John Kemble

“ She was absent-minded, all her attention being concentrated on the study and comprehension of her profession, which gave her a proud, self-contained manner, alienating unconsciously those who surrounded her and were dependent on her. Her children adored her, but her brothers and sisters stood, to a certain extent, in awe of her. All of them, stimulated by the examples of the two eldest, went on the stage, but none possessed her genius, or John Kemble’s talent and industry. ”

“ He belonged to the Kemble school, but he never delivered soliloquies in that ludicrous, self-approving style which I find laughingly noticed by the critics, as a great blot in John Kemble's acting. Young had more natural feeling, and he liked to play with those who could feel in like manner—whereas I have read of John Kemble that, in a love scene, he was not only coldly proper himself, but insisted on the same coldness of propriety in the lady who played his mistress. ”

“ His experiences as a strolling player were naturally varied, and not seldom disagreeable. While with Beverley at Stroud he refused to play Laertes to the Hamlet of ‘Master’ Betty, saying, ‘Damme, I won't play second to any man living except to John Kemble.’ In July 1808, at Stroud, Kean married Mary Chambers, an actress nine years older than himself, with whom he had been playing. The next six years saw Kean in various country towns suffering unmitigated hardship. Stephen Kemble, struck with his Octavian in the ‘Mountaineers,’ offered him a London engagement ”

“ We had a discussion as to how far real feeling enters into our scenic performances. 'Tis hard to say: the general question it would be impossible to answer, for acting is altogether a monstrous anomaly. John Kemble and Mrs. Siddons were always in earnest in what they were about; Miss O'Neill used to cry bitterly in all her tragedy parts; whilst Garrick could be making faces and playing tricks in the middle of his finest points, and Kean would talk gibberish while the people were in an uproar of applause at his. ”

“ So, though I do not affect to say I should be sorry to take an opportunity of peeping at the splendors of royalty, prudence and economy will keep me quietly at home till another day. My great amusement here this some time past has been going almost nightly to see John Kemble, who certainly is a great artist. It is a pity he shows too much of his machinery. ”

“ The more John Kemble endeavoured to suppress his inclination to smile, the less he was able to control himself; as his agitation increased, the ear-trumpet was directed towards him more pertinaciously; [58] seeing which the actor broke forth into a peal of laughter, and rushed in confusion from the stage. The audience had discovered the cause, and laughed with him; while the deaf gentleman, unconscious of his own part in the performance, and marking the hilarious faces around him, dropped his trumpet with the vexed air of a man who had lost a point, and could not account for it. ”

“ Wherever she sits there is grace and grandeur, there is tragedy personified. Her seat is the undivided throne of the Tragic Muse. She had no need of the robes, the sweeping train, the ornaments of the stage; in herself she is as great as any being she ever represented in the ripeness and plenitude of her power! I should not, I confess, have had the same paramount abstracted feeling at seeing John Kemble there, whom I venerate at a distance, and should not have known whether he was playing off the great man or the great actor ”

“ Siddons has left the stage, and ‘has not left her peer;’ or because John Kemble will not return to it with renewed health and vigour, to prop a falling house, and falling art; or because Mr. Kean has gone to America; or because Mr. Wallack has arrived from that country? No; the duller the stage grows, the gayer and more edifying must we become in ourselves: the less we have to say about that, the more room we have to talk about other things. ”

“ And then, when a grand public dinner was given to John Kemble on his quitting the stage, the great actress said to the poet, "Well, perhaps, in the next world women will be [221] more valued than they are in this." "She alluded," says Rogers, "to the comparatively little sensation which had been produced by her own retirement from the boards; and, doubtless, she was a far, far greater performer than John Kemble." ”

“ But the great feature of the Kembles was the jaw-bone. The actress herself exclaimed, laughing, “The Kemble jaw-bone! Why, it is as notorious as Samson’s!” Mrs. Jameson declares that she saw Mrs. Siddons sitting near Gainsborough’s portrait two years before her death, and, looking from one to the other, she says, “It was like her still, at the age of seventy.”
Years after, Fanny Kemble, her grand-daughter, while walking through the streets of Baltimore, saw an engraving of Reynolds’s “Tragic Muse” and Lawrence’s picture of John Kemble’s “Hamlet.” ”

“ The Haymarket engagement proved humiliating, the young actor being cast for very insignificant parts. However, in one character, Ganem, in the ‘Mountaineers,’ by the admirable manner in which he spoke certain words, he drew forth such unmistakable applause, that he availed himself of a recommendation addressed to John Kemble. In an interview with that celebrity, Kean found the eminent tragedian so chilling and unsympathetic in manner, that the poor fellow hurried from the theatre stung to the quick by his inauspicious reception. ”

“ His Octavian was preferred to Elliston's; and Stephen Kemble told him that his Hotspur and Henry IV. were superior to those of his brother, John Kemble. Kean thought of London. "If I could only get there, and succeed! If I succeed, I shall go mad!"
There was much to be suffered by Kean and his wife before that triumph came. For lack of means, they have to walk from Birmingham to Swansea. Two hundred miles, and that poor lady may be a mother before she accomplishes half of them! They wend painfully on, pale, hungry, and silent; twelve miles a day ”

“ Charles Young adorned the English stage from 1807 to 1832. Because he acted with the Kembles he is sometimes described as being of the Kemble school. In a great theatre the leading player is often imitated throughout the house. There was a time when everybody employed at Drury Lane seemed a double of Mr. Macready. Charles Young, however, was an original actor. It took him but five years to show that he was equal in some characters to John Kemble himself. This was seen in 1812, in his Cassius to Kemble’s Brutus. ”

“ Siddons, Charles Kemble, Mr. and Mrs. Henry Siddons, and Cooke, the well-known [184] actor. As soon as Kemble had completed his arrangements, he went abroad for some months, visiting Spain and France. On his return a dinner was given by the managers of Covent Garden to their Drury Lane rival, Sheridan, who made a sarcastic speech on the friendship of fellows who had hated each other all their lives. John Kemble then went abroad again, for a time, to recruit his strength after the anxiety and worry of his years of management. ”

“ It has been stated that the majority of the actors in the scene sat for their portraits in this picture. John Kemble, however, refused when asked to do so by Mr. Welsh, strengthening his refusal with emphasis profane. Harlow was not, however, to be defeated; and he actually drew Kemble’s portrait in one of the stage-boxes of Covent Garden Theatre, while the great actor was playing his part. The vexation such a ruse must have occasioned to a man of Kemble’s temperament may be imagined. Egerton, Pope, and Stephen Kemble were successively painted for Henry VIII., the artist retaining the latter. ”

“ This intruder must have often marred the efforts of the best actor; but I remember a case in which the best actor of his day was entirely discountenanced by the quietest and most attentive auditor in the house. John Kemble was playing Mark Antony, in Dublin, when his eye happened to fall on a sedate old gentleman, who was eagerly listening to him through an ear-trumpet. The first sight caused the actor to smile, and that at an inappropriate moment, for he was surrounded by his wife Octavia (Mrs. Inchbald) and her children, the play being Dryden's "All for Love," and the situation affecting. ”

“ The genius who would not be a soldier, though born in a barrack, found an asylum in the Manchester theatre; and subsequently Dublin welcomed him back to its well-trod stage. There, he and John Kemble met for the first time.
John took the lead, George Frederick played,—I can hardly call them secondary parts, for Booth had acted some of them to Betterton, Garrick to Sheridan, and one great performer to another,—such parts, in fact, as Ghost to Kemble's Hamlet, Henry to his Richard, Edmund to his Lear, and a similar disposition of characters. ”

“ The young actress so completely depressed the spirits of the audience, that the best comic actor seemed unable to raise them. Already she was preparing the way for the stately solemnity of John Kemble and the Revival of Shakespearean Tragedy.
The town went “born mad,” as Horace Walpole said, after her. The papers wrote about her continually, her dress, her movements. Nothing else [79] seemed to have the same interest. Her salary, originally five pounds a week, was raised to twenty pounds before the end of the season, and her first benefit realised eight hundred pounds. ”

“ Siddons, that she was a "mere actress," as it was usually said of Garrick, that he was a "mere player;"—the most admirable and versatile actor that ever existed; but still the mere player;—nothing more—nothing better. He does not appear to have had a tincture of that high gentlemanly feeling, that native elevation of character, and general literary taste which strike us in John Kemble and his brother Charles; nor any thing of the splendid imagination, the enthusiasm of art, the personal grace and grandeur, which threw such a glory around Mrs. Siddons. ”

“ Famine, rage, drink, and tears, mark the way of the wanderers. Brief engagements enabled them to exist, just to keep themselves out of the grave; and [371] then came vacation and want to let them slip back again to the very brink of that grave. Amid it all, Kean did succeed in making a reputation. Passing through London he saw John Kemble and Mrs. Siddons, in Wolsey and Constance—and he registered a vow that he would be there a great actor, too! And so again to the country, to work hard, gain little, and wait ”

“ Not that the old license was not frequently of a somewhat uncivilised nature, as when the Irish footmen in attendance upon masters and mistresses within, being angered by the withdrawal [50] of some privilege, flung their lighted torches into the house, and nearly succeeded in burning both theatre and audience. Sometimes the license had an aspect of rough gallantry. When an actress was more than ordinarily pretty, it was the custom of ardent officers and gentlemen to insist upon escorting the lady home after the play. An incident of this sort once put John Kemble's life in peril. ”

“ Leigh Hunt speaks of Kemble as excelling in the grand rather than the passionate, denies his power to express love, praises his excellence in soliloquy, calls him an actor of correct rather than quick conception, and says that his great fault is a laborious preciseness. Hazlitt, who declares that Kean had destroyed the Kemble religion, and is very severe on some of Kemble's performances, notably his Sir Giles Overreach, describes him as the only modern actor who both in figure and action approached the beauty and grandeur of the antique. ”

“ The Kembles of the last age were extraordinary persons. John Philip Kemble and Mrs. Siddons had both remarkable genius, and Charles Kemble has been an actor of consummate talent. Whatever intellect remains in the family is in his children; one of whom is a man of learning and refinement, another a woman of some cleverness in musical art, and Frances Anne, of whom we write more particularly.
The first appearance of Miss Kemble on the stage was on the evening of the 5th October, 1829, at Covent Garden, and was hazarded with the view of redeeming the fortunes of the theater. ”

“ The first time I had ever been in a theatre I went with my father to see "Cymbeline." I had never neglected Shakespeare, and when our great tragedians, Mrs. Siddons and her brother, John Kemble, came for a short time to act in Edinburgh, I could think of nothing else. They were both remarkably handsome, and, notwithstanding the Scotch prejudice, the theatre was crowded every night. It was a misfortune to me that my mother never would go into society during the absence of my father, nor, indeed, at any time, except, perhaps, to a dinner party ”

“ Siddons's brother for herself; and Mrs. Brereton, the lively Priscilla Hopkins of the old days when her father was prompter, became Mrs. John Kemble. Meanwhile, at other adorers of her own, Mrs. Siddons only laughed. "If [176] you should meet a Mr. Seton," she writes to Dr. Whalley, "who lived in Leicester Square, you must not be surprised to hear him boast of being very well with my sister and myself, for since I have been here I have heard the old fright has been giving it out in town. You will find him rather an unlikely person to be so great a favourite with women." ”

“ How can you ask me if I despise, as great gossip, Emily's telling you that I am writing another tragedy! Why, my dear, I shouldn't consider it despicable gossip if Emily were to tell you what colored gloves I had on the last time she saw me. Do we not all three love each other dearly? and is not everything, no matter how trifling, of interest in that case? But Mrs. John Kemble does not pretend to love me dearly, I flatter myself, and therefore her writing to inquire into my proceedings, and for minute details of my presentation at Court, did seem to me contemptible gossip. ”