A Man of the People

I've written before about the actor Edmund Kean's working-class associations, including his membership in the notorious Wolves Club.

William Hazlitt, a theatre critic who admired Kean, frequently linked him with the common man. "Mr. Kean's acting is not of the patrician order," he wrote in the London Magazine in 1820, "he is one of the people, and what might be termed a radical performer."

Seeing Kean as the title character in William Shakespeare's Coriolanus, Hazlitt deemed him a failure. Since "the prevailing characteristics of the part are inordinate self-opinion, and haughty elevation of soul," Kean simply lacked the aristocratic grace to play the role, Hazlitt thought. Instead, Kean "descended into the common arena of man," which might have been good for other characters, but not Coriolanus.

Similarly, Hazlitt was disappointed at seeing Kean in the regal title role of Shakespeare's King Lear. Of course, Kean wasn't exactly acting Shakespeare's Lear, as he was performing Nahum Tate's adaptation of the play with a happy ending. Still, Hazlitt found Kean's performance "altogether inferior to his Othello."

The parts of Kean's Lear that Hazlitt found most affecting were the ones where he was least royal and most human. He singled out this speech Lear has when reunited with Cordelia:

Pray, do not mock me;

I am a very foolish, fond old man,

Fourscore and upward, not an hour more nor less;

And, to deal plainly,

I fear I am not in my perfect mind.

Methinks, I should know you, and know this man;

Yet I am doubtful; for I'm mainly ignorant

What place this is; and all the skill I have

Remembers not these garments; nay, I know not

Where I did lodge last night. Do not laugh at me,

For, as I am a man, I think this lady

To be my child Cordelia.

Hazlitt wrote that on speaking the last words, the great actor "staggered faintly into Cordelia's arms, and his sobs of tenderness, and his ecstasy of joy commingled, drew streaming tears from the brightest eyes."

That was the Kean that Hazlitt wanted to see, and it appears to have been the Kean most of his other fans wanted as well.

Romanticism and Theatrical Experience

I recently read Jonathan Mulrooney's book Romanticism and Theatrical Experience. It provides an excellent analysis of the actor Edmund Kean, the critic William Hazlitt, and the poet and playwright John Keats. It also delves into how each of these three figures in turn influenced one another.

The first part of the book is divided into two sections, one on theater and the daily news, and another on Britain's theatrical press during the first three decades of the nineteenth century. As Mulrooney observes, the eighteenth century had always had people writing about the theater in periodicals, but it wasn't until the end of that century that audiences were able to read day after day the events that had just taken place in the playhouses at Drury Lane and Covent Garden.

According to Mulrooney, the role of the reviewer shifted from being an advertiser to being an independent reporter. Reviews became longer and more substantial. A watershed moment came with the Old Price Riots, when audiences at Covent Garden disrupted performance night after night to protest an increase in ticket prices. After that, reviewers took to both giving their aesthetic judgments on plays and reporting how they saw audiences respond during the evening. Even people who were not there that night could then participate in the performances vicariously.

Mulrooney next details the different theatrical periodicals available in London from 1800 to 1830. The Theatrical Gazette, for instance, though it didn't last long, was able to give accounts of both Drury Lane and Covent Garden throughout the 1815-1816 season, focusing on alternating houses each night. Of more lasting importance was the Examiner, founded by Leigh and John Hunt. Mulrooney finds the Examiner to be "the most innovative periodical to publish theatrical criticism in the Romantic-period" because it represented theater "as a public experience equal to politics and commerce."

Perhaps no figure in Romanticism was as much a creature of the theatrical press as Edmund Kean, who created a sensation after he appeared at Drury Lane as Shylock in 1814. Mulrooney sees Kean as troubling class differences, since he came from and appealed to the working class. According to Mulrooney, he "embodied a kind of theatrical bad taste, a mobile, sexually ambiguous, working-class and even Cockney subject." Unlike the great John Philip Kemble, Kean avoided stately orations and statuesque gestures. Instead, his acting seemed natural, almost improvised. This made his performances best viewed from the pit, not the expensive boxes.

The same year Kean took to the stage at Drury Lane, Hazlitt began working as critic for both The Examiner and The Morning Chronicle. Mulrooney sees Hazlitt's writing as playing a role in the shift not just from the acting style of Kemble to that of Kean, but in "a fundamental change in the understanding of what a 'mental state' is, what a self is, and how that self is to be represented on stage." Hazlitt focused on cultural receptions to performances. Kean's class-defying performances in turn allowed him to write not just about theatre in the hallowed halls of the patent theaters, but also about jugglers, boxers, and other entertainers not generally covered in the press.

Kean influenced Keats, as well, as can be seen in his famous "negative capability" letter written in December of 1817. As Mulrooney notes, "the letter begins with Kean" and "represents a vital connection between Keats's theatrical experience and his poetry." Keats also wrote three substantial theater reviews in the Champion, covering for his friend John Hamilton Reynolds when he was out of town. Though some critics see Keats as a bit of a social climber, his championing of Kean firmly allies him with the working class.

Unfortunately, the list price for the book is almost $100, but that's what libraries are for, after all. If you get a chance, it's a compelling read for anyone interested in Romantic drama.

End of MLA

Yesterday was the final day of the Modern Language Association conference in New York. I was pleased to be able to present two papers at the conference, one on Charles Dickens and the actor William Charles Macready, and the other on George Bernard Shaw and the Italian playwright Luigi Antonelli.

There were many interesting talks given this year. Frances Ferguson, speaking at the "Romantics at Two Hundred" program arranged by the Keats-Shelley Association of America, spoke about William Hazlitt's criticism in 1818. Hazlitt criticized the poet James Thomson, though he credited him with being the most popular poet among his contemporaries. Thomson was dead by 1818, but his poem The Seasons remained popular. According to Hazlitt, Thomson could not enter into the minds of others, which made him a poor playwright. Thomson's Tragedy of Sophonisba, which opened the same year as George Lillo's The London Merchant, is largely forgotten today.

Speaking of The London Merchant, Laura Rosenthal on Saturday gave a really interesting paper on Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton ghosting 18th-century tragedy. She drew parallels between Hamilton and The London Merchant, which both have scrappy protagonists trying to rise up in the world. In both plays, the protagonist is the victim of a set-up in which a conniving woman gets him to have sex with her, and he then has this event used to get money out of him. In Lillo's play, the protagonist tries to confess his sin to his master, but since Hamilton does not have a master, Rosenthal said, he confesses to the public. Ultimately, she said, Hamilton is sad, but not tragic, because the institutions Hamilton created endure, even as he dies ignobly.

Later on Saturday, Heidi Holder gave a wonderful paper about the popular Newgate drama Jack Shepherd. Shepherd was a real criminal who in the 18th century was arrested for burglary, but managed to escape from prison four times, sometimes with the help of female accomplices. Daniel Defoe wrote an account of Shepherd's life, and in the 19th century W.T. Moncrieff wrote a melodrama about him. William Ainsworth wrote a novel about Shepherd in 1839, which became the basis for numerous other plays, including one by John Baldwin Buckstone, which featured scenery by William Telbin in its original production. Eventually, authorities became concerned that these plays were encouraging crime, and in 1848 the government passed a formal ban on Jack Shepherd plays.

Sunday was the Shaw session I was a a part of, which also included Virginia Costello talking about Shaw and Emma Goldman, Martin Meisel talking about Shaw and Sean O'Casey, and Ellen Dolgin talking about Shaw and J.M. Barrie. It was an honor to join them!

Next year, the MLA conference will be in Chicago. We'll see if they can top the amount of snow we had at the conference this year!

Keen on Kean

Edmund Kean has gone down in history as one of the greatest (though not one of the most beloved) actors of Shakespeare. The exact date of Kean birth is disputed, but in his book The Flash of Lightning, Giles Playfair concludes Kean was born on St. Patrick's Day, 1789.

Poor Kean was the illegitimate son of Ann Carey, whose grandfather wrote popular songs like "Sally in Our Alley" before he committed suicide by hanging in 1743. Kean's father left the child with nothing but his own name, Edmund Kean, when he jumped off the roof of his house and died. Young Kean was three at the time.

Kean was raised primarily by Charlotte Tidswell, the reputed mistress of his uncle. According to Playfair, Tidswell "beat him, locked him in his room, tied him to his bedpost and--more ingenious--encircled his neck in a large dog collar, with her name and address inscribed on it." Though she mistreated the boy, she also introduced him to acting, and by the time he was eight, Kean had already played some small rolls at Drury Lane.

However, it was in the provinces that Kean truly learned his trade. He did not make his adult debut in London until January 26, 1814, when he appeared at Drury Lane as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. Due in part to bad weather, the house was less than a third full. Kean cast aside the traditional red wig used for Shylock, as well as the traditional stage business used for the character. The audience was amazed, as was William Hazlitt, the reviewer for the Morning Chronicle. "No actor had come out for many years at all equal to him," Hazlitt wrote.

After the performance, Kean rushed home to his wife Mary and son Charles. Supposedly, he greeted his wife with the cry: "Mary, you shall ride in your carriage and Charlie shall go to Eaton." Indeed, they both did. Kean was a sensation; he single-handedly reversed the fortunes of Drury Lane, which was on the edge of bankruptcy. His acting provided his family with riches and his son with a first-class education.

Though most known today for Shakespearean roles like Richard III and Othello, Kean was equally popular as Sir Giles Overreach in Philip Massinger's A New Way to Pay Old Debts. Upon seeing him in the role, Lord Byron went into convulsions. Byron adored Kean's acting, but the admiration was not mutual. Kean once left a dinner Byron was holding in his honor, supposedly so he could dine with some boxers.

While Kean was ruling the stage at Drury Lane, Eliza O'Neill appeared at Covent Garden, creating a sensation as Juliet. The committee that ran Drury Lane insisted Kean play Romeo to compete with the new actress, but Kean's Romeo was weak. He was better at acting villains.

Perhaps that's not surprising considering how Kean courted scandal in his private life. A jury fined him 800 pounds for "criminal conversation" with Charlotte Cox, the wife of an alderman. To many, such social climbing seemed worse than the adultery itself.

Mary ended up raising Charles largely on her own, though the father paid for the boy's education. Much to Edmund's dismay, Charles took to acting, a horrible blow to his father's ambitions.

Kean's last role was acting Othello to his son's Iago. It was March 25th, 1833. The scene this time was Covent Garden, and it was the first time father and son had acted together on a London stage.

Halfway through, Edmund Kean collapsed into his son's arms. He whispered into his ear: "Oh God, I am dying. Speak to them for me." Two months later, he was dead.

Illuminating Abrams

So yesterday I explained how M.H. Abrams in his book The Mirror and the Lamp traces English Romantic thought back to German theories of vegetable genius. Today, I want to take a look at how these theories influenced the way we think about art in the English-speaking world, particularly how we think about the theatre.

The Romantic critic William Hazlitt manifests the influence of German philosophy in his appropriately titled essay "Is Genius Conscious of Its Powers?" As is evident from the below quote, Hazlitt's answer to that question was an overwhelming "nein":

The definition of genius is that it acts unconsciously; and those who have produced immortal works have done so without knowing how or why.... Correggio, Michael Angelo, Rimbrandt, did what they did without premeditation or effort--their works came from their minds as a natural birth--if you had asked them why they adopted this or that style, they would have answered, because they could not help it.

Poet and playwright Samuel Taylor Coleridge had also read the German theorists. He drew upon them to argue that Shakespeare was great not in spite of his peculiarities, but precisely because of them. Coleridge praised the diversity of Shakespeare's writing, the mixing of comedy and tragedy, the trivial and the sublime. Coleridge appealed not to the ancient laws of Aristotle but "to the great law of nature that opposites tend to attract and temper each other."

Shakespeare was the great hero of the Romantics, but as much as they wanted to worship his genius, they were thwarted in their attempts to understand him as a man. This was not only because of the scanty information available about his biography. (The Romantics knew even less about Shakespeare than we know today, after diligent research in the early twentieth century by the likes of Charles and Hulda Wallace.) The problem was also that the plays of Shakespeare, precisely because of their universality, resist attempts to read them biographically.

Abrams calls this the "Paradox of Shakespeare," the fact that we know him so well and so little at the same time. The plays seem filled with their author, but at the same time he is nowhere to be found in them. That doesn't mean the nineteenth century didn't go looking, and few critics looked harder than Thomas Carlyle. Still, Carlyle had to admit defeat, writing in 1841:

But I will say, of Shakespeare's works generally, that we have no full impress of him there; even as full as we have of many men. His works are so many windows, through which we see a glimpse of the world that was in him.... Such bursts, however, make us feel that the surrounding matter is not radiant; that it is, in part, temporary, conventional. Alas, Shakespeare had to write for the Globe Playhouse: his great soul had to crush itself, as it could, into that and no other mould.

This image of the tragic Shakespeare, "crushed" in order to fill the theatrical world with his genius, seems to me an idea only the Romantics could have imagined. Other authors received similar treatment by Romantic critics, including Milton and even Homer, but Shakespeare remained the center of their literary universe, as he has remained to this day.

Abrams conjures up a number of Romantic critics to forward his argument. Some of those critics, like Carlyle, are well known today, but others remain obscure. My favorite discovery in reading the book was Joseph Warton, a poet and friend of Samuel Johnson who in the latter half of the eighteenth century wrote fervently about Shakespeare's ability in The Tempest to give "the reins to his boundless imagination" and portray "the romantic, the wonderful, and the wild, to the most pleasing extravagance."

Though Warton's work largely predates the Romantic literary revolution of the 1790s, he is clearly sympathetic to their cause. He wrote all the way back in 1753:

It is the peculiar privilege of poetry... to give Life and motion to immaterial beings; and form, and colour, and action, even to abstract ideas; to embody the Virtues, and Vices, and the Passions.... Prosopopoeia, therefore, or personification, conducted with dignity and propriety, may be justly esteemed one of the greatest efforts of the creative power of a warm and lively imagination.

Abrams links this passage directly to William Wordsworth, who in The Excursion instead of calling upon the hills and streams of the landscape for inspiration, looks instead "to the strong creative power / Of human passion." Here then is the light of the lamp, shining out of the poet, rather than a mirror passively reflecting the world around it.

Light, ever since Sir Isaac Newton broke it up into the colors of the spectrum, had never quite been the same, and Abrams dedicates the last chapter of his book to the dichotomy of science and poetry in Romantic criticism.  Newton's prism seemed more like a prison to many Romantics. After seeing the great Edmund Kean acting Shakespeare, John Keats lamented the fact that "romance lives but in books" and "the rainbow is robbed of its mystery."

Keats later wrote in his long poem Lamia:

Do not all charms fly

At the mere touch of cold philosophy?

There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:

We know her woof, her texture; she is given

In the dull catalogue of common things.

Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings,

Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,

Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine--

Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made

The tender-person'd Lamia melt into a shade.

But not all Romantics maintained a hostility toward science. Keats' mentor Leigh Hunt once remarked that a man who thinks he is no poet after finding out the scientific cause of a rainbow truly "was none before."

John Stuart Mill, who was raised to be a utilitarian rationalist, but was then converted by the poetry of Wordsworth, eventually declared a truce. Passionately feeling the beauty of a cloud, he said, is no hindrance to understanding that it is actually a vapor of water suspended in air. Mill, though writing of poetry, could just as well have been speaking of the theatre when claimed:

Those who think themselves called upon, in the name of truth, to make war against illusions, do not perceive the distinction between an illusion and a delusion. A delusion is an erroneous opinion--it is believing a thing which is not. An illusion, on the contrary, is an affair solely of feeling, and may exist completely severed from delusion. It consists in extracting from a conception known not to be true, but which is better than truth, the same benefit to the feelings which would be derived from it if it were a reality.

Here we see a moral benefit of art, and in particular of the theatre, which invites the audience to enter fully into the lives of the characters on stage. Through drama, we come to identify with those outside of ourselves and recognize our common lot with all humanity. As Percy Bysshe Shelley put it:

A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause.

So there you have it. Art is not a mere ornamentation, but the greatest possible tool for the betterment of humanity. That's some pretty heady stuff, and in these post-Romantic times, maybe there are more than a few who believe that all the poetry of Alexander Pushkin is not worth a good pair of boots. Shelley, obviously, would disagree, and so would I.

Thus ends my explication of M.H. Abrams' classic book The Mirror and the Lamp. Now go out there and shine!