production:104 Sir Giles, he continued, ‘makes use of Lord Lovell merely as the stalking-horse of his ambition. In other respects, he has the greatest contempt for him, and the necessity he is under of paying court to him for his own purposes, infuses a double portion of gall and bitterness into the expression of his self-conscious superiority’. Overreach has more money than the aristocracy, and knows it: ‘my wealth / Shall weigh his titles down, and make you equals’ (3.2.103–4). Kean had more talent than the aristocracy, and knew it. His dependence on the approbation

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of the occupants of the boxes riled him constantly. In the end, Overreach is outmanoeuvred (a fear of being outmanoeuvred kept Kean on the qui vive), and ‘offers to kill’ his own daughter. Lord Lovell intervenes: at the best you are but a man, And cannot so create your aims, but that They may be crossed. (5.1.297–9) And Overreach spits at him. It was an action that lingered in Byron’s memory, and one that he reproduced in his play Marino Faliero. To John Murray, who had warned him of Ugo Foscolo’s objection to this episode, he wrote on 8 October 1820: I know what F means about Calendaro’s spitting at Bertram – that’s national – the objection I mean. – The Italians and French – with those ‘flags of Abomination’ their pocket handkerchiefs – spit there – and here – and every where else – in your face almost – and therefore object to it on the Stage as too familiar. – But – we who spit nowhere – but in a Man’s face – when we grow savage – are not likely to feel this. – Remember Massinger – and Kean’s Sir Giles Overreach. We should not forget, when assessing the significance of Kean’s spitting at a Lord in 1816, the levelling tendency of melodrama, a genre in which simple virtue might outshine high birth. Overreach, to be sure, is to be compared with the heartless landowners who try to dispossess the helpless heroines of melodrama. But Kean found in him the victim of establishment conspiracy – like Shylock, an exploited exploiter. The Venetian Christians had spat on Shylock’s Jewish gabardine. Kean’s Overreach was spitting back. A New Way to Pay Old Debts stayed in Kean’s repertoire for the remaining 17 years of his life: he last played Overreach at Brighton in late February 1833. In failing health, he could hold himself in reserve for four acts, in anticipation of the supreme effort of Act Five and, if his performance was uneven, he never disappointed his audiences at the climax. For G. H. Lewes, who contended that ‘[t]he greatest artist is he who is greatest in the highest reaches of his art’: all defects were overlooked or disregarded, because it was impossible to watch Kean as Othello, Shylock, Richard, or Sir Giles Overreach without being strangely shaken by the terror, and the pathos, and the passion of a stormy spirit uttering itself in tones of irresistible power.105

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Such a judgement reflects a significant shift in what social historians have called the mentalité of the British public – a shift already discernible in the difference between a portrait by Joshua Reynolds and one by Gainsborough, and fully established by the time Thomas Lawrence created his images of Kemble. Shakespeareans were being led away from the Johnsonian dictum that ‘Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature.’106 Kemble, it might be argued, pursued a Johnsonian route through Shakespeare’s heroes. ‘In the writings of other poets’, Johnson continued, ‘a character is too often an individual; in those of Shakespeare it is commonly a species.’ We can be fairly certain that Johnson would have hated Kean: The irregular combinations of fanciful invention may delight a-while, by that novelty of which the common satiety of life sends us all in quest; but the pleasures of sudden wonder are soon exhausted, and the mind can only repose on the stability of truth. Romantic Shakespeare, by contrast, delighted in the ‘pleasures of sudden wonder’, and ‘fanciful invention’ had brought into question ‘the stability of truth’. Kean spoke to an age that preferred the individual to the general. ‘Our’ Shakespeare, as Coleridge wrote, is ‘myriad-minded’,107 and he countered Johnson with a dictum of his own: ‘Nothing can permanently please, which does not contain in itself the reason why it is so, and not otherwise.’108 It was because he seemed, however mysteriously, to contain within himself the reasons why Shylock, Richard III, Othello and Sir Giles Overreach were so, and not otherwise, that Kean persuaded audiences of the truth of his characterizations. No one else would, or could, have come so close to the sources of behaviour. Kean’s intense style of acting was, for those alert to it, complex psychology in action. The nineteenth-century novel would adopt him. Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff was not far away.

A Coda Without its sequel in the steep decline into dissipation, the story of Edmund Kean’s triumph would not have leant itself so readily to legend. Alcohol and philandering have damaged many other actors’ careers, but most have been better at concealment than Kean was. The trajectory of John Barrymore (1882–1942) runs parallel: the intense rivalry with his brother

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Lionel, his increasing tendency to go missing when the pressure became too great, the addiction to women (four of whom he married), the friendships with boxers (Kid McCoy and Jack Dempsey), his purchase of a rural bolt-hole, the self-humiliation involved in continuing to act when he could no longer hold lines in his head. And there is, of course, a Barrymore legend: Everything he did was in an epic way, and, even when he appeared to be making an embarrassing clown of himself, he did so on a grand and wholesale scale, coming apart with boisterous gargantuan humor and a sardonic air of self-criticism.109 There is too little sign, though, of a capacity for self-criticism in Kean, and very little humour in the legend, unless embroidered by Mark Twain. But Barrymore belonged to the theatrical aristocracy: Kean slid into the theatre through the tradesman’s entrance. He had no better way of dealing with fame than the drug-doomed rock stars of the twentieth century. Followers of American boxing may remember the fate of Jack Johnson: followers of British football may think of the genius of George Best, who remained a working-class Belfast boy while living like a lord and drinking himself to at least three deaths. Best, who looked a bit like Kean and moved with a similar sinister grace, even has an airport named after him. Biographers, even one as uneasy as Bryan Waller Procter, stimulate legends, but Kean’s was better fed by Alexandre Dumas père. Working over a rejected script, Dumas produced a play (Kean: ou, Désordre et génie) in which any relation to anything that might be called historical truth is entirely accidental. His Kean is an irresistible force, let loose on the English classsystem, a mixture of ‘master-at-arms and mountebank, drunkard and Lovelace’,110 loved by modest women, greedily pursued by their aristocratic ‘betters’, feared by the Prince of Wales, resourceful in adversity – a blood relation of Cyrano de Bergerac and D’Artagnan, with a low-life dash of François Villon. Kean was staged at the Théâtre des Variétés in Paris, just over three years after its subject’s death, and with the largerthan-life Frédérick Lemaître (1800–1876) in the title role. Lemaître lived as excessively, and courted notoriety as brazenly, as Kean had during the glory years, and his charisma was vital to the play’s theatrical success.111 He played Kean as a kindred spirit, as a man both burdened and uplifted by the need to live up to his heroic onstage image. Robert Baldick concludes his biography of Lemaître by drawing attention to a sheet of paper

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on which the actor had copied a speech from the play. It is an excerpt from the scene in which Kean warns a young aspirant to the stage of the perils she must encounter: Once you have set your foot on the fatal path of the theatre, you must follow it to the end, exhaust its joys and its sorrows, drain its cup and its chalice, drink its honey and its lees; you must finish as you began and die as you have lived – die as Molière died, to the sound of clapping, hisses and cheers! But if there is still time for you not to take that road, if you have not yet opened the gate, then do not enter . . . believe me, on my honour, believe me.112 At the foot of the page, as if to sign the Faustian pact on Kean’s behalf as well, Lemaître has written his own name. Dumas’s implied proposition that Kean was killed by the thing he loved, like the play itself, has limited merit. (It might equally be argued that success prolonged a death-marked life.) But legend necessarily merges with truth, whether the subject is Kean, Lemaître or Freddie Mercury. It did so for the German poet, Heinrich Heine, who saw Kean in Paris: The whole production is wonderfully true to life. It took me right back in spirit to old England, and I really thought I was watching the late Edmund Kean again, whom I saw so often over there. The illusion was doubtless largely due to the actor who played the leading role, although Frédérick Lemaître is a tall, imposing figure and Kean was short and stocky. But there was something in the latter’s personality and acting which is also to be found in Frédérick Lemaître. He is a sublime buffoon whose sinister clowning turns Thalia pale with fear and Melpomene radiant with happiness.113 Heine’s image of an actor who could frighten the Muse of comedy and bring joy to the Muse of tragedy is evocative of Kean at his most mischievous, and it is, perhaps, a pity that Dumas’s play has been displaced on the modern stage by Jean-Paul Sartre’s comparatively sober reworking of it. Sartre finds in the ‘idea’ of an actor an intriguing challenge to the ‘idea’ of reality. His Kean, tied to the contingencies of existence, finds himself void of essence and therefore, unlike Dumas’s, without the resources to take control. That is not to say that Sartre’s version debars bravura performance. Pierre Brasseur, who played the title role in Paris in 1953, had already brilliantly reincarnated Frédérick Lemaître in Marcel Carné’s 1945 film,

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Les Enfants du Paradis. There was nothing shy about his acting, nor that of Alan Badel, who played Sartre’s Kean at the Oxford Playhouse in 1971.114 Most recently (2007), the part has been played in London by Sir Antony Sher, an actor quite as likely as Kean was to make a virtue of eccentricity. Partly shielded by the earned respectability of knighthood, Sher has experienced (still experiences?) the disorientating mixture of exhilaration and torment that may well be inherent in acting for a living. Interviewed by Matt Wolf for Broadway.com on 18 June 2007, he quoted from the speech that best explained the hold Sartre’s play had on him: ‘You don’t act to earn a living, you act to lie to yourself, you act so as not to know yourself. You act because you’d go mad if you didn’t.’ It might be argued that a line of ‘rogue’ British actors runs parallel with the line of ‘respectable’ actors from Richard Burbage (which line was he on?) to Ian McKellen: it links Kean to Sher, and perhaps to Ben Kingsley, who is unmistakably of Kean’s physical type. Kingsley performed Raymund FitzSimons’s one-man play, Edmund Kean, in 1983. This is how FitzSimons, feeding the legend in the service of truth, describes what he wrote: In the play, Kean is conceived as a monster – a man of relentless ambition, forever seeking instant fame: a man paranoidly convinced that everyone is conspiring against him: a megalomaniac allowing no one else to shine beside himself: a sinister man, a volcano of accumulated resentment, a thunderstorm of venom, a torrent of bile: a man with an urge for self-destruction, who burns himself out by the time he is thirty. Yes, Kean is a monster, drink-sodden and syphilitic. But the glorious mystery is this – he is also the first great Romantic actor and the matchless interpreter of Shakespeare.115

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Notes

Introduction 1

2 3

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5 6 7 8 9

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Quoted Michael Caines, ed., David Garrick (Lives of Shakespearian Actors I, vol. 1, London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008), p. xxvii. See Philip Auslander, Liveness (New York: Routledge, 1999). David Roberts, Thomas Betterton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). See James Fullarton Arnott, Actors (Sale Catalogues of the Libraries of Eminent Persons, vol. 12; London: Mansell, 1975). Ibid., pp. 364 and 374. The copy of F4 made 3 guineas while F1 was sold for only 2. Ibid., p. 378. Ibid., p. 376. Ibid., p. [vii]. See Joseph Roach, ‘Public Intimacy: The Prior History of “It” ’, in Mary Luckhurst and Jane Moody, eds, Theatre and Celebrity in Britain, 1660–2000 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 15–30. See the articles by Jacky Bratton on Kean, Peter Thomson on Garrick and Shearer West on Siddons in Luckhurst and Moody, Theatre and Celebrity. See Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), ch. 3 ‘Betterton’s Funeral’, pp. 73–118. Jeffrey Kahan, The Cult of Kean (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); William Hazlitt, ‘Mr Kemble’s King John’ (7 Dec 1816), in Selected Writings, ed. Duncan Wu, 9 vols, London: Pickering and Chatto, 1998, 3: 178, quoted Dobson, p. 58. See pp. 58 and 113. Quoted in Ian McIntyre, Garrick (London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1999), pp. 125–6. OED star n. 1, 5.a, the quotation comes from 1779; see also Simon Varey, ‘A Star Is Born’, Notes and Queries 238 (Sept 1993): 335–6. Jacky Bratton, New Readings in Theatre History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 118. See Kalman A. Burnim and Philip H. Highfill, Jr., John Bell, Patron of British Theatrical Portraiture (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998). See pp. 49–54. Peter Barnes, Jubilee (London: Methuen, 2001), pp. 30–1. See pp. 107 and 68–9. See Robert D. Hume, ‘Before the Bard: “Shakespeare” in Eighteenth-Century London’, ELH 64 (1997): 41–75.

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Chapter 1 1 2

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18 19 20

21 22 23

Ian McIntyre, Garrick (London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1999), p. 233. George Winchester Stone, Jr., and George M. Kahrl, David Garrick: A Critical Biography (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979), p. 429. David Garrick, The Letters of David Garrick, ed. David M. Little and George M. Kahrl, 3 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), Letter 362, 2: 463. Quoted by Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 182. Quoted by Vanessa Cunningham, Shakespeare and Garrick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 8. George M. Kahrl, The Garrick Collection of Old English Plays (London: The British Library, 1982), p. 36. Ibid., p. 37. David Garrick, The Letters, Letter 627, 2: 732. Quoted by Tiffany Stern, ‘ “I do wish that you had mentioned Garrick”: The Absence of Garrick in Johnson’s Shakespeare’, in Eric Rasmussen and Aaron Santesso, eds, Comparative Excellence: New Essays on Shakespeare and Johnson (New York: AMS Press, Inc., 2007), p. 72. Stern’s article brilliantly shows how and why Johnson’s edition so sedulously avoided mention of Garrick. Quoted by Stern, p. 90. Quoted by Stern, p. 73. Quoted by Cunningham, p. 6. Quoted by Cunningham, p. 162. On Bell’s edition see Kalman A. Burnim and Philip H. Highfill, Jr., John Bell, Patron of British Theatrical Portraiture (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998). Harry William Pedicord and Frederick Louis Bergmann, eds, The Plays of David Garrick, vols 3 and 4, Garrick’s Adaptations of Shakespeare (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981), 3: 79. Cunningham, p. 7. Richard Warner, A Letter to David Garrick, Esq., concerning a Glossary to the Plays of Shakespeare (London, 1768), p. 92. James Boaden, ed., The Private Correspondence of David Garrick, 2 vols (London, 1831–1832), 1: 3–4. Ibid., 1: 11. Ibid., 1: 20. See George Winchester Stone, Jr., ‘David Garrick and the Eighteenth-Century Stage: Notes toward a New Biography’, in Stone and Philip H. Highfill, Jr., eds, In Search of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatrical Biography (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976), p. 9. On early biographies of Garrick as a sign of celebrity, see Cheryl Wanko, Roles of Authority: Thespian Biography and Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech University Press, 2003), pp. 187–213. Fitzpatrick, An Enquiry, p. 21. Ibid. David Garrick, The Letters, Letter 281, 1: 350.

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184 24

25

26 27

28 29

30 31

32 33

34 35

36 37 38 39

40 41

42 43 44 45

46 47

48 49 50 51

Notes

Paul Prescott, ‘Doing All That Becomes a Man: The Reception and Afterlife of the Macbeth Actor, 1744–1889’, Shakespeare Survey 57 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 85. Thomas Wilkes, A General View of the Stage (London, 1759), pp. 248–9, quoted by Stone and Kahrl, p. 555. Thomas Davies, Dramatic Miscellanies, 3 vols (Dublin, 1784), 2: 93–4. Murphy, Life of Garrick, 1: 82; The Connoisseur, 1 September 1754, quoted by Kalman A. Burnim, David Garrick, Director (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1961), p. 113. ‘Sir’ John Hill, The Actor (London, 1755), p. 266, quoted by Burnim, p. 113. One authoritative catalogue lists over 280 portraits, prints, statues, busts and other such images; see Philip H. Highfill, Jr., Kalman A. Burnim and Edward A. Langhans, eds, A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses . . . and other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800, 16 vols (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973–1993), 6: 81–103. Davies, Dramatic Miscellanies, 2: 148. The first is in the Kunsthaus in Zürich, the second in the Tate Modern, London. On the portraits see Stephen Leo Carr and Peggy A. Knapp, ‘Seeing through Macbeth’, PMLA 96 (1981): 837–47. Davies, Dramatic Miscellanies, 2: 118. Jean Georges Noverre, Letters on Dancing and Ballets, trans. Cyril W. Beaumont (London, 1930), pp. 84–5. Davies, Dramatic Miscellanies, 2: 105. Arthur Murphy, The Life of David Garrick, 2 vols (London, 1801), 1: 70–1. The classic account of Garrick’s adaptation is George Winchester Stone, Jr., ‘Garrick’s Handling of Macbeth’, SP 38 (1941): 609–28. Stephen Orgel, ‘The Authentic Shakespeare’, Representations 21 (1988): 15. Prescott, ‘Doing All That Becomes a Man’, p. 84. Murphy, 1: 198. John Downes, Roscius Anglicanus (1708), ed. Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume (London: The Society for Theatre Research, 1987), pp. 51–2. Downes, pp. 71–2. Michael Dobson, ‘Improving on the Original: Actresses and Adaptations’, in Jonathan Bate and Russell Jackson, eds, Shakespeare: An Illustrated Stage History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 55. Ibid., p. 56. Pedicord and Bergmann, 3: 28. Quoted by Pedicord and Bergmann, 1: 72. Boaden, Private Correspondence, I: 134; David Garrick, The Letters, Letter 281, 1: 352. Boaden, Private Correspondence, 1: 377. See Stone and Kahrl’s appendix of Garrick’s roles by frequency of performance, pp. 656–8. David Garrick, The Letters, Letter 452, 2: 565. Ibid., Letter 726, 2: 838. Ibid. Quoted in ibid.

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Notes 52 53 54 55 56

57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

66

67 68 69 70 71 72 73

74

75

76 77 78 79

80

81

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David Garrick, The Letters, Letter 93, 1: 152. William Cooke, Memoirs of Charles, Macklin, Comedian (London, 1804), pp. 283–4. Quoted by Burnim, David Garrick, Director, pp. 121–2. Cooke, Memoirs of Macklin, p. 284. Quoted by Denis Donoghue, ‘Macklin’s Shylock and Macbeth’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, 43 (1954): 428. Ibid. David Garrick, The Letters, Letter 20, 1: 34. Both quoted in McIntyre, p. 39. David Garrick, The Letters, Letter 15, 1: 28. Quoted in McIntyre, pp. 125–6. Ibid., p. 126. Ibid., p. 127. Quoted in McIntyre, p. 2. Joshua Steele, An Essay Towards Establishing the Melody and Measure of Speech (London, 1775), pp. 39 and 47. David Thomas’s comment that it is ‘impossible to interpret meaningfully’ is unduly cautious. See David Thomas and Arnold Hare, eds, Restoration and Georgian England, 1660–1788 (Theatre in Europe: A Documentary History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 353. Steele, pp. 40 and 47. Ibid., p. 48. Ibid. Ronald Hafter, ‘Garrick and Tristram Shandy’, SEL 7 (1967): 475–89 (484). Quoted in McIntyre, p. 350. Ibid., p. 49. C. Cibber, The Tragical History of Richard III (1700), p. 52. Cibber represents Shakespeare’s lines in italics and lines substantially Shakespearean are marked with an initial quotation mark. There are fine accounts of Garrick’s acting in, for example, Stone and Kahrl, pp. 23–51 and 471–572, but Joseph R. Roach, The Player’s Passion (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1985), chs 2–4, is brilliant in its analysis of the connection with contemporary scientific theory and with Diderot whose theory of acting in the Paradoxe sur le comédien was profoundly affected by his encounter with Garrick’s style. See Robert D. Hume, ‘Before the Bard: “Shakespeare” in Eighteenth-Century London’ ELH, 64 (1997), pp. 41–75 for the best summary of what was happening in Shakespeare performance from 1700 to the arrival of Garrick. See Emmett L. Avery, ‘The Shakespeare Ladies Club’, SQ, 7 (1956), pp. 153–8. Quoted in Avery, p. 155. Avery, p. 156. Arthur H. Scouten, ‘The Increase in Popularity of Shakespeare’s Plays in the Eighteenth Century: A Caveat for Interpretors of Stage History’, SQ 7 (1956): 189–202, 193–4. Brian Vickers, ed., Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, vol. 3 1733–52 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1975), p. 13. Ibid.

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186 82

83

84 85

86 87 88

89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97

98 99 100 101

102 103 104

105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112

113 114 115

Notes

Quoted in Thomas and Hare, Restoration and Georgian England, 1660–1788, pp. 247–50. See Don-John Dugas, Marketing the Bard (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2006), pp. 180–238. Quoted in Cunningham, pp. 162–3. Samuel Johnson, Prose and Poetry, ed. Mona Wilson (London’: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1950), pp. 143–4. See Dobson, Making of the National Poet, pp. 205–7. Pedicord and Bergmann, 4: 97. See Harry William Pedicord, ‘Ragandjaw: Garrick’s Shakespearean Parody for a Private Theatre’, PQ 60 (1981): 197–204. David Garrick, The Letters, Letter 47, 1: 83. Pedicord and Bergmann, 4: 225. Ibid., 3: 197. Ibid., 3: 200. On this and other adaptations of the play, see Cunningham, pp. 78–95. Pedicord and Bergmann, 3: 143–4. Quoted in Stone and Kahrl, p. 92. Quoted in Burnim, pp. 131–2. Samuel Pepys, The Diary, ed. R. Latham and W. Matthews, 11 vols (London: Bell and Hyman, 1970–1983), 3: 208. ‘Advertisement’ to the published text, in Pedicord and Bergmann, 3: 154. Ibid., 3: 422. Letter 317, 1: 387. Quoted by George Winchester Stone, Jr., ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the Hands of Garrick and Colman’, PMLA 54 (1939): 467–82 (p. 474). Ibid., p. 480. Quoted by Cunningham, p. 142. Margaret L. Mare and W. H. Quarrell, eds, Lichtenberg’s Visits to England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938), p. 15. Ibid., p. 16. Ibid., p. 10. Quoted in Stone and Kahrl, p. 543. Ibid., pp. 547–8. Quoted in McIntyre, p. 65. Hamlet (1676), sig. [A]2a. Both quoted by Cunningham, p. 152. Brian Vickers, ed., Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, vol. 5 1765–1774 (1979), p. 483. Vickers quotes extensively from reviews, pp. 466–86. Quoted by Cunningham, p. 139. David Garrick, The Letters, Letter 730, 3: 841. Vickers, vol. 5 1765–1774, pp. 466–70. On Murphy’s piece, see Richard W. Schoch, ‘ “A Supplement to Public Laws”: Arthur Murphy, David Garrick, and Hamlet, with Alterations’, Theatre Journal 57 (2005): 21–32. For another playlet, by Richard Cumberland, responding to Murphy’s and supporting Garrick, see Dobson, pp. 174–6.

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117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126

127 128

129

130

131 132 133

134 135 136

137 138

139 140 141

142 143 144 145 146

187

Quoted by George Winchester Stone, Jr., ‘Garrick’s Production of King Lear: A Study in the Temper of the Eighteenth-Century Mind’, SP 45 (1948): 89–103, p. 103. Quoted in Cunningham, p. 27. Cooke, Memoirs of Macklin, p. 107. Vickers, 1733–52, p. 212. Ibid., p. 263. See Pedicord and Bergmann, 3: 324. An Examen of the New Comedy (London, 1747), p. 22. Davies, 2: 172. Vickers, 1733–52, p. 269. Ibid., p. 326. Brian Vickers, ed., Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, vol. 4 1753–1765 (1976), p. 108. Vickers, vol. 5 1765–1774, p. 140. See J. D. Hainsworth, ‘King Lear and John Brown’s Athelstan’, SQ 26 (1975): 471–7. Quoted by Arthur John Harris, ‘Garrick, Colman and King Lear: A Reconsideration’, SQ 22 (1971): 61. George Colman, The History of King Lear (London, 1768), in Colman, The Dramatic Works, 4 vols (London, 1777), 3: 103. Vickers, vol. 4, p. 99. Letter 574, 2: 682–3. See Jean I. Marsden, ‘Daddy’s Girls: Shakespearian Daughters and EighteenthCentury Ideology’, Shakespeare Survey 51 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 17–26. Davies, 2: 208. Quoted in Burnim, p. 145. Quoted by Reiko Oya, Representing Shakespearean Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 36. Vickers, Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, vol. 3 1733–52, pp. 365–6. Quoted in Jonathan Bate, Shakespearean Constitutions: Politics, Theatre, Criticism, 1730–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 31. Ibid., pp. 31–2. Ibid., p. 31. See Christian Deelman, The Great Shakespeare Jubilee (London: Michael Joseph, 1964), p. 69. Traces of Gainsborough’s attempts to paint the Shakespeare portrait have been found by x-raying another portrait. On portraits of Garrick, see two excellent exhibition catalogues: Christopher Lennox-Boyd et al., eds, Theatre: The Age of Garrick (London: Christopher Lennox-Boyd, 1994) and Every Look Speaks: Portraits of David Garrick (Bath: Holburne Museum of Art, 2003). Quoted in McIntyre, p. 415. Vickers, vol. 5 1765–1774, p. 345. Ibid., p. 354. George Colman the Elder, Man and Wife (1770), p. 42. Letter 567, 2: 675.

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188 147 148 149 150 151 152 153

Notes

Colman, New Brooms (1776), p. 30. Pedicord and Bergman, Garrick’s Own Plays (1980), 2: 108. Ibid., pp. 115, 119. Ibid., pp. 125–6. See Every Look Speaks, pp. 44–6. Quoted in Dobson, p. 216, n. 46. Quoted in Deelman, p. 290.

Chapter 2 1

2

3

4 5

6 7

8

9

10 11

12

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See, for example, Sian Thomas, ‘Lady Macbeth’, in Michael Dobson, ed., Performing Shakespeare’s Tragedies Today: The Actor’s Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 95–105, esp. 95–7. See Tate Wilkinson, The Wandering Patentee, or, A History of the Yorkshire Theatres, from 1770 to the Present Time, 4 vols (York: Wilson, Spence and Mawman, 1795), 2: 115–16. Proceedings of the Sheffield Shakespeare Club, from its Commencement, in 1819, to January, 1829. By a Member of the Club (Sheffield: Crookes, 1829), p. 4. See also pp. 22, 27, 96–7. Proceedings of the Sheffield Shakespeare Club, pp. 78–9. William Hazlitt, ‘Mr Kemble’s King John’ (7 December 1816), in Selected Writings, ed. Duncan Wu, 9 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1998), 3: 178. See Theatre Notebook 52, 3 (1998): 175; 53, 1 (1999): 2. The NPG bought the portrait of Kemble as Cato in 2009; the press release they issued at the time has far more to say about the importance of Lawrence than it has about that of Kemble. Even this biography, Linda Kelly’s The Kemble Era: John Philip Kemble, Sarah Siddons and the London Stage (London: Bodley Head, 1980), is as much about Siddons as it is about Kemble. On the continuing proliferation of lives of Kean, see Jeffrey Kahan, The Cult of Kean (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006). The best short biography of Kemble currently available is Peter Thomson’s entry in H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, eds, The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 60 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 31: 155–61. An Authentic Narrative of Mr Kemble’s Retirement from the Stage (London: Miller, 1817), p. 6. An Authentic Narrative, p. xxvii. See, for example, Marc Baer, Theatre and Disorder in Late Georgian London (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 1992. [Joseph Haslewood] Secret History of the Green Room (London: Symmonds, 1792), p. 14. The same publication mischievously claims that Kemble earned his first £5 not as an actor but as a Methodist preacher, pp. 110–11. James Boaden, Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble, 2 vols (London: Longman, 1825), 1: 5. Since despite his best intentions eight of Roger Kemble’s children pursued theatrical careers, he must have been a very disappointed man. See Boaden, 1: 5–6.

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Notes 15 16

17 18

19 20

21 22

23 24 25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33 34

35

36 37

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Boaden, 1: 19–20. Boaden, 1: 17–19. Kemble published these poems in Fugitive Pieces (York: Blanchard, 1780), pp. 32–6. Wilkinson, 2: 9, 14, 105; Boaden, 1: 13. Boaden, 1: 19. Belisarius, The Female Officer and Oh! It’s Impossible survive in manuscript in the Huntington Library. Boaden, 1: 21–2. Undated manuscript letter, Harvard Theatre Collection, ‘Kembleiana’, TS 997 480.20. Monthly Mirror 3 (April 1798): 68. Wilkinson, 2: 50. The duel was with James Aickin in March 1792; see Boaden, 2: 291–2. Wilkinson, 2: 49–51. Wilkinson, 2: 6. Elizabeth Inchbald, ‘Remarks on The Wheel of Fortune’, in Elizabeth Inchbald, ed., The Inchbald, The British Theatre, 25 vols (London: Longman et al., 1808), 18: 3–5;. 4–5. See e.g. Sigmund Freud, ‘Introductory lectures on Psycho-Analysis’, in James Strachey, tr., The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols (London: Hogarth, 1953–1974), 15: 23. Kemble’s performance as the Angelo-like monk in Aurelio and Miranda, with Siddons as his chief victim, resonated worryingly with his performance as the monastically-dressed Duke in Measure for Measure, in which Siddons played a saintly Isabella. The playbill for this occasion (12 February 1767) is reproduced in An Authentic Narrative, p. 72. William Havard, King Charles the First: An Historical Tragedy (London: Watts, 1737), p. 56. Elizabeth Inchbald, ‘Remarks on The Count of Narbonne’, in The British Theatre, 20: 3–4; 3. Robert Jephson, The Count of Narbonne, in Inchbald, ed., The British Theatre, 20: 62. On Shakespeare and the rise of the Gothic, see especially John Drakakis and Dale Townshend, eds, Gothic Shakespeares (London: Routledge, 2008). Boaden, 1: 23. On Kemble’s friendship with Malone, see Peter Martin, Edmond Malone, Shakespearean Scholar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 70. See Arthur Sherbo, The Birth of Shakespeare Studies (Ann Arbor, MI: Colleagues Press, 1986), pp. 177–9. Sir Walter Scott, review of Boaden’s Life, Quarterly Review April 1826. ‘Who buys “such readings as were never read”, / Must show such acting as was never seen’, scoffed an epigram in March 1790: in Folger Shakespeare Library W.a.40. The bulk of Kemble’s library was bought by the Duke of Devonshire, and is now in the Huntington Library in Palo Alto, California. The remainder was auctioned in 1821; see A. L. Munby, general ed., Sale Catalogues of Libraries of Eminent Persons, 12 vols (London: Mansell, with Sotheby Parke Bernet Publications), vol. 12, ‘Actors’, ed. J. F. Arnott, 1975.

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190 38

39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

48

49

50 51

52

53

54

55

56

57

58 59

60

61

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Anonymous MS poem, 1817; Harvard Theatre Collection ‘Kembleiana’ vol. 7, TS 990 480.20. Boaden, 1: 51–61, 92. Wilkinson, 2: 50–1. Hazlitt, 3: 212. The Sun, June 24 1817. Public Advertiser 6 October 1783. Cited in Linda Kelly, The Kemble Era, p. 27. Morning Chronicle 11 November 1783. Boaden, vol. 1. Anonymous MS poem on Kemble’s retirement, 1817; Harvard Theatre Collection ‘Kembleiana’ vol. 7, TS 990 480.20. ‘Sir Walter Scott, letter to Lady Abercorn’, spring 1817, in H. J. C. Grierson, ed., The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, 12 vols (London: Constable, 1932–1937), 4: 420. Henry Mercer Graves, An Essay on the Genius of Shakespeare (London: Bigg, 1826), p. 167. Boaden, 1: 132. Remarks on the Character of Richard the Third, as played by Cooke and Kemble (London: Bryer, 1801), p. 47: Folger Shakespeare Library, W.b.67 item 94. These part-books are catalogued in the Folger as T.a.8–31. The Merchant of Venice is T.a.30. He felt strongly enough about the views it expressed, and annoyed enough that Whately’s opinions had subsequently been endorsed by Malone’s rival George Steevens in the notes to his 1803 edition of Shakespeare, to republish this work in expanded form in the year of his farewell season, as Macbeth, and King Richard the Third: An Essay (1817). On Shakespeare and eighteenth-century Francophobia, see Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992, chapter 5. Inchbald, ‘Remarks of Julius Caesar’, in The British Theatre, 4: 3. On the banning of Coriolanus, see vol. 5, ‘Remarks on Coriolanus’, p. 5. Jonathan Bate, Shakespearean Constitutions: Politics, Theatre, Criticism, 1730–1830 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 63. On Lullin’s Richard III, see le Vicomte Gauthier de Brecy, Memoires véridiques et ingénus de la vie privée, moral et politique d’un homme de bien (Paris: Guiraudet, 1834), pp. 282–4; on his friendship with Kemble, see the letter from Egerton Brydges reproduced in W. Powell Jones, ‘Sir Egerton Brydges on Lord Byron,’ Huntington Library Quarterly 13, 3 (May 1950): 325–37. Unidentified press cutting, April 22 1794, in Folger W.b.577, item 12. Benjamin Wyatt, Observations on the Design for the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, as Executed in the Year 1812 (London: Taylor, 1813), pp. 1–2. On theatre design in the age of Kemble see especially Iain Mackintosh, Architecture, Actor, Audience (London: Routledge, 1993), esp. pp. 25–40. Richard Cumberland, Memoirs of Richard Cumberland, Written by Himself, 1806–1807 (Philadelphia: Parry and McMillan), 1856, p. 387. Kemble usually then used these printed editions as the basis for his promptbooks: see especially Charles Shattuck, ed., John Philip Kemble Promptbooks, 11 vols

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Notes

62 63

64 65 66 67

68

69

70

71

72

73

74 75 76 77

78 79

80 81 82 83

191

(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia for the Folger Shakespeare Library, 1974). Boaden, 2: 279. See Joseph W. Donohue, Jr., ‘Kemble’s production of Macbeth (1794)’, Theatre Notebook 21 (1967): 63–74; The World, 22 April 1794. See also David Rostron, ‘Contemporary Political Comment in Four of J. P. Kemble’s Shakespearean Productions’, Theatre Research 12 (1972): 113–19. The Oracle, 8 May 1794. The World, 22 April 1794. ‘Remarks on Macbeth’, in Inchbald’s British Theatre, 4: 3. See, for example, his transcription of lines about the dress and appearance of witches in The Late Lancashire Witches, 1634, beside which he wrote ‘Macbeth # Dress of Witches in Shakespeare’s time.’ Undated commonplace book, Folger W.b.577 item 47. W. C. Oulton, The History of the Theatres of London, 2 vols (London: Martin and Bain, 1796), 2: 139–40. Robert Lloyd, The Actor (1760); cited in Arthur Colby Sprague, Shakespeare and the Actors (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948), p. 256. David Erskine Baker, Isaac Reed and Stephen Jones, Biographia Dramatica, or, a Companion to the Playhouse, 3 vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees et al., 1812), 1: xlviii. An Authentic Narrative, pp. xxiv–xxvii. On Kemble’s Macbeth and Reynolds’ theories, see especially Reiko Oya, Representing Shakespearean Tragedy: Garrick, the Kembles, and Kean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 84–108. William Charles Macready, Reminiscences, ed. Pollock, vol. 1, p. 148; cited in Dennis Bartholomeusz, Macbeth and the Players (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), pp. 135–6. On Kemble’s Macbeth in general see pp. 98–153; also Oya, Representing Shakespearean Tragedy, pp. 67–84. ‘Macbeth’, in Inchbald’s British Theatre, 4: 71. (Inchbald printed this speech in italics to indicate its non-Shakespearean provenance). In 1785 Kemble had retained the whole of Garrick’s added speech: see his part-book, Folger T.a.11. ‘Remarks on Macbeth’, in Inchbald’s British Theatre, 4: 4. Biographia Dramatica, p. xlviii. Unidentified press cutting, 22 April 1794, in Folger W.b.577, item 12. Principally his Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1756. See e.g. Authentic Memoirs of the Green-Room, pp. 109, 117. The marriage was so abrupt and unceremonious (it took place in the afternoon and Mrs Kemble was on stage again in the evening) that a story got about that a nobleman whose daughter was threatening to elope with Kemble had promised the actor £4,000 if he would marry someone else within a fortnight, but had then declined to pay up. See Authentic Memoirs of the Green-Room, pp. 111–17. Public Advertiser 28 January 1795. The Drama, or, Theatrical Pocket Magazine, vol. 4 (London: Elvey, 1823), p. 117. London: Cooper and Graham, ‘1796’ [1795]. London: Cadell and Davies, 1796.

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192 84

85 86

87 88 89 90 91 92

93 94

95

96

97

98

99 100

101 102

103 104

Notes

On Malone and the Ireland forgeries, see especially Samuel Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 193–220; Peter Martin, Edmond Malone, pp. 188–203. Malone, Inquiry, pp. 2–3, 150–1. William Henry Ireland, The Confessions of William Henry Ireland (London: Goddard, 1805), pp. 139–40. William Henry Ireland, Vortigern (London: Barker et al., [1799]), p. xi. Ireland, Confessions, p. 159. Ireland, Confessions, pp. 146–7. Ireland, Vortigern, p. 67. Ireland, Confessions, pp. 157–8. On the first night of Vortigern see especially The Oracle, 4 April 1796; Jeffrey Kahan, Reforging Shakespeare: the Story of a Theatrical Scandal (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1998). The 1996 revival was delightful, despite playing, on the night I saw it, to an audience consisting largely of Shakespearean editors. Inchbald, ‘Remarks on As You Like It’ in The British Theatre, 4: 5. Russell Jackson, ‘Johanna Schopenhauer’s Journal: A German View of the London Theatre Scene, 1803–5,’ Theatre Notebook 52 (1998): 142–60, 152–4. This production is commemorated, probably not entirely accurately, by George Henry Harlow’s painting of the trial scene, often known as ‘The Kemble Family’ (c.1819), now at Basildon Park. See Bell’s Edition of Shakespeare’s Plays, 8 vols (London: 1773–1774), ‘Introduction’ to The Tempest, 4: 3. Inchbald applauded Kemble’s version on the grounds that Shakespeare’s ‘does not interest the passions.’ See ‘Remarks on The Tempest’, The British Theatre, 5: 5. See, for example, the pages catalogued as Folger W.b.577 items 92 and 96, where Kemble has transcribed relevant passages from sixteenth- and seventeenth¯ chés’ alongside them. century texts and written the word ‘A Thomas Middleton Raysor, ed., Coleridge’s Shakespearean Criticism, 2 vols (London: Constable, 1930), vol. 1, p. 83. The Examiner 13 October 1816. This nickname was also used, not always to Kemble’s face, by friends and acquaintances: see e.g. J. G. Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart., 7 vols (Edinburgh: Cadell, 1837), vol. 3, pp. 266–7. See also the frontispiece to the second edition of the anonymous The Life of John Philip Kemble, Esquire, a Proprietor and Stage Manager of Covent Garden Theatre; Interspersed with Family and Theatrical Anecdotes (London: Johnston, 1809), in which Kemble is labelled ‘King John’ (and is crying ‘O my “aitches” ’). Boaden, 2: 516. Lawrence Huston Houtchens and Carolyn Washburn Houtchens, eds, Leigh Hunt’s Dramatic Criticism, 1808–1831 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), pp. 26–7. Leigh Hunt’s Dramatic Criticism, pp. 29–30. Both cartoons are reproduced and discussed in Jonathan Bate, Shakespearean Constitutions, pp. 43–4, plates 8 and 9; see also Baer, Theatre and Disorder, plate 1, p. 181n, 254n.

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Notes 105 106

107 108

109

110 111 112 113

114 115

116 117

118

119 120 121 122 123 124 125

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Baer, pp. 129–32. See, e.g. Cruikshank’s cartoon King John and John Bull, reproduced in Baer, plate 8, and the rhyming placard ‘King John of old . . . ’ quoted in Baer, p. 80. Morning Chronicle 24 June 1817. A New Description of Sir John Soane’s Museum, 1955: 11th revised edition (London: Trustees of Sir John Soane’s Museum, 2007), pp. 34–5, 43–4. John Ripley, ‘Julius Caesar’ On Stage in England and America, 1599–1973 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 50–73; 51. Kemble’s commonplace books are full of details transcribed from military manuals and works on ancient history suitable for use in such procession scenes: see e.g. Folger W.b.577, items 33, 39. Ripley, p. 53. Boaden, 2: 563. Hunt, Dramatic Criticism, pp. 67–8. An Authentic Narrative, pp. xviii–xix. Scott also drew attention to this moment in Kemble’s performance, in his review of Boaden’s biography. Ripley, p. 54. On this rivalry, see especially Peter Thomson, On Actors and Acting (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000), chapter 9. An Authentic Narrative, p. xxiii. It is a mark of the success of Kemble’s Coriolanus at Covent Garden that in 1815 it inspired the printer William West to produce a set of scenes and characters from the play for use in toy theatres; these now provide some of our best evidence about how the play looked in Kemble’s revivals. The Rome depicted by the scenery, as in the case of Julius Caesar, was a compositely magnificent, marble ideal. See George Speaight et al., William West and the Regency Toy Theatre (London: Sir John Soane’s Museum, 2004), p. 32. See David George, ‘Poussin’s Coriolanus and Kemble’s Roman Matron’, Theatre Notebook 48 (1994): 2–10; David Rostron, ‘John Philip Kemble’s Julius Caesar and Coriolanus: An Examination of the Prompt Copies,’ Theatre Notebook 23 (1968): 26–33; John Ripley, ‘Coriolanus’ On Stage in England and America, 1609–1994 (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1998), chapter 4; Jane Moody, ‘Romantic Shakespeare’, in Stanley Wells and Sarah Stanton, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 37–57; 44–6. Bell’s Weekly Messenger 29 June 1817. Morning Chronicle 24 June 1817. The News 29 June 1817. An Authentic Narrative, pp. 4–11. An Authentic Narrative, p. 44. An Authentic Narrative, p. 68. On Lullin’s theatricals with his sister at Beaulieu, see Alville, Anna Eynard-Lullin et l’époque des congrés et des revolutions, Lausanne: Feissly, 1955, pp. 98–103. Boaden, 2: 585. Quoted in Kelly, The Kemble Era, p. 203. See London Magazine 7 (1823): 449–60. An Authentic Narrative, p. 55.

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Henry Bate to David Garrick, 12 August 1775, British Library Add. MSS 25,383. 30 Dec 1775, cited in Philip Highfill, Jr., Kalman A. Burnim and Edward A. Langhans, eds, A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers, & Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800, 16 vols. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973–1993), 14: 5. Quoted by Thomas Campbell, Life of Mrs. Siddons, 2 vols. (London: Effingham Wilson, 1834), 1: 68–9. Sarah Kemble Siddons, Reminiscences of Sarah Kemble Siddons, 1773–1785, ed. William Van Lennep (Cambridge, MA: Widener Library, 1942), p. 20. Ibid., p. 5. See Michael Booth, ‘Sarah Siddons’ in Three Tragic Actresses, ed. Booth, John Stokes, and Susan Bassnett (Cambridge: CUP, 1996), p. 14. James Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs. Siddons, Interspersed with Anecdotes of Authors and Actors (London: Henry Colburn, 1827), p. 147. Edwin’s Pills to Purge Melancholy: Containing all the Songs sung by Mr. Edwin, of Covent Garden Theatre . . . With an Humorous Account of Mrs. Siddons’s first Reception in Dublin (London: William Holland, 1788), pp. iv–v. Sarah Kemble Siddons, The Siddoniad: A Characteristic and Critical Poem (Dublin: R. Marchbank, 1784), p. 15. Sarah Kemble Siddons, The Siddoniad: A Poetical Essay (London: H. Reynell, 1785), 4–5. Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, Thraliana: The Diary of Mrs. Hester Lynch Thrale (Later Mrs. Piozzi), 1776–1809, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951), pp. 876–7. Reminiscences of Sarah Kemble Siddons, pp. 29–30. Ibid., p. 31. William Hazlitt, ‘Mrs. Siddons’, from ‘The Fight’ and other Writings, ed. Tom Paulin and David Chandler (London: Penguin, 2000), pp. 48–9. Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies; or, Man of Pleasure’s Kalendar for the Year 1793 (New York: Garland, 1986), pp. 84–5. Life of Mrs. Sidddons, 2: 357–8. Roger Manvell, Sarah Siddons: Portrait of an Actress (London: Heinemann, 1970), p. 18. Letters Written During a Residence in England, translated from the French of Henri Meister, containing many curious remarks upon English manners and customs, government, climate, Literature, theatres etc. (London: Longman and Rees, 1799), p. 196. Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis and A. Dayle Wallace (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), 33: 359. Boaden, p. 141. Booth, pp. 52–3. Campbell, Life, 2: 143. Campbell, Life, 1: 244. Reminiscences of Sarah Kemble Siddons, p. 19. Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, 33: 359.

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Cited in Highfill et. al., Biographical Dictionary, 14: 18. ‘Sarah Siddons, Theatre Voices and Recorded Memory’, Shakespeare Survey 61 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 1–12. Boaden, p. 327. Jenkin, H. C. Fleeming, ‘Mrs. Siddons as Lady Macbeth and Queen Katherine, with an Introduction by Brander Matthews’, Publications of the Dramatic Museum of Columbia University. 2nd series, 3 (New York, 1915), p. 46. Anonymous reviewer of her appearance at Drury Lane, 10 October 1782, quoted in Boaden, p. 141. The Children of Thespis (London: 1786), p. 18. Letters Written During a Residence in England, 1799, p. 198. Boaden, pp. 381–2. 4 February 1785. ‘ . . . nay beware yourself Great Little Man, for she plays Hamlet to the satisfaction of the Worcestershire critics’. Quoted in Highfill et. al., Biographical Dictionary, 14: 4. Reminiscences, p. 8. ‘Sarah Siddons’, p. 28. Campbell, 2: 126. Unsigned review, General Advertiser, February 28, 1785. ‘Memoir of Sarah Siddons’, in Oxberry’s Dramatic Biography and Histrionic Anecdotes, ed. William Oxberry (London: G. Virtue, 1825), vol. 1, p. 139. Letter of 20 July 1786, quoted in Highfill et. al., Biographical Dictionary, 14: 16. Jonathan Bate has written brilliantly about the different cultural strains represented by the rival actresses: ‘Siddons stood for tragedy, decency of birth, Englishness, freedom from scandal, reserved dignity, and financial prudence (to the point that she was sometimes accused of stinginess). She was admired by George III, read uplifting works to the royal daughters, and was painted many times by Thomas Lawrence, the king’s chosen painter. Jordan stood for comedy, illegitimate birth, traces of Irishness, scandal (she had illegitimate children by different men), sociability, and generosity with money (to the point of profligacy). She was the mistress of one royal son and was admired by the circle of another (the group around Fox and Sheridan, which caused the Prince of Wales to be thought of as an anti-government figure). She was painted many times by Hoppner, the Prince of Wales’s chosen painter.’ ‘Shakespeare and the Rival Muses: Siddons Versus Jordan,’ in Notorious Muse: The Actress in British Art and Culture, 1776–1812, ed. Robyn Asleson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 99. Life of Mrs. Sidddons, 2: 11–12. Memoirs of Mrs. Siddons, p. 210. See Bate, pp. 95–6. Campbell, 2: 211. Ibid., 2: 213. Ibid., 2: 215. King John, 3.4.22–36. From William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller (New York: The Penguin Group, 2002).

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Memoirs of Mrs. Siddons, p. 220. Courier and Evening Gazette, Monday, 1 December 1800. Wednesday, 26 November 1788. ‘Memoir of Sarah Siddons’, in Oxberry’s Dramatic Biography, 138–9. Campbell, Life of Mrs. Siddons, 2: 141–2. The New Rosciad: A Poem (London: 1786), p. 7. Campbell, Life of Mrs. Siddons, 2: 39. Unsigned review, 14 February 1785. 5 February 1785. Quoted in Campbell, 2: 11. Ibid., 18. Jenkin, ‘Mrs. Siddons as Lady Macbeth and Queen Katherine’, p. 36. Ibid., p. 38. Boaden, p. 256. Joseph Donohue, ‘Kemble and Mrs. Siddons in Macbeth: The Romantic Approach to Tragic Character,’ Theatre Notebook, 22 (Winter 1967–1968): 66. Ibid., 67. Jenkin, ‘Mrs. Siddons as Lady Macbeth and Queen Katherine,’ p. 40, n. 7. The one complaint he ventures is his wish that in the sleepwalking scene she had entered ‘less suddenly. A slower and more interrupted step more natural.’ Ibid., p. 66. Ibid., p. 40. Ibid., p. 43. Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser, Mon, 14 Feb 1785. Cited in Highfill et. al., Biographical Dictionary, 14: 14. Quoted by Campbell, Life of Mrs. Siddons, 2: 157. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. J. T. Boulton (New York: Garland, 1971), p. 58. Cited in Campbell, 1: 198. From her Diary, cited in Highfill et al., Biographical Dictionary, 14: 18. Reminiscences of Sarah Kemble Siddons, p. 14. Memoirs of Mrs. Siddons, p. 258. ‘Sarah Siddons’, p. 54. Life of Mrs. Siddons (London: Edward Moxon, 1839), p. 371. Letter from Henry Bate to David Garrick, 19 August 1775, British Library Add 25,383. Alan S. Downer, ‘Nature to Advantage Dress’d: Eighteenth-Century Acting’, PMLA 58 (1943): 1005. Cited in Highfill et al., A Biographical Dictionary, 14: 17. Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser, 13 February 1789. I have benefited from the expertise of Professor Peter Holland on the stage history of Coriolanus. Paul Prescott, ‘Doing All That Becomes a Man: The Reception and Afterlife of the Macbeth Actor, 1744–1889’, Shakespeare Survey 57 (Cambridge, 2004), p. 82. ‘Memoir of Sarah Siddons’, Oxberry’s Dramatic Biography and Histrionic Anecdotes, ed. William Oxberry (London: G. Virtue, 1825), 1: 137. Fanny Kemble, Record of a Girlhood, 3 vols. (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1878), 2: 64.

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Robert Lloyd, The Actor (London: C. W. Beaumont, 1926), p. 27. The legend has been traced by Jeffrey Kahan in The Cult of Kean (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006). Quoted in Eric R. Delderfield, Cavalcade by Candlelight (Exmouth: Raleigh Press, 1950), p. 48. J. Fitzgerald Molloy, The Life and Adventures of Edmund Kean, 2 vols. (London: Ward and Downey, 1888), 1: 86–7. Save for a few additional documents, Molloy is almost entirely dependent on the earlier biographical labours of ‘Barry Cornwall’ and F. W. Hawkins, more parasite than biographer. ‘Barry Cornwall’, The Life of Edmund Kean, 3rd edition (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1847), p. 59. George Frederick Cooke (1756–1812) was the most notorious sufferer from the actors’ ‘old complaint’ of drunkenness. During his American tour of 1821, Kean, who had seen him act, arranged for his remains to be reinterred and for a monument to him to be erected in New York, where Cooke had died of cirrhosis of the liver. The 3rd Baron Holland (1773–1840) was the nephew of the great Whig politician Charles James Fox. He, and particularly his wife, ran what amounted to a political and literary salon at Holland House. A New Way to Pay Old Debts (c.1625) had been readmitted to the theatrical repertoire by David Garrick in 1748, and the role of Sir Giles Overreach had subsequently attracted such major actors as John Henderson, John Philip Kemble and George Frederick Cooke. Kean’s first Drury Lane appearance as Overreach took place on 12 January 1816. Quoted in G. H. Lewes, On Actors and the Art of Acting (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1875), p. 11. William Hazlitt, Complete Works, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols. (London: J. M. Dent, 1930–1934), 1: 179. A. C. Grayling, The Quarrel of the Age: The Life and Times of William Hazlitt (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2000), p. 167. Hazlitt, Complete Works, 5: 179. Ibid., p. 179. Ibid., p. 180. Ibid., p. 345. This was the route that Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) chose. Mendoza’s personal stock had fallen after his engagement by Kemble and the Covent Garden management as leader of the strong-arm team engaged in 1809 to eject Old Price rioters. As a direct result, he delayed publishing his Memoirs, written in 1808–1809, until 1816. Procter (1787–1874) wrote under the pen-name of Barry Cornwall. He was a literary associate of Charles Lamb, Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt, but a reluctant biographer. His problem in writing a life of Kean was that he admired the actor, but not the man. Blackwood’s Magazine (September 1825) ungenerously summarized Cornwall as ‘a slight, slim poetaster mincing a-muck among the great English bards’.

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‘Barry Cornwall’, The Life of Edmund Kean, p. xix. Quoted in J. Fitzgerald Molloy, The Life and Adventures of Edmund Kean, 1: 139. Keats’s review appeared in The Champion on 21 December 1817. It is most readily available in Stanley Wells (ed.), Shakespeare in the Theatre: An Anthology of Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 51–2. The description is Jane Moody’s, from her chapter in The Cambridge History of British Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), vol. 2, p. 214. Edmund Burke’s Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) introduced new terms and concepts into the language of dramatic criticism. Applied to Garrick, they were better embodied by Sarah Siddons. Kemble’s aspirations to sublimity veered towards the picturesque. Fuseli wrote this three months after the storming of the Bastille, for the Analytical Review of December 1789. See Henry Fuseli (London: Tate Gallery, 1975), p. 41. Giulio Carlo Argan, quoted in Henry Fuseli, p. 11. See Henry Fuseli, p. 48. Most famously in ‘The Theatrical Atlas’, published in April 1814, in which Kean is depicted as Richard III carrying the whole weight of Drury Lane on his crooked shoulders. See John Buchanan-Brown, The Book Illustrations of George Cruikshank (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1980), p. 247, n. 34. George Colman the Younger’s Blue Beard: or, Female Curiosity had remained a popular spectacle since its first performance at Drury Lane on 16 January 1798. The Journal of Eugène Delacroix (London: Phaidon Press, 1951), p. 181. The Journal of Eugène Delacroix, p. 298. Lewes, On Actors and the Art of Acting, p. 8. Henry Nelson Coleridge, Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 2nd edn (London: John Murray, 1836), p. 13. Tracy C. Davis, ‘ “Reading Shakespeare by Flashes of Lightning”: Challenging the Foundations of Romantic Acting Theory’, ELH 62, 4 (1995): 933–54. My thanks to Peter Holland for drawing my attention to this essay. Oddly, Davis risks undermining her own argument by raising doubts about whether Coleridge ever uttered the much-quoted sentence. John Milton, L’Allegro, ll. 133–4. Coleridge’s Shakespearean Criticism, ed. T. M. Raysor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1930), vol. 2, p. 132. John Keats, Letters, 1814–1821, ed. Hyder Rollins, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), 2: 139. Keats, Letters, 2: 217. Keats, Letters, 1: 386–7. Keats, Letters, 1: 403. Keats, Letters, 2: 80. Keats, Letters, 1: 193. The success of Maturin’s Bertram a year earlier had, by contrast, been ascribed entirely to Kean’s performance of the title role. Byron is using the word ‘scurra’ to mean ‘buffoon’ rather than the more acceptable ‘joker’. Alan Downer, Oxberry’s 1822 Edition of King Richard III, ed. Alan S. Downer (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1959), p. xix.

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Kemble played the part, of course. No aspirant to tragic acclaim could avoid it. But he was conscious that George Frederick Cooke’s less refined portrait was more popular, and he could never have rivalled Kean. Quoted in Julia Swindells, Glorious Causes: The Grand Theatre of Political Change, 1789 to 1833 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 10. See F. W. Hawkins, The Life of Edmund Kean (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1869), vol. 1, p. 110 and vol. 2, p. 176. James Boaden, Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble, Esq. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1825), vol. 1, p. 132. Lamb’s review appeared in the Morning Post of 4 January 1802. It is reprinted in George Rowell (ed.), Victorian Dramatic Criticism (London: Methuen & Co., 1971), pp. 20–2. Robert H. Ross, ‘Samuel Sandford: villain from necessity’, in PMLA 76 (1961): 367–72. Hazlitt, Complete Works, 5: 181. The London Theatre, 1811–1866: Selections from the Diary of Henry Crabb Robinson, ed. Eluned Brown (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1966), p. 26. Oxberry’s 1822 Edition of King Richard III, p. xiv. Quoted in ‘Barry Cornwall’, The Life of Edmund Kean, p. 227. Hackett’s notes are the distinguishing feature of Alan S. Downer’s edition of Oxberry’s 1822 Edition of King Richard III (see above, n. 45). Hazlitt, Complete Works, 5: 180. (Hazlitt repeats these words in a later review. See 5: 295.) Lewes, On Actors and the Art of Acting, p. 10. The London Theatre, 1811–1866, p. 56. Hazlitt, Complete Works, 5: 182. Hunt’s review is reprinted in George Rowell (ed.), Victorian Dramatic Criticism, pp. 51–3. Neither did V. C. Clinton-Baddeley, who, in tracing the history of the solo curtaincall ascribes its innovation to Kean – but not until 1818, after the first performance of John Howard Payne’s Brutus. (See All Right on the Night (London: Putnam, 1964), pp. 47–56.) Hazlitt, Complete Works, 5: 182. Laurence Olivier’s playing of Othello at the National Theatre in 1964 was certainly extraordinary, but it is not his signature role. Parker’s recollection appears in We Saw Him Act, ed. H. A. Saintsbury and Cecil Palmer, (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1939), p. 109. Hawkins, The Life of Edmund Kean, 1: 247–8. Hawkins has silently hijacked Hazlitt’s description of Kean’s Iago as ‘a careless, cordial, comfortable villain’. Hazlitt, Complete Works, 4: 206. Contemporary review quoted in Arthur Colby Sprague, Shakespeare and the Actors: The Stage Business in His Plays, New York: Russell & Russell, 1963, p. 208. Fuseli’s illustration to Cowper’s poem shows the negro standing erect on a rocky promontory, his left arm pointing out to sea, where a slave-ship is sinking in a tornado. The woman clutching at his waist is white, and the engraving was titled ‘The Negro Revenged’. See Rowell, Victorian Dramatic Criticism, p. 56. Hazlitt, Complete Works, 4: 263.

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The London Theatre, 1811–1866, p. 57. ‘Barry Cornwall’, The Life of Edmund Kean, p. 180. Kean bears an indirect responsibility, then, for the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, since Booth took refuge in America, where his sons included Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth. Elliston figures frequently in Lamb’s Essays of Elia, not least in the fond obituary, ‘To the Shade of Elliston’ (1831): ‘Magnificent were thy cappriccios on this globe of earth, ROBERT WILLIAM ELLISTON’. See Raymund FitzSimons, Edmund Kean: Fire from Heaven (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1976), p. 166. Young evidently practised his speeches to piano accompaniment. See FitzSimons, Edmund Kean, p. 171. See FitzSimons, Edmund Kean, pp. 164 and 166–7. Quoted in Bertram Joseph, The Tragic Actor (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959), p. 264. Lewes, On Actors and the Art of Acting, p. 5. Hazlitt, Complete Works, 5: 187. The Journal of Thomas Moore, ed. Peter Quennell (London: B. T. Batsford, 1964), p. 190. It is not clear from the journal which Kemble spoke the words he is quoting. John was long dead by 1829 – the journal entry is dated 13th to 15th August 1829 – but, from the context, it may be that John Murray, the publisher, introduced the quotation into an anecdote about him. For no clear reason, the opinion is generally ascribed to John, but Moore knew both the brothers. Hazlitt, Complete Works, 5: 188. Quoted in John A. Mills, Hamlet on Stage: The Great Tradition (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), p. 52. Reiko Oya, Representing Shakespearean Tragedy: Garrick, the Kembles, and Kean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). The reference here is to the Wolves drinking club, which met, under Kean’s chairmanship, in an alehouse called the Coal Hole. William Robson, The Old Playgoer (London: Joseph Masters, 1846), pp. 117–18. Hazlitt, Complete Works, 5: 223. Hawkins, The Life of Edmund Kean, 1: 306. Grayling, The Quarrel of the Age, p. 168. Stanley Wells (ed.), Shakespeare in the Theatre, p. 46. Hazlitt, Complete Works, 18: 332–3. Hazlitt, Complete Works, 4: 259. Hazlitt, Complete Works, 18: 333. By March 1818, Kean was a member of the St. Mark’s Lodge in Edinburgh. F. W. Hawkins records his reception there after a performance of Bertram in the city (The Life of Edmund Kean, 2: 39). Lewes, On Actors and the Art of Acting, p. 10. J. Fitzgerald Molloy, The Life and Adventures of Edmund Kean, 2: 230. James Boaden, Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble, Esq., 2: 555. Hazlitt, Complete Works, 5: 344–5. I have written at greater length about this rivalry in chapter 9 of On Actors and Acting (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000).

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George Colman the Younger, Random Records (London: Henry Colburn & Richard Bentley, 1830), vol. 2, p. 183. 103 Ernest E. Probert, in We Saw Him Act, ed. H. A. Saintsbury and Cecil Palmer (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1939), p. 162. 104 Hazlitt, Complete Works, 5: 277. 105 Lewes, On Actors and the Art of Acting, p. 3. 106 Samuel Johnson, The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1958– ), vol. 7, pp. 61–2. 107 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, Everyman edition (London: J. M. Dent, 1956), p. 175. 108 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, p. 172. 109 Richard Watts Jr., quoted in Gene Fowler, Good Night, Sweet Prince (New York: Viking Press, 1944), p. 236. 110 Georges Duval, Frédérick-Lemaître et son temps (Paris: Tresse, 1876), p. 190 [my translation]. ‘Lovelace’ is, I assume, a reference to the attractive, but duplicitous wooer of Clarissa Harlowe in Samuel Richardson’s novel of that name, but Duval has probably confused him with the chivalrous cavalier poet, Richard Lovelace (1618–1658). 111 The best biography of Lemaître in English remains Robert Baldick’s The Life and Times of Frédérick Lemaître (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1959). 112 Baldick, The Life and Times of Frédérick Lemaître, p. 247 [Baldick’s translation]. 113 Quoted in Baldick, The Life and Times of Frédérick Lemaître, p. 158. 114 The play was translated and directed by Frank Hauser. 115 ‘Kean in Sicily’, a pamphlet for private circulation only, published by Anne FitzSimons in Carlisle, 1989, p. 3.

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Select Bibliography

Asleson, Robyn. A Passion for Performance: Sarah Siddons and Her Portraitists. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1999. Asleson, Robyn (ed.). Notorious Muse: The Actress in British Art and Culture, 1776–1822. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. An Authentic Narrative of Mr Kemble’s Retirement from the Stage. London: Miller, 1817. Baer, Marc. Theatre and Disorder in Late Georgian London. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Baker, Herschel. John Philip Kemble, The Actor in His Theatre. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942. Bate, Jonathan. ‘Shakespeare and the Rival Muses: Siddons versus Jordan’, in Asleson, Notorious Muse, pp. 81–103. —. Shakespearean Constitutions: Politics, Theatre, Criticism, 1730–1830. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. —. ‘The Romantic Stage’, in Jonathan Bate and Russell Jackson, eds, Shakespeare: An Illustrated Stage History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. 92–110. Boaden, James. Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble, 2 vols. London: Longman, 1825. —. Memoirs of Mrs Siddons: Interspersed with Anecdotes of Authors and Actors, 2 vols. London: Henry Colburn, 1827. —. Memoirs of Mrs Inchbald, 2 vols. London: Bentley, 1833. Boaden, James (ed.). The Private Correspondence of David Garrick, 2 vols. London, 1831–1832. Booth, Michael. ‘Sarah Siddons’, in John Stokes, Booth and Susan Bassnett, eds, Three Tragic Actresses. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 1–65. Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. J. T. Boulton. New York: Garland, 1971. Burnim, Kalman A. David Garrick, Director. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1961. Caines, Michael (ed.). David Garrick (Lives of Shakespearian Actors I, vol. 1). London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008. Campbell, Thomas. Life of Mrs Siddons, 2 vols. London: Effingham Wilson, 1834. Child, Harold. The Shakespearean Productions of John Philip Kemble. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935. Cornwall, Barry. [pseudonym of Bryan Waller Procter.] The Life of Edmund Kean, 2 vols. London: Edward Moxon, 1835. Cunningham, Vanessa. Shakespeare and Garrick. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Davis, Jim (ed.). Lives of Shakespearian Actors II, Vol. 1. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009.

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Davies, Thomas. Dramatic Miscellanies, 3 vols. Dublin, 1784. Deelman, Christian. The Great Shakespeare Jubilee. London: Michael Joseph, 1964. Dobson, Michael. The Making of the National Poet. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1992. Donohue, Joseph W. Jr. ‘Kemble’s production of Macbeth (1794)’, Theatre Notebook 21 (1967): 63–74. —. Theatre in the Age of Kean. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975. Downer, Alan. ‘Nature to Advantage Dress’d: Eighteenth-Century Acting’, PMLA 58 (1943): 1002–37. Downer, Alan S. (ed.). Oxberry’s 1822 Edition of King Richard III. London: Society for Theatre Research, 1959. Dugas, Don-John. Marketing the Bard. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2006. Egan, Pierce. The Life of an Actor. London: C. S. Arnold, 1825. Every Look Speaks: Portraits of David Garrick. Bath: Holburne Museum of Art, 2003. Fitzgerald, Percy. The Kembles, 2 vols. London: Tinsley, 1871. FitzSimons, Raymund. Edmund Kean: Fire from Heaven. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1976. Freeman, Lisa A. (ed.). Sarah Siddons (Lives of Shakespearian Actors II, vol. 2). London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009. Galindo, Catherine. Mrs. Galindo’s Letter to Mrs. Siddons, Being a Circumstantial Detail of Mrs. Siddons’s Life for the Last Seven Years; with Several of Her Letters. London: W. N. Jones, 1809. Garrick, David. The Letters of David Garrick, ed. David M. Little and George M. Kahrl, 3 vols. London: Oxford University Press, 1963. George, David. ‘Poussin’s Coriolanus and Kemble’s Roman Matron’, Theatre Notebook 48 (1994): 2–10. Hawkins, F. W. The Life of Edmund Kean, 2 vols. London: Tinsley Brothers, 1869. Hazlitt, William, Complete Works, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols (esp. vol. 5). London: J. M. Dent, 1930–1934. —. ‘Mrs. Siddons’, in Tom Paulin and David Chandler, eds, ‘The Fight’ and Other Writings. London: Penguin, 2000, pp. 48–50. Highfill, Philip, Jr., Kalman A. Burnim and Edward A. Langhans (eds). A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers, & Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800, 16 vols. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973–93. Hillebrand, H. N. Edmund Kean. New York: Columbia University Press, 1933. Jenkin, H. C. Fleeming. ‘Mrs. Siddons as Lady Macbeth and Queen Katherine, with an Introduction by Brander Matthews’, Publications of the Dramatic Museum of Columbia University. 2nd Series, 3. New York, 1915. Joseph, Bertram. The Tragic Actor. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1959. Kahan, Jeffrey Reforging Shakespeare: The Story of a Theatrical Scandal, Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1998. —. The Cult of Kean. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006. Kahrl, George M. The Garrick Collection of Old English Plays. London: The British Library, 1982. Kelly, Linda. The Kemble Era: John Philip Kemble, Sarah Siddons and the London Stage. London: Bodley Head, 1980.

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Lennox-Boyd, Christopher et al., (eds). Theatre: The Age of Garrick. London: Christopher Lennox-Boyd, 1994. Lewes, G. H. On Actors and the Art of Acting. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1875. The Life of John Philip Kemble, Esquire, a Proprietor and Stage Manager of Covent Garden Theatre; Interspersed with Family and Theatrical Anecdotes. London: Johnston, 1809. McDonald, Russ. Look to the Lady: Sarah Siddons, Ellen Terry, and Judi Dench on the Shakespearean Stage. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005. McIntyre, Ian. Garrick. London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1999. Manvell, Roger. Sarah Siddons: Portrait of an Actress. London: Heinemann, 1970. Mare, Margaret L. and Quarrell, W. H. (eds). Lichtenberg’s Visits to England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938. ‘Memoir of Sarah Siddons’, in William Oxberry, ed., Oxberry’s Dramatic Biography and Histrionic Anecdotes, Vol. 1. London: G. Virtue, 1825. Molloy, J. Fitzgerald, The Life and Adventures of Edmund Kean, 2 vols. London: Ward and Downey, 1888. Moody, Jane. ‘Romantic Shakespeare’, in Stanley Wells and Sarah Stanton, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 37–57. ‘Mr Kemble’, unsigned obituary, London Magazine 7 (1823): 449–60. Murphy, Arthur. The Life of David Garrick, Esq., 2 vols. London:1801. Murray, Christopher. Robert William Elliston. London: Society for Theatre Research, 1975. Oya, Reiko. Representing Shakespearean Tragedy: Garrick, the Kembles, and Kean. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pedicord, Harry William and Bergmann, Frederick Louis (eds). The Plays of David Garrick, 7 vols. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980–1982. Playfair, Giles. Kean: The Life and Paradox of the Great Actor. London: Reinhardt & Evans, 1950. Ripley, John. ‘Julius Caesar’ on Stage in England and America, 1599–1973. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. —. ‘Coriolanus’ On Stage in England and America, 1609–1994. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1998. Roach, Joseph R. ‘Patina: Mrs. Siddons and the Depth of Surfaces’, in Asleson, Notorious Muse, pp. 195–209. —. The Player’s Passion. Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1985. Rogers, Pat. ‘ “Towering Beyond Her Sex”: Stature and Sublimity in the Achievement of Sarah Siddons’, in Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski, eds, Curtain Calls: British and American Women and the Theater, 1660–1800. Athens: University of Ohio Press, 1991, pp. 48–67. Rostron, David. ‘John Philip Kemble’s Julius Caesar and Coriolanus: An Examination of the Prompt Copies’, Theatre Notebook 23 (1968): 26–33. —. ‘Contemporary Political Comment in Four of J. P. Kemble’s Shakespearean Productions’, Theatre Research 12 (1972): 113–19. Russell, William. The Tragic Muse: A Poem Addressed to Mrs. Siddons. London: G. Kearsley, 1783.

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Scott, Sir Walter, review of Boaden’s Life of John Philip Kemble, The Quarterly Review 34, 1826. Shattuck, Charles (ed.). John Philip Kemble promptbooks, 11 vols. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia for the Folger Shakespeare Library, 1974. Siddons, Sarah Kemble. The Siddoniad: A Characteristic and Critical Poem. Dublin: R. Marchbank, 1784; revised as The Siddoniad: A Poetical Essay. London: H. Reynell, 1785. —. The Reminiscences of Sarah Kemble Siddons, 1773–1785, ed. William van Lennep. Cambridge, MA: Widener Library, 1942. Steele, Joshua. An Essay Towards Establishing the Melody and Measure of Speech. London, 1775. Stone, George Winchester Jr. ‘Garrick’s Handling of Macbeth’, SP 38 (1941): 609–28. —. ‘Garrick’s Production of King Lear: A Study in the Temper of the EighteenthCentury Mind’, SP 45 (1948): 89–103. Stone, George Winchester Jr. and Kahrl, George M. David Garrick: A Critical Biography. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979. Thomas, David and Hare, Arnold (eds). Restoration and Georgian England, 1660– 1788. Theatre in Europe: A Documentary History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Thomson, Peter. On Actors and Acting. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000. —. ‘Edmund Kean’, in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. —. ‘John Philip Kemble’, in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Vickers, Brian (ed.). Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, 6 vols. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1974–1981. West, Shearer. The Image of the Actor: Verbal and Visual Representation in the Age of Garrick and Kemble. London: Pinter, 1991. Whalley, Rev. Thomas. Verses Addressed to Mrs. Siddons on Her Being Engaged at The Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, in 1882. London: T. Cadell, 1782. Woo, Celestine. Romantic Actors and Bardolatry: Performing Shakespeare from Garrick to Kean. New York: Peter Lang, 2008.

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Index

Adam, Robert 9, 77 Addison, Joseph Cato 58, 96, 102 Aeschylus 93 Alfieri, Vittorio Alfieri 176 Aristotle 64 Arne, Thomas Judith 52 Arnold, Samuel 143 Arnott, James Fullarton 3 Ashcroft, Dame Peggy 130 Augustus, Emperor 97 Avery, Emmett L. 34 Badel, Alan as Kean (Sartre, Kean) 181 Bage, Robert 165 Baldick, Robert 179–80 Bandello, Matteo 39 Bannister, Jack 120 Barnes, Peter Jubilee, The 5 Barrington, Shute, Bishop of Durham 1 Barry, Spranger 72, as Romeo 39, 48 as Lear 47–8 Barrymore, John 178–9 Barrymore, Lionel 178–9 Basse, William 10 Bate, Jonathan 76, 195n. Bate, Rev Henry 105, 117, 133, 135 Beale, Simon Russell 61 Beaumont, Francis 10 Beethoven, Ludwig van 151 Bell, John 5, 14, 25, 35 Bell, Professor G.J. 114–15, 127–8, 134

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Best, George 179 Betterton Thomas 2, 4, 17, 72, 111, 130 as Hamlet 6, 22 as Othello 37 Fairy Queen, The 40 Betterton, Mary 130 Betty, William Henry West, ‘Master Betty’ 101 as Hamlet 90–1 as Macbeth 91 as Richard III 91 Boaden, James 15, 64, 65, 71, 74, 79, 98, 102, 107, 113, 114, 115–16, 118, 120, 127, 128, 132, 156 Aurelia and Miranda 68, 189n. Boniface VIII, Pope 51 Booth, Barton 72 as Othello 37 Booth, Edwin as Othello 161–2 as Iago (Othello) 161 Booth, Junius Barton, as Iago (Othello) 166 Booth, Michael 114, 118, 132 Boswell, James 13, 46, 49 Boswell, James, the Younger 70 Bourgeois, Francis 96 Branagh, Kenneth 103 Brasseur, Pierre, as Kean (Sartre, Kean) 180 as Lemaître (Carné, Les Enfants du Paradis) 180–1 Brontë, Charlotte 67 Brontë, Emily 67, 178 Brown, John Athelstan 48 Brownsmith, John 35

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208

Index

Buckingham, George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Adaptation: Chances, The 29 Buckingham, George Villiers, 2nd Duke of, and others The Rehearsal 6, 12 Burbage, Richard 17, 111, 130, 181 Burgess, James Bland 87 Burke, Edmund 65, 75, 86, 130–1 Burney, Fanny 114, 131 Byron Werner 159–60 Byron, George Gordon, Lord 3, 144–5, 154–5, 159–60, 163, 167, 168, 175–6 Bride of Abydos, The 171 Cain 154 Deformed Transformed, The 154 Manfred 155 Marino Faliero 177 Werner 154, 159–60 Campbell, Thomas 113, 114, 117, 118, 120, 121–3, 127, 128, 132 Capell, Edward 5, 11, 36 Caravaggio 152 Carey, Ann 139 Carey, Henry Chrononhotonthologos 139 Dragon of Wantley, The 139 Carné, Marcel 180–1 Caroline, Queen 155 Carter, George 53 Charlemont, Earl of 86 Charles I 155 Charlotte, Queen 111 Chaucer, Geoffrey 10 Cibber, Colley 135, 169 King Richard III 6, 33, 60, 117, 119, 156–8, 160 Provoked Husband, The 29 Cibber, Susanna 29, 31, 130 as Cordelia (King Lear) 48 Cibber, Theophilus Romeo and Juliet 38 Cimarosa, Domenico 151 Cobham, Viscount 10 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 91–2, 150, 152–3, 155, 161, 169, 178

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Collins, William 56 Colman, George, the Elder Fairy Tale, A 41 King Lear 48–9 Man and Wife 52 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 41 New Brooms 53 Colman, George, the Younger 155 Blue Beard 151 Inkle and Yarico 165 Iron Chest, The 88, 173–5 Mountaineers, The 143 Condell, Henry 81 Cooke, George Frederick 91, 145, 150 as Iago (Othello) 163 as Richard III 74, 155–6 as Sir Giles Overreach (Massinger, A New Way to Pay Old Debts) 197n. Cooper, James Fenimore 165 Cornwall, Barry, see Procter, Bryan Waller Cowper, William 50, 164–5 Cox, Charlotte 171, 172 Crawford, Ann 130 Cruikshank, George 151 Cruikshank, Isaac 95 Cumberland, Richard 4, 29, 78, 186n. West Indian, The 165 Cunningham, Vanessa 14 Davenant, Sir William Hamlet 43 Macbeth 22–5, 27 Davenant, Sir William, and John Dryden Enchanted Island, The 37, 60, 91 Davies, Thomas 19–21, 49 Davis, Tracy C. 152, 169 de Camp, Fanny 83–4, 101, 102 Delacroix, Eugène 151–2 Dempsey, Jack 179 Dench, Dame Judi as Lady Macbeth 128 Dickens, Charles 55 Digges, Mr, (actor) 110–11 Dignum, Mr, (actor) 83 Dobson, Michael 1, 3, 4, 23

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Index Dodsley, Robert 12 Donohue, Joseph 127 Doran, Gregory 103 Downer, Alan S. 134, 155 Downes, John 23 Drury, Dr James 143 Dryden, John 34, 41 All for Love 118 Dumas, Alexandre, père Kean 179–80 Egan, Pierce 142–3 Elliston, Robert William 144, 166, 171, 172 as Mortimer (Colman the Younger, The Iron Chest) 174–5 Equiano, Olaudah 164 Fairy Queen, The 40 Farquhar, George Beaux’ Stratagem, The 6, 29 Farren, Elizabeth 83 Fawcett, John 101 Fielding, Henry 43 Fitzpatrick, Thaddaeus 16 FitzSimmons, Raymund Edmund Kean 181 Fitzwilliam, Earl 57 Flaxman, John 58, 101, 103 Fletcher, John 123 Foote, Samuel 46 Forrest, Edwin 55 Foscolo, Ugo 177 Freud, Sigmund 67 Fuseli, Henry 19–21, 41, 150–1, 165 Gainsborough, Thomas 51, 111, 136, 178 Galindo, P. 109–10 as Laertes (Hamlet) 109 Garrick, David 1–4, 6, 7, 8–54, 55, 56, 60, 64, 66, 67, 70, 72, 75, 77, 105, 106–7, 108, 111, 119, 122, 130, 133, 134, 135, 136, 138, 147, 150, 161, 172, 176, 197n. Shakespeare Jubilee: 5, 8, 50–4, 83 as Archer (The Beaux’ Stratagem) 6, 29

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209 as Bayes (Buckingham, The Rehearsal) 6, 12 as Benedick (Much Ado About Nothing) 5–6, 25, 118 as Chorus (Henry V ) 36 as Don John (Buckingham, The Chances) 29 as Hamlet 15, 16, 25, 29–31, 42–5, 58, 70–2 as extra (Harlequin Student) 28 as Henry IV (Henry IV Part 2) 36 as Hotspur (Henry IV Part 1) 36 as Iago (Othello) 37 as King Lear 4, 7, 25, 26, 32, 45–9, 51 as Leontes (The Winter’s Tale) 37 as Lothario (The Fair Penitent) 29 as Macbeth 3, 15, 17–22, 24–7, 29, 82, 125, 130 as Othello 37 as Petruchio (Garrick, Catherine and Petruchio) 37 as Posthumus (Cymbeline) 36 as Ranger (Hoadly, The Suspicious Husband) 5, 29 as Richard III 5, 15, 16–17, 28, 32–3, 36, 74, 107, 155, 156 as Romeo 2, 39, 48 as Sir John Brute (Vanbrugh, The Provoked Wife) 6, 29 as Townly (Cibber, The Provoked Husband) 29 Works: Antony and Cleopatra 36 Catherine and Petruchio 37–8, 117 Cymbeline 36 Essay on Acting, A 17–18, 22 Fairies, The 40–1 Florizel and Perdita 37–8 Fribbleriad, The 16 Hamlet 43–5, 49, 70 Isabella, or The Fatal Marriage 107, 117 Jubilee, The 5, 52–4 King Lear 6, 46–9 Lethe 27 Lying Valet, The 27 Macbeth 24–5, 82 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 41

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210 Garrick, David (Cont’d) ‘Ode’ 50–2 ‘Prologue’ (1750) 49–50 Ragandjaw 37 Rehearsal, The 6 Romeo and Juliet 14, 38–9 Tempest, The 37 Productions: Henry IV Part 2 26 Henry VIII 36 King John 26 King Lear 26 Macbeth 80–1 Richard III 26 Tempest, The 60 Garrick, Eva Maria, née Veigel 3 Garrick, George 25, 45 Garrick, Peter 27, 28 Gay, John Beggar’s Opera, The 92 Gentleman, Francis 25, 43, 91 George III, King 36, 57, 74, 94, 111, 114, 138, 155 George, Prince of Wales (later Prince Regent and King George IV) 85, 92, 145, 155 Gielgud, Sir John 166 Giffard, Henry 27–8 Gillray, James 110 Godwin, William 88, 131, 136, 175 Grattan, Thomas Colley, Ben Nazir 173 Graves, Henry Mercer 74 Grayling, A.C. 147, 169 Greatheed, Lady 113 Grimm, Friedrich 31 Hackett, James 157–60 Hafter, Ronald 31 Hailes, Lord 12 Hall, Sir Peter 5 Halpin, W.H. 173 Handel, George Frederick 40, 92 Hands, Terry 5 Hanmer, Sir Thomas 37 Harewood, Earl of 58 Harlequin Student 28, 53

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Index Harlow, George 136 Havard, William King Charles the First 68 Hawkins, F.W. 172 Hawkins, Thomas 12 Hawkins, William Cymbeline 36 Haydon, Benjamin 101 Hayman 151 Hayman, Francis 37, 151 Hazlitt, William 4, 58, 92, 111–12, 136, 137, 147–8, 152, 153, 155, 156, 158, 159, 161, 163, 165, 168, 169, 172, 174–5, 176 Heine, Heinrich 180 Heminge, John 81 Henderson, John 117 as Benedick (Much Ado About Nothing) 118 as Sir Giles Overreach (Massinger, A New Way to Pay Old Debts) 197n. Henslowe, Philip 78 Hicks, Greg as Coriolanus 104 Hinchcliffe, John 58 Hoadly, Benjamin Suspicious Husband, The 5, 29 Hoadly, Rev John 37 Cymbeline 36 Hogarth, William 32–3, 151 as Grilliardo (Garrick, Ragandjaw) 37 Holbein, Hans 102 Holland, Henry 77–8 Holland, Lord 102 Home, John Douglas 140 Homer 94 Hopkins, William 41 Howard, Charles, 11th Duke of Norfolk 142 Hughes, Richard 143 Hunt, Leigh 92–3, 94, 98, 159, 165, 170 Hytner, Nicholas 61 Inchbald, Elizabeth 67–9, 76–7, 79, 80, 83, 90, 102

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Index Inchbald, Joseph 65, 67 Inchiquin, Lord 69 Ireland, Samuel 85, 87, 88 Ireland, William Henry 85–90, 93 Henry II 87 Miscellaneous Papers 85 Vortigern 63, 87–90 Irving, Sir Henry 55, 79 as Benedick (Much Ado About Nothing) 118 as Iago (Othello) 161–2, 163 as Mortimer (Colman the Younger, The Iron Chest) 175 as Othello 161 Isaiah 113 Jacobi, Sir Derek 103 James II, King (as Duke of York) 68 Jephson, Robert Count of Narbonne, The 6, 68–9, 88 Jerrold, Douglas 147 Johnson, Charles Love in a Forest 40 Johnson, Dr. Samuel 5, 8, 12, 13, 14, 24, 27, 35–6, 47, 49–50, 111, 131–2, 178 Johnson, Jack 179 Jonson, Ben 10, 34, 93 Jordan, Dorothy 109, 119 as Imogen (Cymbeline) 12 as Rosalind (As You Like It) 120 Josephus 148 Kahan, Jeffrey 4 Kean, Aaron, (father of Edmund Kean?) 139 Kean, Charles, (son of Edmund Kean) 4, 102, 142, 176 as Iago (Othello) 167–8 Kean, Edmund, (father of Edmund Kean?) 139 Kean, Edmund 3, 4, 6, 7, 61, 99, 101, 104, 108, 135, 136, 138–81 as Barabas (Marlowe, The Jew of Malta) 171 as Ben Nazir (Grattan, Ben Nazir) 173 as Bertram (Maturin, Bertram), 173

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211

as Blue Beard (Colman the Younger, Blue Beard) 151 as Chimpanzee the Monkey (La Perouse) 141 as Coriolanus 171 as Cupid 140 as Hamlet 143, 144, 162, 168–9, 172 as Harlequin (including Harlequin Mother Goose) 140, 142, 143 as Henry V 173 as Iago (Othello) 162–3 as Jaffeir (Otway, Venice Preserved) 166–7 as King Lear 146, 171–2 as Macbeth 3, 143 as Mortimer (Colman the Younger, The Iron Chest) 173–5 as Octavian (Colman the Younger, The Mountaineers) 143 as Othello 3, 55, 142, 143, 146, 151, 152, 161–8, 172, 173, 177, 178 as Sir Giles Overreach (Massinger, A New Way to Pay Old Debts) 6, 146, 173, 175–7 as Percy (More, Percy) 141 as Posthumus (Cymbeline) 172 as Prince Arthur (King John) 140 as Richard II 169 as Richard III 2, 6, 74, 142, 143, 144, 146, 151, 154–61, 162–3, 165, 172, 173, 177, 178 as Richard (Merivale, Richard, Duke of York) 171 as Romeo 169 as Shylock (The Merchant of Venice) 3, 7, 138, 142, 144, 146–9, 151, 155, 162, 172, 173, 176, 177, 178 as Timon of Athens 170–1 as Wolsey (Henry VIII) 172 as Young Norval (Home, Douglas) 140 Kean, Howard, (son of Edmund Kean) 142 Kean, Mary, née Chambers, (wife of Edmund Kean) 142, as Columbine (Harlequin Mother Goose) 142

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212

Index

Kean, Moses, (father of Edmund Kean?) 139 Keats, John 149, 153–4 King Stephen 153 Keats and Charles Brown Otho the Great 153 Kemble, Captain Richard 63 Kemble, Charles 57, 58, 85, 90, 102, 168 Kemble, Fanny 130, 137 Kemble, John Philip 1–3, 6, 7, 55–104, 108, 111, 113, 134, 136, 145–6, 147–8, 149, 150, 151, 169, 174, 178 Works: Coriolanus 129, 135 Female Officer, The 65 Fugitive Pieces 65 Hamlet 70–1 Lodoiska 83, 88 Macbeth Reconsidered 74, 82 Oh! It’s Impossible 65 Richard III 156 as Alexander (Lee, The Rival Queens) 69 as Antony (Dryden, All for Love) 96 as Aurelio (Boaden, Aurelio and Miranda) 189n. as Belisarius 96 as Benedick (Much Ado About Nothing) 73 as Bertram (All’s Well That Ends Well) 73 as Brutus (Julius Caesar) 1, 2, 61, 76, 96–9, 102, 104 as Cato (Addison, Cato) 58, 59, 96, 102 as Coriolanus 1, 6, 7, 59, 62, 76, 96, 99–101, 102, 104, 108, 129, 134–5, 146, 171 as Count of Narbonne (Jephson, The Count of Narbonne) 6, Count of Narbonne 68–9 as Cromwell (Henry VIII) 123 as Duke (Measure for Measure) 189n. as Duke of York (Havard, King Charles the First) 68

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as Garrick 5 as Hamlet 57, 59–60, 69, 70–2, 78, 90, 94, 162, 168 as Henry V 76 as Hotspur (Henry IV Part 1) 72, 99 as Jaques (As You Like It) 90 as King John 74, 88, 99, 121, 140 as King Lear 60, 74 as Leontes (The Winter’s Tale) 108, 120 as Macbeth 55, 61, 69, 74–5, 88, 91, 94–5, 98, 99, 108, 125, 127–8 as Mortimer (Colman the Younger, The Iron Chest) 174–5 as Octavian (Colman, The Mountaineers) 143 as Othello 56, 73 as Posthumus (Cymbeline) 73, 88, 99 as Prospero (The Tempest) 91 as Richard III 60, 73–4, 91, 156 as Romeo 66, 69, 130 as Shylock (The Merchant of Venice) 74 as Sir Giles Overreach (Massinger, A New Way to Pay Old Debts) 69, 176 as Theodosius (Lee, Theodosius) 66 as Vortigern (Ireland, Vortigern) 87–90 as Wolsey (Henry VIII) 56, 91, 99 Productions: Coriolanus 97 Henry V 76 Henry VIII 91, 102 Julius Caesar 96–9, 102 King Lear 60 Macbeth 75, 77–83 Measure for Measure 79 Merchant of Venice, The 79 Othello 79 Richard III 60 Tempest, The 60, 91 Vortigern 63 Winter’s Tale, The 79 Kemble, Priscilla, née Brereton 84, 101

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Index Kemble, Roger 63–4, 188n. Kemble, Sarah, née Ward 63 Kemble, Stephen 124 as Falstaff (Henry IV Parts 1 and 2) 92 as Othello 71 King, Thomas 52 Kingsley, Sir Ben as Kean (FitzSimmons, Edmund Kean) 181 Lacy, James 8 Lamb, Charles 129, 156, 166, 171–2 Lamb, Hon. George Timon of Athens 170–1 Lampe, John Frederick Pyramus and Thisbe 40 Lawrence, French, Lyric Ode, A 41 Lawrence, Sir Thomas 58–60, 71, 101, 104, 109–10, 111, 151, 178 Lee, Nathaniel Rival Queens, The 69 Theodosius 66 Lemaître, Frédérick as Kean (Dumas, Kean) 179–80 Leveridge, Richard Comick Masque of Pyramus and Thisbe, The 40 Lewes, George Henry 152, 158, 167, 172, 177 Lewis, Matthew Castle Spectre, The 68 Monk, The 68 Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph 42–3 Linley, Thomas, the Younger Lyric Ode, A 41 Lloyd, Robert 81–2, 138 Loftie, Thomas 73 Louis XVI, King 76 Louis XVIII, King 92 Luhrmann, Baz 103 Lullin, Charles Michel 76, 102 Richard III 76 Macklin, Charles 25–6, 29, 37, 46, 130 as Macbeth 26–7

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213

as Shylock (The Merchant of Venice) 26, 31, 148 Production: Macbeth 26–7, 80 Macready, William Charles 55, 58, 60, 79, 82, 167 as Coriolanus 171 Maintenon, Mme de 115–16 Malone, Edmond 5, 69–70, 74, 76, 78, 86, 88, 190n. Marlowe, Christopher Jew of Malta, The 171 Massinger, Philip 3, 6 New Way to Pay Old Debts, A 3, 69, 146, 173, 175–7, 178, 197n. Matthews, Charles 4–5 Maturin, Charles Robert Bertram 171, 173 Manuel 154 McCoy, Kid 179 McDonald, Russ 4, 6, 55 McKellen, Sir Ian 181 Meister, Jacques Henri 113, 115 Melbourne, Lady 144, 154 Menander 93 Mendoza, Daniel 148 Mercury, Freddie 180 Merivale, John Herman Richard, Duke of York 171 Michelangelo 4, 113, 151 Middleton, Thomas 23 Milton, John 10, 41, 152 Mitford, Mary Russell Charles the First 155 Molière 93 Molloy, J.F. 141 Moore, Edward Gamester, The 111, 117 Moore, Thomas 163, 167 More, Hannah 8–9, 42 Percy 141 More, Martha 9 More, Sarah 9 Morgan, Macnamara Sheep-Shearing, The 37–8 Morton, Thomas Slave, The 165

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214 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 151 Murphy, Arthur 18, 22, 32, 47–9 Grecian Daughter, The 117 Hamlet, with Alterations 44–5 Zenobia 66 Murray, John 154, 176, 177 Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor 144, 163 Newton, Rev Thomas 14–15 Noble, Adrian 103 Norfolk, Duke of 57, 76 North, Lord 25 Northumberland, Duke of 92 Noverre, Jean Georges 20–1, 25 Nunn, Trevor 5, 103 O’Neill, Eliza as Juliet (Romeo and Juliet) 169 Olivier, Laurence, Lord Olivier 103, 166 Orgel, Stephen 22 Otway, Thomas History and Fall of Caius Marius, The 38–9 Venice Preserved 117, 166–7 Oulton, W.C. 80 Oxford, Robert Harley, 2nd Earl of 12 Oya, Reiko 169 Palmer, Robert 3 Parker, Louis Napoleon 162 Pascoe, Judith 114 Pasquin, Anthony, see Williams, John Peck, Bob as Iago (Othello) 162, 163 Pepys, Samuel 40 Percy, Bishop Thomas 11–12 Percy, Lord, Duke of Northumberland 65 Perkins, Mr (wig-maker), 42 Phippen, Francis 139 Piozzi, Mrs, see Thrale, Hester, Mrs Piozzi Pitt, William, the Younger 91 Place, Francis 95 Planché, James Robinson 102 Plautus 93

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Index Pope, Alexander 10 Poussin, Nicolas 100, 151 Powell, George 169 Prescott, Paul 19, 22, 136 Pritchard, Hannah 130 as Beatrice (Much Ado About Nothing) 118 as Lady Macbeth 19–21, 125–6, 130, 131–2 Procter, Bryan Waller 148, 152, 166, 179 Purcell, Henry, Fairy Queen, The 40 Quin, James 72, 134 as Lothario (The Fair Penitent) 29 as Macbeth 17–18, 22, 23 as Othello 37 Racine, Jean 151 Rae, Alexander as Iago (Othello) 166 Reynolds, Sir Joshua 4, 29, 53, 81, 111, 113, 114, 150, 152, 178 Rich, John 53, 92 Richardson, John 140, 148 Richardson, Samuel 47, 201n. Ripley, John 97–8 Roach, Joseph 4, 185n. Roberts, David 2 Robinson, Henry Crabb 156, 158, 160, 161, 165 Robson, William 169 Rogers, J., (engraver) 60 Romney, George 111 Ross, Robert H., 156 Rossi, John Charles Felix 93 Rostand, Edmond Cyrano de Bergerac 179 Roubillac, Louis François 9, 11 Rowe, Nicholas 5, 34, 35, 81 Fair Penitent, The 29, 117 Tragedy of Jane Shore, The 117 Salter, Mr, (actor) 56–8, 61, 62, 101 as Hamlet 57, 102 Sandford, Samuel 156 Sartre, Jean-Paul Kean 180–1 Saxe-Meiningen, Duke of 103 Scheemakers, Peter 10, 51

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Index Schopenhauer, Johanna 91 Scott, Sir Walter 70, 72 Scouten, Arthur 34 Scudéry, Mlle de 115–16 Seward, Anna 120 Shadwell, Thomas Tempest, The 37 Shakespeare, William All’s Well That Ends Well 73, 118 Antony and Cleopatra 36, 96 As You Like It 40, 90, 115, 117, 119–20 Coriolanus 1, 6, 7, 59, 62, 76, 96, 97, 99–101, 102, 104, 108, 117, 129, 134–5, 146, 171 Cymbeline 34, 36, 73, 88, 99, 117, 119, 121, 153, 172 Comedy of Errors, The 65, 118 Henry V 36, 76, 88, 117, 173 Henry VIII 36, 56, 69, 99, 102, 114, 115, 117, 123–4, 131, 134, 172 Hamlet 6, 10, 15, 16, 22, 29–31, 35, 42–5, 57–8, 59–60, 65, 69, 70–2, 90–1, 94, 117, 118, 133, 143, 144, 155, 162, 164, 168–9, 172 Henry IV Part 1 36, 72, 99 Henry IV Part 2 26, 36 Henry VI, Part 1 119, 171 Henry VI, Part 2 119, 171 Henry VI, Part 3 119, 171 Julius Caesar 1, 10, 37, 61, 76, 96–9, 102, 104, 144 King John 26, 74, 88, 99, 102, 117, 118, 121–3, 131–2 King Lear 4, 6, 7, 26, 32, 34, 35, 45–9, 57, 60, 74, 117, 146, 171, 173–4 King Richard II 169 King Richard III 5, 6, 15, 16–17, 26, 28, 32–3, 36, 60, 67, 73–4, 76, 88, 91, 107, 117, 118, 119, 142, 143, 144, 146, 151, 154–61, 162–4, 165, 172, 173, 177, 178 Love’s Labours Lost 118 Macbeth 3, 7, 15, 17–27, 29, 35, 55, 61, 67, 69, 74, 77–83, 88, 91, 94, 98, 99, 108, 115, 116–17, 119, 123, 124–9, 130, 131–2, 133, 134, 136–7, 143, 169

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215

Much Ado About Nothing 73, 117, 118 Measure for Measure 68, 79, 117, 119, 120, 121 Merry Wives of Windsor, The 35 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 40–2, 118 Merchant of Venice, The 3, 7, 26, 31, 74, 79, 105–7, 117, 119, 135, 138, 142, 144, 146–9, 151, 155, 162, 163, 173, 176, 177, 178 Othello 3, 35, 37, 55, 56, 71, 73, 79, 117, 142, 143, 146, 151, 152, 153, 160, 161–8, 172, 173, 177, 178 Romeo and Juliet 9, 14, 50, 52, 69, 117, 118, 130, 169 Taming of the Shrew, The 37, 117 Tempest, The 10, 60, 117, 119 Two Gentlemen of Verona, The 119 Timon of Athens 170–1 Titus Andronicus 96 Twelfth Night 117, 118, 119 Troilus and Cressida 153 Winter’s Tale, The 37, 69, 79, 108, 117, 119, 120 Shakespeare, Anne, née Hathaway 86 Shakespeare Ladies Club 33–4 Shaw, George Bernard 6 Sheffield Shakespeare Club 55–8 Shelley, Mary 131 Sher, Sir Antony 61 as Kean (Sartre, Kean) 181 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley 60, 70, 72, 75, 76, 77, 87–90 School for Scandal, The 88 Pizarro 91 Sheridan, Thomas 126 Coriolanus or The Roman Matron 100, 129, 135 Shirley, William Edward the Black Prince 26 Siddons, Harriet, (daughter of Sarah) 90 Siddons, Henry, (son of Sarah), 90 Siddons, Henry 91 Siddons, Sarah, née Kemble 3, 4, 6, 7, 56, 57, 63, 64, 87, 90, 91, 92, 99, 105–37, 141, 145 as Ariel (The Tempest) 117

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216

Index

Siddons, Sarah, née Kemble (Cont’d) as Beatrice (Much Ado About Nothing) 117, 118 as Belvidera (Otway, Venice Preserved) 117 as Calista (Rowe, The Fair Penitent) 117 as Cleopatra (Dryden, All for Love) 96, 118 as Constance (King John) 74, 117, 118, 121–3, 131, 132 as Cordelia (Tate, King Lear) 117 as Desdemona (Othello) 73, 117 as Euphrasia (Murphy, The Grecian Daughter) 117 as Gertrude (Hamlet) 117, 118 as Hamlet 109, 117, 133 as Hermione (The Winter’s Tale) 108 as Hermione 117, 119, 120 as Imogen (Cymbeline) 73, 117, 119, 121 as Isabella (Measure for Measure) 117, 119, 120, 121, 189n. as Isabella (Isabella) 107 as Jane Shore (Rowe, The Tragedy of Jane Shore) 117 as Juliet (Romeo and Juliet) 117, 118, 130 as Katherina (Garrick, Catherine and Petruchio) 117 as Lady Anne (Richard III) 107, 117 as Lady Macbeth 2, 7, 55, 83, 108, 115, 116–17,118, 119, 123, 124–9, 131, 132, 133, 134, 136–7 as Miranda (Boaden, Aurelio and Miranda) 189n. as Mrs Beverly (Moore, The Gamester) 111, 117 as Olivia (Twelfth Night) 117, 119 as Ophelia (Hamlet) 117 as Portia (The Merchant of Venice) 105–7, 117, 119, 135 as Princess Katherine (Henry V ) 117 as Queen Elizabeth (Richard III) 117, 118 as Queen Katharine (Henry VIII) 91, 114, 115, 117, 118, 123–4, 131

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as Rosalind (As You Like It) 115, 117, 119–20 as Volumnia (Coriolanus) 108, 117, 129, 134–5 Works: Remarks on the Character of Lady Macbeth 127 Reminiscences 106–7 Siddons, Walter 108, 109 Sinden, Sir Donald 103 as Othello 162 Smirke, Robert 92–3, 96, 97, 101 Smith, Horace 154 Smith, James 154 Smith, John Christopher 40 Smith, William ‘Gentleman’ 72 as Macbeth 125 Soane, Sir John 96, 97, 101 Sophocles 64 Sotheby, William Ivan 154 Southerne, Thomas Isabella 107, 117 Oroonoko 165 Spenser, Edmund 10 Steele, Joshua 29–31 Steevens, George 11, 13, 44, 190n. Storace, Stephen Haunted Tower, The 83 Suard, Jean 9 Swinfen, John 28 Talma, François Joseph 90, 101 Tate, Nahum 135 King Lear 6, 46–9, 60, 117, 172–4 Taylor, Joseph 22 Terry, Daniel 124 Terry, Ellen 130, 162 as Beatrice (Much Ado About Nothing) 118 as Lady Macbeth 128 Theobald, Lewis 24, 35 Thomson, James Coriolanus 129 Thrale, Hester, Mrs Piozzi 49, 108, 110 Tidswell, Charlotte 139–40, 142 Titian 152

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Index Tonson, Jacob 35 Turner, Joseph Mallord William 101 Twain, Mark 179 Vanbrugh, Sir John Provoked Wife, The 6, 29 Vega, Lope de 93 Verdi, Giuseppe Macbeth 83 Vickers, Brian 34 Villon, François 179 Virgil 100 Wagner, Richard 103 Walker, Robert 35 Waller, Edmund 41 Walpole, Horace 9, 41, 68, 114 Warburton, William 24, 35 Warner, Deborah 61 Warner, Richard 14, 15 Warton, Thomas 11–12 West, Benjamin 101 West, William 193n. Westmacott, Sir Richard 101 Whalley, Peter 11 Whately, Thomas 74, 190n. Wickham, William 76 Wilkes, Thomas 19

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217

Wilkinson, Tate 65, 66–7, 68–9, 71 Wilks, Robert 43 Williams, Charles 95 Williams, John, ‘Anthony Pasquin’115 Wilson, Benjamin 49, 51 Winston, James 166 Wolf, Matt 181 Wolfit, Sir Donald 104 Wood, John as Brutus (Julius Caesar) 104 Woodward, Henry, as Fool (King Lear) 47 Harlequin’s Jubilee 53 Wren, Sir Christopher 77 Wyatt, Benjamin 77 Yates, Mary Ann 106–7 Yates, Richard 28 York, Duke of 57, 109 Young, Charles Mayne 129, 132–3, 169 as Iago (Othello) 166–7 as Iachimo (Cymbeline) 172 as Pierre (Otway, Venice Preserved) 166–7 Younge, Elizabeth 106–7 Zeffirelli, Franco 103 Zoffany, Johann 19, 26, 151

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