Edmund Kean

English actor

• Born: November 4, 1787
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: May 15, 1833
• Place of death: Richmond, England

Kean’s capacity to identify deeply and sympathetically with the characters he portrayed and his ability to communicate passion to his audiences established him as the foremost tragic actor of his day and assured the dominance of Romantic over classical acting techniques on the nineteenth century British stage.

Early Life

Considerable uncertainty surrounds Edmund Kean’s date of birth. November 4, 1787, is the most frequently mentioned possibility, but March 17, 1789, has also been suggested, and both may be incorrect. Some doubt exists, too, about Kean’s parentage, but the consensus is that his mother was Ann “Nance” Carey, an untalented actor and part-time street vendor, and that his father was Edmund Kean, at various times a surveyor’s clerk, an architect, an amateur orator, a professional mime, a drunkard, and a madman. The great actor himself often speculated that he was the son of his sometime guardian, Charlotte Tidswell, and Charles Howard, the eleventh duke of Norfolk, but this appears to be romantic fantasy. Contemporary testimony points with near unanimity to Nance Carey as Kean’s mother, and the actor’s physical and temperamental resemblance to the dark-eyed, dark-haired, alcoholic, unstable Edmund suggests, although it does not quite prove, the elder Edmund’s paternity.

Because both the Carey and the Kean families had strong connections with the theater, it is hardly surprising that the younger Edmund Kean became a performer. In addition to Nance, her father, George Saville Carey, appeared on the stage both as an actor and an impersonator of figures from the entertainment world. George’s father, Henry Carey, was a writer of ballad operas whose one claim to fame, other than being Edmund Kean’s grandfather, is his composition of the song “Sally in Our Alley.” Like George Carey, with whom he occasionally performed, Moses Kean, the actor’s uncle and a man of considerable theatrical renown, was an impersonator of public figures.

Although the details of his childhood are almost as sketchy as the facts of his birth, it appears that Kean was primarily cared for not by his parents but by a Mrs. Price, his father’s sister, and by Charlotte Tidswell, an actor who was Moses Kean’s mistress for a time. Young Kean may also have been negligently attended by a professional nurse for a short while, resulting in health problems that required his temporarily wearing leg braces, but again the biographers contradict one another on this point.

What the biographers agree on, however, is that Kean began his stage career early and experienced a long and often frustrating apprenticeship in his craft. The earliest playbill that mentions him by name is dated June 8, 1796, and announces him as Robin in a Drury Lane production of The Merry Wives of Windsor (pr. 1597), but he is reputed to have played a goblin in a presentation of Macbeth (pr. 1606) as early as April 21, 1794, when the new Drury Lane first opened its doors, and his actual debut may have occurred still earlier. Separating fact from myth for this first stage of Kean’s theatrical life is nearly impossible, but what emerges from the various accounts is the portrait of a gifted, undereducated, rebellious child performing sporadically in the major and minor theaters and entertainment halls of London and beyond while being shunted from guardian to exploitative mother to guardian. The young Kean is most likely to have been experienced in every form of theatrical entertainment, from singing to tumbling to Shakespearian recitation, by the time he was announced on May 18, 1802, at Covent Garden as “the celebrated Master Carey.”

The above billing suggests that Kean was exhibited as a child prodigy, an assumption strengthened by the oft-repeated claim that he was capable, perhaps even before entering his teens, of reciting The Merchant of Venice (pr. c. 1596-1597) in its entirety from memory. Whatever the truth, Kean, despite his small stature, could hardly have passed for a prodigy beyond his mid-teens, and by 1804, he was working as a journeyman actor at a weekly wage of fifteen shillings for Samuel Jerrold, an organizer of a provincial touring troupe.

Kean played a wide variety of roles for several companies during the next decade, spent mainly in the provinces, and while mastering an impressive dramatic repertoire, he waited with growing impatience for the opportunity to prove himself before an audience at London’s Drury Lane or Covent Garden. Compounding his troubles during this period of comparative obscurity were the attractions of alcohol and the financial responsibilities that accompanied his marriage to Mary Chambers on July 17, 1808, and the births of his sons Howard Anthony Kean, on September 13, 1809, and John Charles Kean, who eventually became a distinguished actor in his own right, on January 18, 1811.

Life’s Work

One of the terrible ironies of Kean’s life is that his beloved Howard Anthony died during the complex contract negotiations that led to Kean’s first London successes. The son died on November 22, 1813, and the father premiered at Drury Lane as Shylock on January 26, 1814. Reviewers for only two of the London papers, the Morning Chronicle and the Morning Post, were present for the historic performance, but both praised Kean’s innovative, passionate, sardonic interpretation of Shakespeare’s familiar Jew. The Morning Chronicle’s William Hazlitt, who was to become Kean’s foremost champion and most insightful critic, was especially impressed with the variety of emotion Kean infused into the too-often predictable role.

After several performances of The Merchant of Venice, the patrons of Drury Lane, still uncertain of Kean’s potential, looked forward with considerable anticipation to his appearance on February 12 as Richard III. This time, a full retinue of reviewers was present. The Richard to which London audiences were accustomed was the carefully cadenced, classically restrained Richard of John Philip Kemble. Kean’s Richard, by contrast, was emotionally complex, unpredictable, electrifying; his gestures and vocal intonations were subtle at one moment and fiery at the next. This Richard was not simply a character played by a skillful actor with a mellifluous voice; this was the moody, richly varied human being as he might really have been.

For those who would accept nothing but Kemble’s declamatory style, the evening was disconcerting, but for the rest, the performance was a revelation, and Kean’s success was assured. Kean’s subsequent performances of Richard III (pr. c. 1592-1593) filled Drury Lane to capacity and restored the financially ailing house to solvency. His appearance as Hamlet on March 12, although not quite the success that his Richard had been, was received well enough to confirm him as Kemble’s primary rival for preeminence on the English stage and to raise the public’s hope that Kean might become as great as the immortal David Garrick. His triumphs also ended the financial privations of his family. The provincial player who had so recently been earning a few shillings a week was now the most lionized actor in London, under contract to Drury Lane Theater for five years at the princely sum of eighty pounds a month.

The extraordinary season continued with Kean’s portrayal on May 5 of Othello and, in the immediately following performance, of Iago. His Othello, eventually recognized as one of his greatest roles, at first received lukewarm reviews, but his Iago was immediately acknowledged as masterful. As generally happened when Kean performed, what the critics noted were the subtleties of gesture, the nuances of expression that set his version of the character apart from all others. Kean’s voice lacked the grandiloquent music of that of Kemble, but he could communicate emotion with a glance, with some bit of body movement that no previous actor had thought to attempt, and he could shift the emphasis of a familiar dramatic line in such a way that it became startlingly new and the character astonishingly human.

Kean followed up his London successes with well-received performances in Dublin, Gloucester, and Birmingham. He returned to London in the fall of 1814, and in addition to repeating the roles that had made his reputation during his first London season, he played Macbeth, Romeo, Richard II, and various forgettable non-Shakespearian parts. Although his Richard II was widely admired and his Macbeth profitable, the season, which ran from October, 1814, through July, 1815, was not quite the dazzling triumph that the previous one had been. Nevertheless, Kean remained a vastly admired man, and he thoroughly immersed himself in the life that his recent fame and wealth had made possible. His friendship was cultivated by Lord Byron, and he began developing eccentricities that rivaled Byron’s own. He sometimes startled his guests by introducing them to his pet lion, often rode after dark at full gallop through the countryside on a black horse, and, most ominously, spent interminable hours drinking in the Coal Hole Tavern with his cronies of the Wolf Club, a notorious organization of his own founding.

By the season of 1815-1816, Kean was advising in the management of Drury Lane, with Byron and four others, and he continued to be the theater’s major attraction. His performances were generally well attended, but when he added new roles to his previous successes, the public, having been disappointed by a number of his previous efforts to diversify, was slow to respond. Three new parts, however, were well received: Florez in Douglas Kinnaird’s The Merchant of Bruges: Or, Beggar’s Bush (1815), Sir Giles Overreach in Philip Massinger’s A New Way to Pay Old Debts (1621-1622?), and Bertram in the play of that name by Charles Robert Maturin. Overreach, one of his finest portrayals, illustrates his genius for representing evil. During the final scene of the January 12, 1816, premiere, one of the supreme moments of his career, Kean rendered Overreach’s culminating madness with such passionate conviction that his fellow actors were astounded, the pit enthralled, and the susceptible Lord Byron quite literally thrown into a convulsive fit. Needless to say, the play was profitably repeated for many nights thereafter.

Kean’s drinking problem was increasing, and his first missed performance at Drury Lane, occurring on March 26, 1816, is probably attributable to drunkenness. He recovered well from this first misstep, however, and the season’s end and the subsequent summer tour of the provinces were successful. All appeared prosperous as the 1816-1817 season began, but soon matters took a troublesome turn, with Drury Lane receipts falling disastrously and Kean’s home life threatening to deteriorate. Furthermore, despite the retirement of Kemble at the end of the season, Kean’s preeminence among English tragedians was still insecure because of the appearance of two new rivals, Junius Brutus Booth and William Charles Macready. Booth, the father of the great actor Edwin Booth and the infamous assassin John Wilkes Booth, was soon overcome, but Macready remained a thorn in Kean’s side to the end.

The 1817-1818 and the 1818-1819 seasons were again mediocre, and Kean’s health, which had already shown signs of decline, began growing worse under the various pressures of his intense acting and his equally intense carousing. He was also alienating many of his fellow actors through the ruthlessness with which he eliminated rivals to his theatrical fame. Booth was the most illustrious of Kean’s victims, but there were others. In addition, Kean became entangled in disputes over which plays were to be performed at Drury Lane, and on more than one occasion, he helped to scuttle the hopes of an aspiring playwright by resisting the inclusion of a particular play in the season’s schedule or by putting little effort into the performance of a role that did not provide him with any likelihood of further glory.

Because of various managerial difficulties, a number of them aggravated by Kean, control of Drury Lane was handed over at the beginning of the 1819-1820 season to an old theatrical enemy, Robert William Elliston, for whom Kean at first refused to work. The combination of a threatened lawsuit for breach of contract and various flattering promises soon changed his mind, and the season included Kean’s London debut as King Lear, seen first on April 24, 1820, and repeated twenty-five times by May 27. The fact that Kean, despite his five-foot, seven-inch frame, could succeed as Lear, perhaps the most formidable of all dramatic roles, is a clear indication of his continuing power as an actor.

Kean spent the 1820-1821 season in the United States, dividing his time between New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Baltimore. All went well until May 25, 1821, when he refused to perform before a Boston audience that he judged to be insultingly small. The ensuing national furor cut short his intended tour, and on June 6, he set sail for home. His return to Drury Lane was greeted enthusiastically, but his health failed him, as it would more and more frequently in the future, and he took several weeks off. The rest of the 1821-1822 season brought no new triumphs, and it was only through the shrewd introduction by Elliston of a rival tragedian, Kemble’s heir apparent Charles Young, into the Drury Lane company that Kean was once more inspired to act to his full potential.

During the 1822-1823 season, both Young and Kean played to large houses, and when they played together, especially in Othello, the Moor of Venice (pr. 1604), the theater was packed. The 1823-1824 season saw Young at Covent Garden and Kean and Macready at Drury Lane, but nothing like the previous year’s rivalry developed. Kean’s performances were usually quite profitable, but provincial touring and sporadic bad health kept him frequently away from Drury Lane.

As the 1824-1825 season began, Kean’s tempestuous personal life became even more the subject of scandalous rumor than it had formerly been. Town gossip alleged that a liaison had long existed between Kean and the wife of a close family friend and that the aggrieved husband, one Robert Cox, was about to seek damages for the insult to his marriage. When, on January 17, 1825, the suit actually materialized, resulting in a judgment of eight hundred pounds against Kean, the English and American newspapers gave the matter their full attention, and several of Kean’s audiences reacted with predatory delight.

Kean’s performance as Richard III on January 24 was shouted down, and disruptive behavior marred two or three of his subsequent appearances, but the Drury Lane patrons gradually shifted their sympathies back to Kean, and his London career survived the crisis. However, his long-abused marriage did not. Although there was no divorce, he and Mary were permanently estranged. Problems continued, too, during various performances away from Drury Lane. Partially because of public disapproval of his personal life and partially because of his own belligerence and more and more noticeable drunkenness on the stage, a tour of the provinces and a second North American tour, this time including Canada, were stormy. They were not without their triumphant moments, however; Kean’s star was rapidly declining, but it had not quite set.

Kean’s January 8, 1827, return to Drury Lane in The Merchant of Venice was a tumultuous success, but the Cox scandal still haunted him, and he escaped his sorrows through spectacular indulgences in liquor and women. The cumulative effect on his health, physical and mental, was disastrous, and he soon found it nearly impossible to memorize new roles. He failed miserably, for example, in the May 21, 1827, premiere of Thomas Colley Grattan’s Ben Nazir (1827), only a few lines of which he was able to deliver correctly. He then quarreled with Stephen Price, the new manager of Drury Lane, deserted to Covent Garden for the 1827-1828 season, and found himself competing with his own inexperienced son, with whom he was also quarreling and whom the sly Price had signed straight from the amateur theatricals of Eton.

The final period of Kean’s career is an odd mixture of the pathetic and the heroic, as Kean continued to act—sometimes badly, sometimes with a return of the old fire—despite continual announcements of his impending retirement. His final performance occurred on March 25, 1833, at Covent Garden, where he played Othello opposite the Iago of his son Charles, with whom he had since been reconciled. He collapsed into his son’s arms halfway through the presentation and was taken to his home in Richmond, where he died on May 15.

Significance

Edmund Kean was the quintessential Romantic actor, capable of stirring a depth and variety of emotion unmatched by the best of his contemporaries and perhaps unequaled in the history of the English theater. He was the perfect actor for his time, a period in which theaters were large and audiences attuned to the stormy emotive power of which Kean was the acknowledged master. Although the ephemeral nature of the performing arts, at least before the next century’s audio and video recording, makes it impossible to know with certainty what a performance by Kean was like, contemporary accounts suggest that classical polish gave way entirely to passion and psychological exploration when Kean was on the stage.

Laurence Olivier’s brooding Heathcliff and John Barrymore’s eccentric Svengali, rather than John Gielgud’s regal Hamlet, are the lineal descendants of the characters brought to vivid life by Kean. That dexterity of face and body that Kean developed during his long, obscure apprenticeship served him well in his years of triumph, and though his voice was not the sonorous, cadenced instrument of a John Philip Kemble, it was capable of both the subtlety and the projective power needed to stir the soul of the furthest spectator at Drury Lane.

As the comments of such writers as William Hazlitt and John Keats, another of Kean’s admirers, make clear, Kean was capable of identifying so completely with his role that all distinction between actor and character disappeared. The intensity that was displayed by Kean both on the stage and in his tempestuous private life destroyed him, as it has destroyed other actors like him, but it created some of the most inspired moments in world theater and made the Romantic rather than the classical ideal the standard that English-speaking actors most frequently sought to emulate for decades following his untimely death.

Bibliography

Booth, Michael R., et al. The Revels History of Drama in English. Vol. 6. London: Methuen, 1975. A wide-ranging history invaluable for understanding the complex theatrical world in which Kean flourished. Volume 6 covers the years 1750 to 1880. The direct commentary on Kean’s acting contrasts the passion of his technique with the classical restraint of John Philip Kemble. An evenhanded account of both Kean’s strengths and weaknesses is presented through references to many of the roles with which Kean was most closely associated.

Crochunis, Thomas C. “Byronic Heroes and Acting: The Embodiment of Mental Theater.” In Contemporary Studies on Lord Byron, edited by William D. Brewer. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2001. Analyzes how actors portrayed the heroes in Byron’s plays, focusing on Kean’s performances of these roles.

FitzSimmons, Raymund. Edmund Kean: Fire from Heaven. New York: Dial Press, 1976. A popular biography that makes use of all preceding biographical material as well as some newly discovered documents. A vivid account of both the private and public lives of the great actor that leans a bit too strongly toward the credulous. Contains an extremely useful bibliography.

Hawkins, F. W. The Life of Edmund Kean from Published and Original Sources. 2 vols. London: Tinsley Bros., 1869. Reprint. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1969. One of the more influential and unreliable of the nineteenth century biographies. A repository of mingled fact and myth that has led many later researchers astray.

Hazlitt, William. Hazlitt on Theater. Edited by William Archer and Robert Lowe. New York: Hill & Wang, 1957. Reprint. Westport, Conn.: Hyperion Press, 1979. Fully one-third of the essays in this volume are reviews of particular performances by Kean directly witnessed by Hazlitt. An invaluable depiction by Kean’s greatest champion and most astute critic of what Kean’s acting was like. Hazlitt emphasizes the naturalness and the emotive power of Kean’s stage presence.

Hillebrand, Harold Newcomb. Edmund Kean. New York: Columbia University Press, 1933. Reprint. New York: AMS Press, 1966. This is the definitive scholarly account of Kean’s public life. A valuable resource, too, for some details of Kean’s private life. Any serious research on Kean should begin with this volume.

Moody, Jane. “Romantic Shakespeare.” In The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Stage, edited by Stanley Wells and Sarah Stanton. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Describes theatrical production during the Romantic period in the nineteenth century, focusing on the performances of Kean and John Philip Kemble.

Playfair, Giles. Kean. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1939. Rev. ed. Kean: The Life and Paradox of the Great Actor. London: Reinhardt and Evans, 1950. A revision of Playfair’s widely respected 1939 study. Playfair has the advantage of familiarity with Hillebrand’s work and improves on Hillebrand’s treatment of the private life.

Proctor, B. W. The Life of Edmund Kean. 2 vols. London: Edward Moxon, 1835. Reprint. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1969. This earliest full-length biography of Kean has the advantage of direct access to those who knew him but is unreliable in many details. Less fanciful than Hawkins but should still be read with caution.

Thomson, Peter. On Actors and Acting. Exeter, England: University of Exeter Press, 2000. A collection of essays, including essays exploring the themes, episodes, and contemporary taste that established the reputations of Kean and other English actors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.