Charles Kean

“ In January 1838, however, he returned to Drury Lane, and played Hamlet with a success which gave him a place among the principal tragedians of his time. He was married to the actress Ellen Tree (1805–1880) on the 29th of January 1842, and paid a second visit to America with her from 1845 to 1847. Returning to England, he entered on a successful engagement at the Haymarket, and in 1850, with Robert Keeley, became lessee of the Princess Theatre. The most noteworthy feature of his management was a series of gorgeous Shakespearian revivals. Charles Kean was not a great tragic actor. ”

“ Kean has distinguished himself on these boards, he has never appeared in one in which the large spirit of an artist, the feeling of a man, and the grace of a gentleman, have been more admirably blended than in this day’s faithful adherence to the calling of which he is a prosperous ornament, and in this day’s manly advocacy of its cause. ”

“ Kean's innocent vanity in his father's likeness to Byron, he made much of me. Evening after evening, in Columbus, he would have me come to their dressing-room, for after the habit of the old-time actor, they came very early, dressed without flurry, and were ready before the overture was on. There they would tell me stories, and when Charles had a teasing fit on him, he would relate with great gusto the awful disaster that once overtook Ellen in a theatre in Scotland, "when she played a Swiss boy, my girl—and—and her breeches——"
"Now, Charles!" remonstrated Mrs. Kean. ”

“ Charles Kean. Now, PUNCH, fair play is beyond any of the crown jewels. I will advance only one proof, amongst a thousand others that cart-horses sha’n’t draw from me, to show that Charles Kean makes more—mind, I say, makes more—of Shakspere, than every other actor living or dead. Last night I went to the Haymarket—Lady Georgiana L—— and other fine girls were of the party. The play was “Romeo and Juliet,” and there are in that tragedy two slap-up lines; they are, to the best of my recollection, as follow:—
“Oh! ”

“ If I was a despot, I would suppress hebdomadal writing of sermons, and people should be forbidden instead of bidden to talk nonsense upon sacred subjects.
Monday, 11th.—At night the theater was very full, and the audience pleasant. During supper my father, Charles Mason, and I had a long discussion about Kean. I cannot help thinking my father wrong about him. Kean is a man of decided genius, no matter how he neglects or abuses nature's good gift. He has it. He has the first element of all greatness—power. ”

“ Of a stature rather below the middle size, and with a countenance that forms no index of the heroic mind, the younger Kean seems studious of displaying all those peculiarities of attitude, action, and intonation which we have been accustomed to regard rather as defects than as excellencies in his justly celebrated father. ”

“ At Waterford, Kean played tragedy, and in addition for his benefit, gave an exhibition of pugilism, tight-rope dancing, singing, and wound up by playing the Chimpanzee in the piece called ‘La Perouse.’ It was at Waterford that Edmund Kean’s second son, Charles, was born. Beaching Scotland, so exhausted were the funds of the actor, that at Dumfries he got up an entertainment at a tavern, and the only patron was a shoe-maker, who paid sixpence for admission. ”

“ Kean came over and put her arm about me and repeated the kiss and thanks, Charles snuffled most distinctly from the corner where he was folding his precious miniature within a silk handkerchief.
They were both at their very best in the tragedy of "Henry VIII." Mr. Kean's Wolsey was an impressive piece of work, and to the eye he was as true a Cardinal as ever shared in an Ecumenical Council in Catholic Rome, or hastened to private audience at the Vatican with the Pope himself ”

“ Some cities showed him a spirit of charity; many audiences submitted him to the grossest insults and endangered his life by the violence of their disapproval. In Quebec he was much impressed with the kindness of some Huron Indians who attended his performances, and he was made chief of the tribe, receiving the name Alanienouidet. Kean’s last appearance in New York was on the 5th of December 1826 in Richard III., the rôle in which he was first seen in America. ”

“ He was presented with a tame lion with which he might be found playing in his drawing-room. The prizefighters Mendoza and Richmond the Black were among his visitors. Grattan was his devoted friend. In his earlier days Talma said of him, “He is a magnificent uncut gem; polish and round him off and he will be a perfect tragedian.” Macready, who was much impressed by Kean’s Richard III. and met the actor at supper, speaks of his “unassuming manner ... partaking in some degree of shyness” and of the “touching grace” of his singing. Kean’s delivery of the three words “I answer—NO!” ”

“ The eye would be pleased without the taste being offended; and there would be no tremendous burst of human passion cast into the background by the predominance of hats and feathers. "King John" at the Princess's, we pronounce, on this ground, to be a great success as a spectacle, but a failure as a play. Mr Kean has great merits; quick appreciation, sound intelligence, and occasionally a burst of something which, if it is not genius, is describable by no other word ”

“ At a public dinner, he says he is going to America. The Duke of York, who presides, cries out, "No, no!" Shouts follow and the rattling of glasses, and men leap on the chairs and almost on the tables, repeating the Duke's "No, no!" till at last Kean promises to make an apology from the stage,—a perilous experiment, he will find, after which he cannot stay here. The object of Price, who has engaged him, is to kill off Cooper. The best actors now get fifty guineas a week, or twenty-five pounds a night for so many nights, play or pay, with a benefit. ”

“ The city has a population of about 50,000 and a thriving transit trade, particularly since 1899 when the carriage road between Resht and Teheran with Kazvin as a half-way stage was opened under the auspices of the Russian “Enzeli-Teheran Road Company.” Great quantities of rice, fish and silk are brought to it from Gilan for distribution in Persia and export to Turkey.
KEAN, EDMUND (1787-1833) , was born in London on the 17th of March1 1787. His father was probably Edmund Kean, an architect’s clerk; and his mother was an actress, Ann Carey, grand-daughter of Henry Carey. ”

“ In truth, I do not believe you fit to deal with the world, or at least the American world. But, good God! who can avoid these chances? You have done your best. Take matters as coolly as you can; and confidently expecting help from England, act as if no help were nigh. Mine, I am sure, is a tolerable tragedy; it would have been a bank to me, if just as I had finished it, I had not heard of Kean’s resolution to go to America. That was the worst news I could have had. There is no actor can do the principal character besides Kean. At Covent Garden there is a great chance of its being damm’d. ”

“ He played the feigned character as if it were reality. Now we believe that a spirit of raillery should be thrown over the part, so as to carry off the gravity of the imposture. There is in Mr. Kean an infinite variety of talent, with a certain monotony of genius. He has not the same ease in doing common things that he has energy on great occasions. We seldom entirely lose sight of his Richard, and to a certain degree, in all his acting, ‘he still plays the dog.’ His dancing was encored. ”

“ Kean, in the intellectual and impassioned part, is in our judgment equal to any one, but he produces his most striking effects by fits and starts, without the same general tone and elevation of character, and, for want of the instrumental advantages, with an appearance of effort and sometimes of extravagance. ”

“ Edmund Kean, born under the ban of society, treated as a dog, beaten, starved, while yet an infant flung for a livelihood on his wits and tricks as a public performer, associating mostly with vagrants and adventurers, but occasionally with the best and highest, early became a wonder both in the elastic strength of his small body and in the penetrative power of his flashing mind. ”

“ His father, Samuel Browne Keene of Furnival's Inn and Ipswich, was a solicitor, and died in 1838; his mother was Mary Sparrow, the daughter of John Sparrow of the Old, or Ancient, House, Ipswich, which stands in the Butter Market, and had been occupied by the Sparrow family for more than three centuries. Charles Keene was educated at the grammar school in Foundation Street, Ipswich. When he quitted it, at sixteen years of age, he came to London to enter his father's office. The law was found to be uncongenial by one whose taste for drawing was already manifest ”

“ In that rare combination of intellectual and physical qualities without which no particular gift would justify his pretensions—intensity of emotion, subtlety of perception, a power of impersonation implying of itself the union of all the natural requirements with a mastery in their display attainable only by consummate art—it is hard to believe that he can ever have been excelled; though doubtless the mingled fire and pathos of Kean transcended in their effect any like exhibition ever witnessed on the stage. ”

“ It was in the impersonation of the great creations of Shakespeare’s genius that the varied beauty and grandeur of the acting of Kean were displayed in their highest form, although probably his most powerful character was Sir Giles Overreach in Massinger’s A New Way to Pay Old Debts, the effect of his first impersonation of which was such that the pit rose en masse, and even the actors and actresses themselves were overcome by the terrific dramatic illusion. His only personal disadvantage as an actor was his small stature. ”

“ It is in these things, scarcely less than in the more prominent parts of his playing, that Kean shows himself the great actor. He must always make a deep impression; but to suppose the world at large capable of a right estimate of his different powers, would be forming a judgment against every-day proof. The gradual manner in which the character of his playing has opened upon me satisfies me, that in acting, as in everything else, however deep may be the first effect of genius upon us, we come slowly, and through study, to a perception of its minute beauties and delicate characteristics. ”

“ No one can admire more than we do the force of genius and passion which Mr. Kean shews in this part, but he is not stately enough for it. He plays it like a gipsey, and not like a Moor. We miss in Mr. Kean not the physiognomy, or the costume, so much as the architectural building up of the part. This character always puts us in mind of the line—
‘Let Afric on its hundred thrones rejoice.’ It not only appears to hold commerce with meridian suns, and that its blood is made drunk with the heat of scorching skies ”

“ Kean’s performance of the remainder of the character, when the king’s intellects begin to fail him, and are, at last, quite disordered, was curious and quaint, rather than impressive or natural. There appeared a degree of perversity in all this—a determination to give the passages in a way in which nobody else would give them, and in which nobody else would expect them to be given. But singularity is not always excellence. Why, for instance, should our actor lower his voice in the soliloquy in the third act, ‘Blow winds, and crack your cheeks,’ &c. ”

“ Southern’s tragedy of Oroonoko, which has not been acted, we believe, for some years, has been brought forward here to introduce Mr. Kean as the Royal Slave. It was well thought of. We consider it as one of his best parts. It is also a proof to us of what we have always been disposed to think, that Mr. Kean, when he fully gives up his mind to it, is as great in pure pathos as in energy of action or discrimination of character. In general, he inclines to the violent and muscular expression of passion, rather than to that of its deep, involuntary, heart-felt workings. ”

“ Edmund Kean, from that very time of boyhood, had genius, industry, and ambition,—but, with companionship enough to extinguish the first, lack of reward sufficient to dull the second, and repeated visitations of disappointment that might have warranted the exchange of high hopes for brutal despair,—he nourished his genius, maintained his industry, and kept an undying ambition under circumstances when to do so was a part of heroism. ”

“ Kean? which Kean?
Rose.
Edmund Kean. My mother acted with Edmund Kean when she was a girl.
Sir William.
[Approaching her slowly, speaking in a queer voice.] With Kean? with Kean!
Rose.
Yes.
Sir William.
[At her side, in a whisper.] My dear, I—I've seen Edmund Kean.
Rose.
Yes?
Sir William.
A young man then, I was; quite different, from the man I am now—impulsive, excitable. Kean! [Drawing a deep breath.] Ah, he was a splendid gypsy!
Rose.
[Looking down at the dress-basket.] I've a little fillet in there that my mother wore as Cordelia to Kean's Lear——
Sir William. ”

“ Kean, but took it for granted that it was not, for no other reason, than because the question had not been settled by the critics twenty or thirty years ago, and admitted by the town ever since, that is, before Mr. Kean was born. A royal infant may be described as ‘un haut et puissant prince, agé d’un jour,’ [28] but a great and powerful actor cannot be known till he arrives at years of discretion, and he must be first a candidate for theatrical reputation before he can be a veteran. ”