FOOTNOTES:
[88] That is, the next season; the "Roman Father" was produced 24th February 1750.
[89] It was Lewis's father who quited business for the stage.
[90] His success over Mossop was only in one part, a comedy character utterly unfitted for the latter.
[91] Some valuable remarks on this subject will be found in the article "Lewis Hallam, the Second," by Edward Eggleston in Brander Matthews' and Laurence Hutton's "Actors and Actresses of Great Britain and the United States": New York, 1886.
[92] Tate Wilkinson says she played Calista, and sang a song after the tragedy.
[93] It is generally held that Wilkinson himself gave her the name of Jordan.
[94] Should be 1794-95.
[95] I do not know any reason for saying that he was in want.
[96] Should be 1796. The date was 25th June.
[97] 1824, 31st May.
[98] Mrs. Lefanu's "Prejudice" may be added.
[99] That is, no new piece of any importance.
[100] There were at Covent Garden also Young, and Mrs. Jordan.
COVENT GARDEN THEATRE.
[CHAPTER XIV.]
NEW IDEAS; NEW THEATRES; NEW AUTHORS; AND THE NEW ACTORS.
Early in the present century, Mr. Twiss published his Verbal Index to Shakspeare; and this led to an attack upon the poet and the stage, as fierce, if not so formidable, as the onslaught of Prynne and the invective of Collier. The assailant, in the present case, was an anonymous writer, in the Eclectic Review, for January 1807. As an illustration of the feeling of dissenters towards the bard and players generally, this attack deserves a word of notice. The writer, after denouncing Mr. Twiss as a man who had no sense of the value of time, in its reference to his eternal state; sneering at him as one who would have been more innocently employed in arranging masses of pebbles on the sea shore; and bewailing "the blind devotion which fashion requires to be paid at the shrine of Shakspeare," professes to recognise "the inimitable excellences of the productions of Shakspeare's genius;" and then proceeds to illustrate the sense of the recognition, and to pour out the vials of his wrath, after this fashion:—
"He has been called, and justly, too, the 'poet of Nature.' A slight acquaintance with the religion of the Bible will show, however, that it is of human nature in its worst shape, deformed by the basest passions, and agitated by the most vicious propensities, that the poet became the priest; and the incense offered at the altar of his goddess will continue to spread its poisonous fumes over the hearts of his countrymen till the memory of his works is extinct. Thousands of unhappy spirits, and thousands yet to increase their number, will everlastingly look back with unutterable anguish, on the nights and days in which the plays of Shakspeare ministered to their guilty delights. And yet these are the writings which men, consecrated to the service of Him who styles Himself the Holy One, have prostituted their pens to illustrate! such this writer, to immortalise whose name, the resources of the most precious arts have been profusely lavished! Epithets amounting to blasphemy, and honours approaching to idolatry, have been and are shamelessly heaped upon his memory, in a country professing itself Christian, and for which it would have been happy, on moral considerations, if he had never been born. And, strange to say, even our religious edifices are not free from the pollution of his praise. What Christian can pass through the most venerable pile of sacred architecture which our metropolis can boast, without having his best feelings insulted, by observing, within a few yards of the spot from which prayers and praises are daily offered to the Most High, the absurd and impious epitaph upon the tablet raised to one of the miserable retailers of his impurities? Our readers who are acquainted with London, will discover that it is the inscription upon David Garrick, in Westminster Abbey, to which we refer. We commiserate the heart of the man who can read the following lines, without indignation:—
'And till eternity, with power sublime,
Shall mark the mortal hour of hoary time,
Shakspeare and Garrick like twin stars shall shine
And earth irradiate with a beam divine.'
"'Par nobile fratrum!' your fame shall last during the empire of vice and misery, in the extension of which you have acted so great a part!"
There is much more in this style, and it seems rather over-strained, however well meant. I must confess, too, that the writer had some provocation to express himself strongly, not in the writings of Shakspeare, nor in Twiss's Concordance, but in the meanness and blasphemy which Mr. Pratt, or Courtenay Melmoth, infused into his wretched epitaph on Garrick's monument. Charles Lamb has hardly gone further in attacking the monument itself. "Taking a turn the other day, in the Abbey," he says, "I was struck with the affected attitude of a figure which I do not remember to have seen before, and which, upon examination, proved to be a whole length of the celebrated Mr. Garrick. Though I would not go so far, with some good Catholics abroad, as to shut players altogether out of consecrated ground, yet I own I was not a little scandalised at the introduction of theatrical airs and gestures into a place set apart to remind us of the saddest realities. Going nearer, I found inscribed, under this harlequin figure, a farrago of false thoughts and nonsense."
Such falsehood and nonsense helped to bring the stage into disrepute; and the pulpits, for seven or eight years, often echoed with disparaging sentiments on the drama—and quotations from Shakspeare. Nevertheless, those who never worked, as well as those who were over-worked, needed amusement; and what was to be done?
"The devil tempts the industrious; idle people tempt the devil," was a saying of good Richard Baxter. Good men took it up in 1815. Well-intentioned preachers denounced the stage, and recommended rather an unexceptionable relaxation; the sea side, pure air, and all enjoyments thereon attending. But, while audiences were preached down to the coast, and especially to Brighton, there were zealous pastors at the latter place, who preached them back again. One of these, the Rev. Dr. Styles, of Union Street, Brighton, did his best to stop the progress of London-on-sea. He left the question of the stage for others to deal with; but, in his published sermons, he strictly enjoined all virtuously-minded people to avoid watering-places generally, and Brighton in particular, unless they wished to play into the devil's hands. He denounced the breaking up of homes, the mischief of minds at rest, and the consequences of flirting and philandering. He looked upon a brief holiday as a long sin,—at the sea side; and, with prophecy of dire results attending on neglect of his counsel, he drove, or sought to drive, all the hard workers, in search of health and in the enjoyment of that idle repose which helps them in their search, back to London! Then, as now, England stood shamefully distinguished for the indecorum of its sea-coast bathers; but, with certain religious principles, whereby to hold firmly, the good doctor does not think that much ill may befall therefrom; and he sends all erring sheep with their faces towards London, and with a reference to Solomon's Song, above all things!—bidding them to wait for the south wind of the Holy Spirit to blow over their spices!
On the other hand, good men in France were then seeking to render theatrical amusements universally beneficial; and a pamphlet, by Delpla, suggested a few reforms which evoked notice in this country. In some respects, the project was a development of that proposed in England, in 1732, when the idea of turning Exeter Change into a theatre and college was first started. M. Delpla held, that the public required stage exhibitions, but that they did not always know what was good for them. He thought that in every country there ought to exist a theatrical board, or censorship, composed, not of government officials, but of poets, reviewers, retired actors, and men of letters generally. There would then be, he thought (poor man!), a reconstruction of theatrical literature: the beautiful, preserved; the exceptionable, omitted; and the instructive, imported. Historic truth was never to be departed from; local costume was to be strictly observed; dénouements, in which virtue looked ridiculous, or vice seemed triumphant, were to be severely prohibited; and poets, critics, and ex-actors were to be charged with this responsibility! M. Delpla considered that, by such means, the theatre and the pulpit would be on a level, as public instructors; or, if any difference could be between them, the greater efficiency of instruction would rest with the stage. If they were simply equal, the writer concluded that bishops themselves would show their exemplary presence in the side boxes!
The French Government only adopted that part of M. Delpla's project which spoke of a censorship; but as the censors were not competent persons,—poets, critics, actors, literary men,—but "officials," they often came to grief. Their greatest calamity I may notice here, though it befell them at a later period, when a new law rendered the old censorship more stringent. To the authorised officials two well-known dramatic writers sent a new tragedy for examination and approval. It was returned in a few days, with 1500 erasures. The authors were required to modify 300 lines, replace 500 words, shorten 12 scenes, and change a score of names, all of which, in the original, was considered obnoxious to public tranquillity, political order, and dramatic propriety. On receiving the corrected manuscript, the rebuked authors addressed the following note to the censors:—"Gentlemen, we have the honour to acknowledge the receipt of our censured manuscript, with an accompanying letter. We agree with you in thinking that the passages marked for erasure may be of that perturbative character which you suppose; but as we do not dare to cut or modify the verses of Pierre Corneille, we prefer foregoing the representation of 'Nicomède' at the 'Théâtre Français.'"
But let us get back to our own theatres, and to the manners of audiences, between the commencement of this century and the coming of Edmund Kean. Such manners are most strikingly illustrated by the O. P., or old price riots of 1809. In ten months a new Covent Garden Theatre had risen, at an expense of £150,000. Smirke had taken for his model the Acropolis of Athens, and in a narrow, flat street, had built, or hidden, his imitation of the mountain fortress of the Greeks. The house was unnecessarily large, and attendant costs so heavy, that the proprietors raised the price of admission to the boxes from 6s. to 7s., and to the pit, from 3s. 6d. to 4s. They had also converted space, usually allotted to the public—the third tier, in fact—into private boxes, at a rental of £300 a year for each. The pit and box public resolved to resist, and the gallery public having a grievance in its defective construction,—the view being impeded by solid divisions, and the run of the seats being so steep that the occupants could see only the legs of the actors at the back of the stage,—joined the insurrection.
The house opened on the 18th of September 1809, with "Macbeth," and the "Quaker." The audience was dense and furious. They sat with their backs to the stage, or stood on the seats, their hats on, to hiss and hoot the Kemble family especially; not a word of the performance was heard, for when the audience were not denouncing the Kembles, they were singing and shouting at the very top of their then fresh voices. The upper gallery was so noisy, that soldiers, of whom 500 were in the house, rushed in to capture the rioters, who let themselves down to the lower gallery, where they were hospitably received. The sight of the soldiers increased the general exasperation. "It was a noble sight," said the Times, "to see so much just indignation in the public mind;" and that paper scorned the idea that the prices were to be raised, to pay such vanities as were exhibited by Mrs. Siddons and John Kemble, who were on the stage "with clothes on their backs worth £500."
Such was the first of nearly seventy nights of riot, out of which the public issued with a cry of "victory," but under a substantial defeat. In alluding to this matter, it is only necessary to notice the additions to, or the variations in, the riot—in the conduct of which the proceedings of the first night were imitated, with this exception, that the insurrectionists did not enter the theatre till half-price.
First came the introduction of placards and banners, for furnishing pins to affix one of which, in front of the boxes, a lady received an ovation; then speeches were made against the exorbitant salaries of the Kembles, and prisoners were made of the speakers; magistrates appeared on the stage to read the Riot Act, and the public, preparing to rush on the stage itself, were deterred by the sudden opening of all the traps.
The proprietors then assembled partisans by distributing orders, and this introduced fighting. Between the combats, post-horns confounded the confusion. Pigeons were let loose—symbols that the public were pigeoned, and Kemble, compelled at last to come forward, only gave double fury to the storm, by asking "what they wanted," and, on being told, by replying that such demand was not reasonable, and they would think better of it! Lawyers addressed the house from the boxes, encouraging the rioters, and, in allusion to the expensive engagements of Catalani and others, declared that "the British stage should not be contaminated by Italian depravity and French duplicity"—at which declaration the modest and candid public flung some highly-seasoned aspersions at the immoral private-boxes, and retired, cheering.
Watchmen's rattles and "artillery whistles" next added to the storm which tore the public ear. Placards increased. Cheers were given for the British Mrs. Dickons, and groans for Madame Catalani. The very name seemed to give birth to cat-calls. The actors in no way interrupted the uproar. The Times remarked that this was kind, as the public had so often sat without interrupting them.
Kemble made stiff-necked speeches, and the house called him "fellow" and "vagrant," said his head was "full of a-ches," declared they would obey King George and not King John, and protested that they would be sung to by "native nightingales, not foreign screech-owls." The boxes looked like booths, so hung were they with placards and banners—the most loudly cheered of which former was one which announced that the salaries of the Kembles and Madame Catalani amounted, for the season, to £25,575. "Mountain and Dickons, no Cats, no Kittens!" Such is a sample of the O. P. row—the first series of which ended by Kemble announcing, on the sixth night, that Catalani's engagement had been cancelled, and that the house would be closed until the accounts of the proprietors had been examined by competent gentlemen. "Britons who have humbled a prince will not be conquered by a manager!"—in that form was reply made by huge placard; and, next day, the Times told the public that they would not be bound by the report of the examiners of the accounts, as the people had no voice in the choice of arbitrators.
The report appeared in a fortnight. In few words, it amounted to this:—If the present prices were reduced, the proprietors would lose three-fourths per cent. on their capital; but as the reporters could not even guess at the possible profits, the award was null. Meanwhile, the Times suggested that it would be better to reduce the exorbitant salaries. There was Mrs. Siddons with £50 per night! Why, the Lord Chief Justice sat every day in Westminster Hall, from 9 to 4, for half the sum.
The house re-opened on the 4th of October, with the "Beggar's Opera," and "Is he a Prince?" The war was resumed with increase of bitterness in feeling, and of fury in action. Jewish pugilists, under the conduct of Dutch Sam, were hired to awe and attack the dissentients. The boxer, Mendoza, distributed orders, by dozens, to people who would support the pugilists. The speech-makers were dragged away in custody, and Bow Street magistrates sat, during the performances, ready to commit them to prison-companionship with the worst class of thieves; and they lent Bow Street runners to the managers, and these runners, armed with bludgeons, charged and overwhelmed the dauntless rioters in the pit. Dauntless, I say; for, on a succeeding night, they fell upon the Jews in great number, and celebrated their triumph in a bloody fray, by hoisting a placard with the words, "And it came to pass that John Bull smote the Israelites sore!"
The incidents present themselves in such crowds, that it is hardly possible to marshal them. Among them I hear the audience called a "mob," from the stage; and I see Lord Yarmouth and Berkley Craven fighting in the pit, on the part of the managers; and there are "middies" and "gallant tars," or people so attired, addressing the house, in nautical and nonsensical, and rather blackguard style, from upper boxes and galleries; and Brandon is rushing in to point out rioters, and rushing out to escape them; and gentlemen, with "O. P.," in gold, on their waistcoats, laugh at him; and there is up above an encounter between two boxes, the beaten party in which slide down the pillars to the tier below; and, suddenly, there is a roar of laughter at an accident on the stage. Charles Kemble, in Richmond, has stumbled in the fight, with Mr. Cooke as Richard, and fallen on his nose, and the house is as delighted as if he had been their personal enemy!
Then the ear is gratefully sensible of a sudden hush! and the voices of the actors, for once, are heard; but it is not to listen to them the house is silent. A gentleman in the boxes has begun playing "Colleen" on the flute; the piece goes on the while, but it is only the instrumentalist who is listened to and cheered. Then, there is an especially noisy night, when rows of standing pittites are impelled one row over the other, in dire confusion. Anon, we have a night or two of empty houses; the rioters seem weary, and the managers' friends do not care to attend to see a Jubilee procession in honour of George III., in which the cars of the individualised four quarters of the globe are drawn by scene-shifters and lamplighters, in their own clothes!
Because the public were thus kept away, the proprietors thought they had gained a victory, and on the first appearance of a Mrs. Clark, in the "Grecian Daughter," Cooke alluded, in a prologue, to the late "hostile rage." This little scrap of exultation stirred the house to fury again; and when Charles Kemble died as Dionysius, the half-price rioters shouted as if one of their most detested oppressors had perished.
Then came the races up and down the pit benches, while the play was in progress; and the appearance of men with huge false noses, making carnival, and of others dressed like women, who swaggered and straddled about the house, and assailed the few bold occupants of private boxes in terms of more coarseness than wit. Then, too, was introduced the famous O. P. war dance in the pit, to see which alone,—its calm beginning, its swelling into noise and rapidity, and its finale of demoniacal uproar and confusion, even Princes of the Blood visited the boxes; and having beheld the spectacle, and heard the Babel of roaring throats, laughed, and went home.
Not so the rioters; these sat or danced till they chose to withdraw, and then they went in procession through the streets, howling before the offices of newspapers which advocated the managerial side, and reserving their final and infernal serenade for John Kemble himself, in front of his house, No. 89 Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury.
The lack of wisdom on the part of the management was remarkable. The introduction of Jewish pugilists into the pit had been fruitless in good; and now I find them and other questionable-looking people admitted to the boxes. Of course, increase of exasperation followed. The rioters celebrated the jubilee of their row on its fiftieth night. Ladies who came wearing O. P. medals were cheered as if they had been goddesses, and gentlemen who had lost hats in the previous night's fray came in cotton night-caps, or with kerchiefs round their heads. The pit was in a frenzy, and so was the indefatigable Brandon, who captured two offenders that night, one of whom he charged with calling "Silence!" and the other with "unnaturally coughing!" The Bow Street runners also carried off many a prisoner, half-stripped and profusely bleeding, to the neighbouring tribunal; and altogether the uproar culminated on the jubilee night.
The acquittal of leading rioters gave a little spirit to some after displays; but it led to a settlement. Audiences continued the affray, flung peas on the stage to bring down the dancers, and celebrated their own O. P. dance before leaving; but, at a banquet to celebrate the triumph of the cause in the acquittal of the leaders, Mr. Kemble himself appeared. Terms were there agreed upon; and on the sixty-seventh night, a banner in the house, with "We are satisfied" inscribed on it, proclaimed that all was over.
After such a fray the satisfaction was dearly bought. The 4s. rate of admission to the pit was diminished by 6d., but the half-price remained at 2s. The private boxes were decreased in number, but the new price of admission to the boxes was maintained. Thus, the managers, after all, had more of the victory than the people; but it was bought dearly. In a few years the prices were lowered, but the audiences, except on particular occasions, were not numerous enough to be profitable. In fact the house was too large. The public could not hear with ease what was uttered on the stage, and spectacle was more suited to it than Shakspeare or old English comedy;—and huge houses, high prices, and exorbitant salaries, soon brought the British Drama to grief in the patented houses. Into this melancholy question I do not wish, however, to enter. I have only noticed the O. P. affair, as it marks an improvement in the manners and customs of our audiences. In the preceding century, at Lincoln's Inn Fields and Old Drury, rioters on less provocation went more desperate lengths. Destruction even by fire was often resorted to by them. In the O. P. matter, the insurrectionists did not even break a bench. Mixed with the fury of fight there was an under-current of fun. The combatants declared that they would attain their end by perseverance. They persevered, and did not attain it!
I have previously shown that the second George did not dislike to witness an insurrection of a theatrical audience. The third George was of a more placid temperament, and not only laughed at clowns who swallowed sausages, but at allusions to his own agricultural tendencies, which he accepted with a half-delighted: "I! I! good; they mean my sheep!" or some equally bright exclamation. As guests, he did not invite actors to his house; but his eldest son was more, and unnecessarily, condescending.
When Prince of Wales, and subsequently as Prince Regent, actors and managers were not unfrequently invited to Carlton House. The former seem to have appreciated their position better than the latter, at least as far as we may learn from instances afforded by the elder Bannister and the younger Colman. Charles Bannister told Mr. Adolphus, who had questioned him as to the Prince's bearing, whether it resembled that of Prince Hal, amid his boon companions? "The Prince never assumed familiarity with us, though his demeanour was always most gracious. We public performers sat all together, as all guests took their places, according to their rank; our conversation was to ourselves, and we never mixed in that of the general party, further than to answer questions. At proper moments, with inimitable politeness, he would suggest that he should be pleased with a song, and the individual selected received his highest reward in praises which his royal highness bestowed with an excellent judgment, and expressed with a taste peculiar to himself."
When the younger Colman obtained a day-rule from the King's Bench, in 1811, to dine at Carlton House, whither he was conveyed by the Duke of York, dramatic literature was not so pleasantly represented as the stage had previously been in the persons of Charles Bannister and his comrades. The guest behaved like a boor, the host still like a gentleman. Among the offensive queries put by the former to the Duke, was—"Who is that fine-looking fellow at the head of the table?" The Duke urged him to be silent, lest he get into a scrape. Colman would not be anything but ruffianly, and raising his voice, he exclaimed,—"No! no! I want to know who that fine square-shouldered magnificent-looking, agreeable fellow is, at the end of the table!" The Duke remonstrated; saying, "You know it is the Prince." "Why, then," said George, "he is your elder brother! I declare he doesn't look half your age. Well! I remember the time when he sang a good song, and as I'm out for a lark, for one day only, he will not refuse an old playfellow, if he is the same good fellow that he used to be." The Prince, with more condescension than was warrantable, laughed, and then sang a song, which, being done, Colman roared out applause at the magnificent voice, and with a round oath, expressed his determination to engage the singer for the next season at his own theatre! Peake, who tells the story in fuller detail, in his Memoirs of the Colman Family, adds that the Prince was not offended, and that Colman was, subsequently, his guest. If so, the former had forgotten, since Charles Bannister's days, that propriety which the actor so justly admired.
To the list of pieces by which this chapter is preceded, I direct the attention of those who desire to know the character of our stage literature half a century ago. I will not go so far as Gifford, who, on contemplating a similar list, remarked: "All the fools in the kingdom seem to have risen up and exclaimed, with one voice,—Let us write for the Theatres!" But the censure of Leigh Hunt is almost as strong, when he says, that being present at the comedies of Reynolds and Dibdin, he laughed heartily at the actors; but, somehow or other, never recollected a word of the dialogue! The truth is, that the actors, tragic as well as comic, were superior to the authors, especially to those who wrote parts expressly for them, and composed tipsy grimacers for Munden, and chatterers for Fawcett, and voluble gentlemen for Lewis; and, let the scene of the play be in what remote part of the world it might, always introduced an Irishman, because Johnstone was there, ready and richly able, to play it. The authors thus depended on the actors, and not on themselves; and this was so much the case that Leigh Hunt remarked, that the loss of Lewis would be as rheumatism to Reynolds; and the loss of Munden, "who gives such agreeable variety of grin, would affect him little less than lock-jaw!" The old sentimental comedy was bad enough, and we rejoice to this day that Goldsmith overthrew it; but he was followed by writers who mingled sentiment and farce together, who extorted tears, exacted rude laughter, and violated nature in every sense. With all this, however,—vapid in the reading, as some of these productions now appear, they reflected, with great distortion, no doubt, the manners of the times, and suggested, with some awkwardness, how those manners might be improved. The more obtrusively loyal such writers affected to be, the more loudly their clap-traps were applauded. The absence of servile sentiment, and the suspicion of the author being led by liberal principles in politics, could only bring down upon him condemnation. Poor Holcroft, who went through so many painful varieties of life, and who was a radical before the radical era, was one of the ablest writers of what was then called comedy, but he often failed, because of his politics, and was then taunted for his failure, and that by brother dramatists. "Holcroft has done nothing for literature," says Charles Dibdin; "because, perhaps, he has done little for morality, less for truth, and nothing for social order!" Holcroft belongs, indeed, to two centuries; but if the Administration had hanged him, as they wished to do, in 1794, when he took his trial for high treason, the author of the Road to Ruin would not have added his adaptation of "Deaf and Dumb," and the very first of melodramas, the "Tale of Mystery," to the list of his deserved successes.
The younger Colman justified the writing of nonsense, by metrically asking:—
"If we give trash, as some poor critics say,
Why flocks an audience nightly to our play?"
Nevertheless, there were authors who, in the French phrase, had frequently to "sup at the 'Bagpipes,'" like the minor French playwright, Dancourt, who was accustomed to failure, but who used to find solace under the catastrophe by supping joyously with his friends, at an inn with the above sign. One night, his candid daughter was present at the first representation of one of Dancourt's little comedies. At the close of the second scene, the sibilations commenced, and mademoiselle thereupon turned gaily to her sire, with the pleasant remark, "Papa, you are going to sup to-night at the 'Bagpipes!'" The Regent Duke of Orleans was less tender towards a dramatist who bitterly complained to him, not merely that his piece had been hissed, but that he had been horsewhipped by some of the audience, who disliked the coarse raillery of his satire. "Well," said the Duke, having listened to the complaint, "what is it you now want?" "Justice," answered the author. "I think," replied his highness, coolly, "I think you have had that already!"
English managers found authors quite as unreasonable. Early in the present century, there existed a writer of tragedies, named Masterton. Failing to get any of them represented, he printed one, the "Seducer," in 1811;—promising to publish all his rejected pieces, if his specimen tragedy obtained approval. His object, of course, was to shame the managers. Like most of the authors of this century, Mr. Masterton took Otway for his model,—but he did it after this wise—
"Beware, Olivia, of the wiles of man!—
You've seen one suck an orange in the street;
And when he's feasted, fling the rind away?
So will a man, who has despoiled a woman,—
When all's ta'en from her, cast her in the dirt."
Hayley was angry enough when the public damned his "Eudora," which act he thought, manifested only the bad taste of the public, seeing that his play had received the sanction of Lieutenant-General Burgoyne; but if Hayley knew little of practical triumphs of temper, and exhibited small discretion in printing his rejected tragedy, he at least showed that his tragedy was free from such nonsense as we find in Mr. Masterton's.
The two authors who most strongly contrast with each other as to their feelings under a disagreeable verdict, were Charles Lamb and Godwin. The former was present on the night that his farce, "Mr. H.," was played, and he heartily joined in the shower of hisses with which it was assailed by the audience. This was in juster taste than the conduct of Godwin, who sat in the pit, stoically indifferent, in all appearance, to the indifference of the audience to his tragedy—"Antonio." As the act-drop descended, without applause or disapprobation, the author grimly observed that such was exactly the effect he had laboured to produce. And as the piece proceeded amid similar demonstrations of contemptuous indifference, "I would not for the world," said poor Godwin, "have the excitement set in too early."
I question, however, if anything superior to "Antonio" was produced between 1800 and the first appearance of Edmund Kean. Soon after that event came Sheil, Maturin, Proctor, and a greater than any of them, Sheridan Knowles. Sheil wrote his tragedy, "Adelaide," expressly for Miss O'Neill; everything was sacrificed to one character,—and "Adelaide" proved a failure. The poem, however, contained promise of a poet. There was originality, at least there was no servile imitation, in the style, which was not indeed without inflation, and thundering phrases and conceits,—but there was, withal, a weakness, from which, if the writer ever extricated himself, it was only to fall into greater defect. The story is romantic, and something after the fashion of the day, in which there was an apotheosis for every romantic villain. Such a villain is Lunenberg, who, as he remarks in an early part of the play, had lured Adelaide's unsuspecting innocence,—
"And with a semblance of religious rites,
Abused thy trust, and plunged thee into shame."
This sorry rascal treats the lady so ill that she is driven to take poison, and Lunenberg, after fighting her brother Albert, and heroically running on his sword, dies with sentimental phrases in his mouth of pure and hallowed happiness to come, and with the prophecy that "when the sound of heaven shall raise the dead," he and Adelaide would "awake in one another's arms," which is a very bold image, to say the least of it.
Adelaide herself is so feeble a personage, in nothing superior to the heroines of the Leadenhall Street romances of the time, that she fails to win or to exact sympathy. How very silly a young lady she is, may be seen by her dying speech to the villain who had deceived her by a false marriage—
"When I am dead,
As speedily I shall be, let my grave
Be very humble in that mournful spot.
I pray thee, sometimes visit it at eve,
And when you look upon the fading rose
That grows beside a pillar down the aisle,
And watch it drooping in the twilight dews,
Then think of one who bloomed a little while,
E'en as that sickly rose, and bloomed to die."
There is more here of the small sweets of Anna Matilda than of the pathos and harmony of Otway, or the vigour of Lee.
Whatever promise this first tragedy gave, there was nothing of realisation in the author's next tragedy, the "Apostate." In this piece, Hermeya, the Moslem hero, renounces his faith, for love of the Christian lady Florinda, who is so perplexed between love and duty, even more than he between love and patriotism, that she at length finds expression for her condition in the unusually majestic line—"This is too much for any mortal creature!"—a line which was echoed by more than one critic. "Adelaide" was feeble; the "Apostate," in place of being stronger, was only furious. There was the bombast of Lee, but none of his brilliancy; the hideousness of his images without anything of their grand picturesqueness. Florinda, looking on at the execution of Hermeya, exclaims—
"Lo! they wrench his heart away:
They drink his gushing blood!"
—and when a compassionate gentleman requests that the lady may be removed, she sets forth this series of screaming remarks:—
"You shall not tear me hence; No!—Never! never!
He is my lord!—My husband!—Death!—'twas death!
Death married us together!—Here I will dig
A bridal bed, and we'll lie there for ever!
I will not go!—Ha! You may pluck my heart out,
I will never go!—Help!—Help!—Hermeya!
They drag me to Pescara's cursed bed!
They rend the chains of fire that bind me to thee!
Help!—Help!"
—and so, screaming, she dies. Not thus, despite some raving, was Belvidera frantic, calling on Jaffier;—and the audience failed to see a second Otway in Lalor Sheil.
It has hardly fared better with Maturin, who wrote especially for Edmund Kean. The year 1816 produced this new dramatic writer, and also a new actress of great promise, in Miss Somerville, who made her first appearance at Drury Lane, in Maturin's tragedy of "Bertram, or the Castle of St. Aldobrand," which was played for the first time on May the 9th. The plot is of the romantic school. Imogine, loving and loved by an exiled ruffian (Bertram), marries, in his absence, Bertram's enemy, St. Aldobrand, in order to save her sire from ruin. Bertram, the outcast, is wrecked near the castle of the wedded pair; and of course the old lovers encounter each other. From this time, with some hesitations of decency, all goes wrong. Imogine forgets her duty to her husband, whom Bertram kills, after seducing his wife. He, moreover, treats the lady very ungallantly; and Imogine, gaining nothing by her lapse from righteousness of life, goes mad, and dies; whereupon, Bertram, finding the world emphatically unpleasant, kills himself, with considerable self-exultation that he, captain of a robber band, who had lived with desperate men in desperate ways,—
"Died no felon's death;
A warrior's weapon freed a warrior's soul!"
There is no moral to this piece; but there is some beauty of language, with a load of bombast, and an old-world amount of fierce sentiment and grotesque horrors. Among the last may be enumerated, Bertram sitting with the body of the murdered Aldobrand; and Imogine sitting with that of her child,—who had been a good angel, of the best intentions, but never in time to save his mother from mischief. The German element—in story, style, speech, and minute stage-directions—prevails throughout the piece, which had a greater success than it deserved.
If Maturin, in this tragedy, followed the German model rather than strove to imitate the touching melody of Rowe, and the unaffected but energetic tenderness of Otway,—he brought back to the stage some of the grosser features of the dramas of the preceding centuries, which lowered the standard of woman, and made her not less eager to be won than dishonest lovers were to woo. The same villainous spirit marked the epilogue, furnished by the Hon. George Lamb (afterwards Viscount Melbourne). In it, the villainous Bertram was covered with the dignity of a hero; and of woman, generally, it was said by the writer, that—"Vice, on her bosom, lulls remorseful care."
As in the case of Sheil, Maturin's second tragedy, "Manuel," did not fulfil even the small promise of his first; and, after "Bertram," "Manuel" was found insipid,—but more pretentious, roaring, and bombastic. The interest of the play hangs on one incident. Manuel's son is reported as slain in battle; but Manuel accuses his kinsman, and once heir, before that son was born (De Zelos), of having murdered him. Trial by battle ensues, between Torrismond, son of De Zelos, and a stranger, who offers himself as champion of Manuel. This champion (Murad) is vanquished: and he confesses to have been the murderer, at the instigation of De Zelos; but, having been uneasy in his mind ever since, he had come to risk and render his own life, by way of expiation. The instigator stabs himself; Manuel dies; and of course there is no wedding for Victoria, the daughter of the latter, and her lover (Torrismond), the son of De Zelos.
A droll, minor incident, in this tragedy, is that in which De Zelos, when hiring the assassin, and very much desiring to be unknown, gives him a dagger, with the owner's name upon the haft. Thereby, of course, he is ultimately known and betrayed; and it was suggested, that the incident might have authorised the writer to call his tragedy a comedy, and to give it the name of the "Absent Man." For violation of nature, common sense, and I may add, sound, this tragedy of Maturin's equals anything of the kind produced in the earliest ages of the drama. To Edmund Kean, in the very bloom of his fame and best of his strength, was raving, like the following, consigned. De Zelos has just died,—hiding his face,—probably ashamed of the whole business, whereupon Manuel exclaims, spasmodically:—
"False!—False!—ye cursed judges!—do ye hide him?
I'll grasp the thunderbolt! rain storms of fire!
There!—There!—I strike! The whizzing bolt hath struck him.
He shrieks! His heart's blood hisses in the flames!
Fiends rend him! lightnings sear him! hell gapes for him!
Oh! I am sick with death! (Staggering among the bodies.)
Alonzo! Victoria!—I call, and none answer me!
I stagger up and down, an old man, and none to guide me:
Not one! (Takes Victoria's hand.) Cold! cold! That was an ice-bolt!
I shiver! It grows very dark! Alonzo! Victoria!—Very—very
dark! (Dies.)"
There is no such nonsense as this in the tragedies of Proctor, Milman, or Sheridan Knowles. "Mirandola," "Fazio," and "Virginius," will never want readers; and "Virginius," especially, will never want an audience, if it be but fittingly represented. The principal character in "Virginius" was written expressly for Edmund Kean; but mere and lucky accident conveyed it to Mr. Macready, who found therein golden opportunity, and knew how to avail himself of it. To the former, with a sketch of whose career I close my contributions towards a History of the English Stage, may be happily applied the lines of the French poet:—
"Ce glorieux acteur,
Des plus fameux héros fameux imitateur;
Du théâtre Anglais, la splendeur et la gloire,
Mais si mauvais acteur dedans sa propre histoire."
KEAN AS SIR GILES OVERREACH.
[CHAPTER XV.]
EDMUND KEAN.
"It is, perhaps, not generally known," says Macaulay, when closing his narrative of the death of the great Lord Halifax, in 1695, "that some adventurers who, without advantages of fortune or position, made themselves conspicuous by the mere force of ability, inherited the blood of Halifax. He left a natural son, Henry Carey, whose dramas once drew crowded audiences to the theatres, and some of whose gay and spirited verses still live in the memory of hundreds of thousands. From Henry Carey descended that Edmund Kean who, in our own time, transformed himself so marvellously into Shylock, Iago, and Othello."
This reminds me of an anecdote of Louis Philippe, when Duke of Orleans, who happened one day to speak of Louis XIV. as "my august ancestor." The remark was made to a young clerk in his household,—a future novelist and dramatist, Alexandre Dumas. This gentleman opened his eyes in amazement, knowing that the duke was legitimately descended from the brother of the "Grand Monarque." The duke, however, was thinking of the inter-marriages between members of his family and the illegitimate descendants of Louis XIV.; but he noticed the surprise of Dumas, and then calmly added:—"Yes, Dumas; my august ancestor, Louis XIV.! to descend from him, only through his bastards, is, in my eyes at least, an honour sufficiently great to be worth boasting of!"
In like manner Edmund Kean might have boasted of his descent from George Saville, Marquis of Halifax; but I think he was prouder of what he had achieved for himself through his genius, than of any oblique splendour derived to him from the author of the Maxims and the great chief of the Trimmers,—if, indeed, he knew anything about him.
A posthumous son of Henry Carey, well known as George Saville Carey, inherited much of his father's talents. After declining to learn the mystery of printing, he tried that of playing; produced little effect, but by singing, reciting, and above all by his imitations, lived a vagabond life, and managed to keep his head above water, with now and then a fearful dip into the mud below, for forty years; when paralysis depriving him of the means to earn his bread, he contrived to escape further misery here by strangling himself.[101] He was a man of great genius not unmixed with a tendency to insanity.
He was cursed in one fair and worthless daughter, "Nance Carey," whose intimacy with Aaron Kean,—a tailor,—or as some say, Edmund Kean, a builder, but at all events brother to Moses Kean, a tailor, and as admirable a mimic as George Carey himself,[102]—resulted in her becoming the mother of a boy, her pitiless neglect of whom seems to have begun even before his birth.
Whether that event took place in an otherwise unoccupied chamber in Gray's Inn, which had been lent to her vagabond father, or in a poor room in Castle Street, Leicester Square, or in a miserable garret in Ewer Street, Southwark,—for all of which there are respective claimants, Miss Carey's son had a narrow escape from being born in the street. But for Miss Tidswell, the actress, and another womanly gossip or two, this would have happened. It seemed all one to "Nance Carey," who having performed her part in this portion of the play, deserted her child, and left him to the cruelty, caprice, or humanity of strangers.
Little Edmund Kean, born in 1787, or in the following year,[103] for the date is uncertain, had a hard life of it from the first. In a loving arm he never was held,—a loving eye never looked down upon him. Had he not been a beautiful child, perhaps the charity of Miss Tidswell and of whomsoever else extended it to him, would have failed. It is certain that they took the earliest opportunity of deriving profit from him; and before he was three years old, Edmund Kean figured as a Cupid in one of Noverre's ballets at the Opera House. He owed his election to this dignity to his rare personal beauty, an endowment which went for nothing in his subsequent appointment, when four or five years of age, to act as one of the imps attendant on the witches in "Macbeth." John Kemble was then supreme at Drury Lane, and, of course, little conscious that among the noisy and untractable young imps, the wildest by far would prove to be, what Mrs. Siddons would have called, one of those new idols which the public delight to set up, in order to mortify their old favourites!
One night the goblins fell over one another in the cavern-scene, Edmund going down first, out of weakness, or of mischief. This led to the dismissal of the whole troop; and some good Samaritan then sent young Kean to school. In Orange Court, Leicester Square, was the fountain whence he drew his first and almost only draught of learning. In that dirty locality may be found the shrine of three geniuses. There, Holcroft was born, Opie was housed, and Edmund Kean instructed.
Thereafter comes Chaos; and it is only by glimpses that the whereabout of the naturally-gifted but most unhappy lad can be detected. A little outcast, with his weak legs in "irons," day and night, he sleeps between a poor married couple whose sides are hurt by his fetters. Miss Tidswell takes him, ties him to a bedpost, to secure his attention, teaches him elocution, and corrects him a little too harshly, though out of love. He dances and tumbles at fairs and in taverns, performs wonderful feats, is kicked and starved, thrives nevertheless,—and conceives that there is something within him which should set him above his fellows in hard work and lean fare. And then, when he is becoming a bread-winner, he is claimed by his evil genius, Nance Carey.
His mother has been a stroller; she is a vagabond still; tramps the country with pomatums, and perfumes, and falballas, and her son is her pack-horse;—and the bird, to boot, that shall lay golden eggs for her. He is savage at having to plod through mud and dust, but he has a world of his own beyond it all; and he not only learns soliloquies from plays, but recites them in gentlemen's houses. To the audiences there, he goes confident but sensitive; proud and defiant, even when wounded by many a humiliation. By reciting, selling the wares in which Nance Carey dealt, and exhibiting in every possible and impossible play and posture, at fairs, he earned and received some small but well-merited wage. "She took it all from me!" cried the boy, in his anguish and indignation.[104]
A London Arab leads an easier life. It was a dark and hard life to Edmund,—Miss Tidswell occasionally appeared to do him a kindness, to give him bread, and more instruction for the stage. Of his father, we hear nothing save his rascal gallantry with Miss Carey; of his mother, nothing but her rapacity; of his uncle, Moses Kean, only that Miss Tidswell turned his wooden leg to account. When her young pupil, studying Hamlet, had to pronounce the words, "Alas, poor Yorick!" she first made him say, "Alas, poor uncle!" that the memory of the calamity the latter had suffered might dispose Edmund's face to seriousness!
And then he is abroad again; not easily to be followed. His sensitive pride renders him hasty to take offence, and then he rushes from some friendly roof, and disappears, sinks down some horrible gulf, issues not purified, nor softened, nor inclined to give account of himself. A more sober flight took him to Madeira as a cabin-boy, whence he returned, disgusted with Thalatta. Finally, he runs the round of fairs again, and starves and has flashes of wild jollity, as such runners have; and pauses in his running at Windsor. He was just then the property of crafty old Richardson, and at Windsor Fair made such a local reputation by his elocution, that King George sent for him, and so enjoyed a taste of his quality that the young player carried away with him the bright guerdon of two guineas,—either to his manager or his mother, I forget which.
I think, however, this speaking in presence of royalty was the getting the foot on the first round of the slippery ladder which he was so desirous to ascend. He spoke a speech or two at some London theatres, when benefit nights admitted of extraordinary performances; and he now went the round of country theatres, and not of country fairs. It was not a less weary life; he starved as miserably as before, and he began to find a means of reinvigoration in "drink." Had his labour been paid according to its worth, the devil could not have flung this temptation in his way. "A better time will come by and by," said the poor stroller, who was always promising to himself, or to others, a happy period in which all would be right.
In the course of his wanderings he played at Belfast. Mrs. Siddons passed that way too, and acted Zara and Lady Randolph. Edmund Kean, not then, I believe, nineteen, played Osmyn and Young Norval. In the first part I think he was imperfect, and the Siddons shook her majestic head at the apparent cause. Nevertheless, her judgment was, that he played "well, very well; but there was too little of him wherewith to make a great actor!"
If painstaking could do it, he was resolved to be one. No amount of labour to this end daunted him. However poor the task entrusted to him, he did his utmost for it. When playing some worthless fifth-rate character at the Haymarket, a generous colleague remarked:—"Look at the little man, he is trying to make a part of it."
I find by the bills of the Haymarket Theatre, which Mr. Buckstone kindly placed at my disposal, that Dubbs, in the "Review" to Fawcett's Caleb Quotem, was about the best character he played. Considering that he was at this time under twenty, his position was not a very bad one; but it seemed to him to promise no amendment—and he again passed to the country, to play first business, and to be hungry three or four days out of the seven.
He could not earn enough to enable him to travel from one place of engagement to another. He journeyed on foot, and when he came to a river, swam it (particularly when a press-gang was near), as readily as an Indian would have done. In some towns his Hamlet was not relished, but his Harlequin filled the house. The Guernsey critics censured his acting, on the ground that he would rudely turn his back on the audience, and make no more account of them than if they were the fourth side of a room in which he was meditating! When the Guernsey pit hissed him in Richard III., his cry, pointedly addressed to them:—"Unmannered dogs! Stand ye, when I command!" rendered them silent. He tried the same trick, and not without effect, when the pit of Drury Lane was hissing him, not for being a bad actor, but an immoral man.
"Who is that shabby little man?" said Mary Chambers, a young Waterford girl, who had been a governess, and who was going through her probationary time as an actress in Gloucester. "Who the devil is she?" asked Kean, after being soundly rated by her, for spoiling her performance through his unsettled memory. She was what Kean never thoroughly knew her to be—his good genius—worth more than all the kinsfolk he had ever possessed, including Miss Tidswell, who once gave him a home and the stick. The imprudent young couple, however, fell in love; they married; and the manager paid his congratulations to them, by turning them out of his company.[105]
They loved, slaved, and starved. The misery of their lives is unparelleled, except by the heroic uncomplainingness with which it was endured by Mrs. Kean. His industry was really intense; his study of every character he had to play careful, earnest, conscientious; and after acting with as much anxiety as if he had been performing before a jury of critics, he would return to his miserable home, saddened, furious, and unsober. "I played the part finely; and yet they did not applaud me!"
Gleams of good fortune occasionally lit up their path. An engagement at Birmingham, at a guinea a week to each, was comparative wealth to them; and there Kean found the applause for which he sighed. 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; not asking alms, but not above receiving that hospitality of the poor which is true, because self-denying, charity. Needing many things, and obtaining none of those she most needed, Mrs. Kean reached Bristol more dead than alive. A cast in a boat, more weary suffering, a son born, and an audience at Swansea who preferred Bengough, an elephantine simpleton, with large unmeaning eyes, to Edmund—tells the outline of his tale before they crossed from Wales to Waterford.
Soon in this troop, under Cherry, at Waterford, there were two men, destined to be at the very head of their respective vocations, as player and dramatic poet—Edmund Kean and Sheridan Knowles. At present they are only strolling players. The training of the two men had been totally different. Kean was "Nobody's Son," and had passed through the misery, degradation, and blackguardism attendant on such a parentage—his genius not slumbering, but ready to flash, like the diamond, when light and opportunity should present themselves.
Knowles, on the other hand, was the son of a scholar and a trainer of scholars. He came of a literary race. His sire compiled a dictionary; Sheridan, the lexicographer, was his uncle; Richard Brinsley, his cousin. At an early age he was removed from his native city, Cork, to London, where the boy wrote boyish plays, and the youth grew up in friendship with Hazlitt, Coleridge, and Lamb. Then he went into the world, to fight his fight, and at four and twenty, that is, in 1808, I find him a tolerable actor, on the old Dublin stage in Crow Street, and a very acceptable guest at firesides where merit, wit, and a harmonious voice were appreciated. Subsequently he joined the troop of vivacious Cherry, in Waterford. There he met with the little, bright-eyed, swarthy young man, who was Richard in the play, and Harlequin in the pantomime, on the same evening; who, in short, could do anything and did everything well. For him, Edmund Kean, Knowles wrote his first serious play, a melo-dramatic tragedy, "Leo, the Gipsey;" and in that piece Kean achieved so notable a triumph, that he would have chosen it for his first appearance in London, but that, luckily for him, he had lost the copy.
Edmund seems to have worked steadily in the ancient Irish city. Of the general business I can say nothing, except that Mrs. Kean played a Virgin of the Sun, at a time when the character least suited her; but for a reminiscence of a benefit night, I take half a page from Mr. Grattan.
"The last thing I recollect of Kean in Waterford, was the performance for his benefit. The play was Hannah More's tragedy of "Percy," in which he of course played the hero. Edwina was played by Mrs. Kean, who was applauded to her heart's content. Kean was so popular, both as an actor, and from the excellent character he bore, that the audience thought less of the actor's demerits than of the husband's feelings; and besides this, the débutante had many personal friends in her native city, and among the gentry of the neighbourhood, for she had been governess to the children of a lady of good fortune, who used all her influence at this benefit. After the tragedy, Kean gave a specimen of tight-rope dancing, and another of sparring with a professional pugilist. He then played the leading part in a musical interlude, and finished with Chimpanzee, the monkey, in the melo-dramatic pantomime of La Pérouse, and in this character he showed agility scarcely since surpassed by Mazurier or Gouffe, and touches of deep tragedy in the monkey's death scene, which made the audience shed tears."
What cause broke the connection of the Keans with Cherry, I do not know; but the former were one day without an engagement, and among the separations that ensued was that of Kean and Knowles. They were both to find what they thirsted for in London; but for the former many were the trials, and terrific the ascent, before he was to reach that pinnacle which he occupied so gloriously and so briefly.
From Waterford, Edmund and his wife took with them no more than they had brought, except an additional son, the day of whose birth was a happy day in the mother's calendar of sorrows. They suffered, and the children with them, all that humanity could suffer and yet live. I find them at Dumfries, depending for food and shelter upon the receipts at an "entertainment," given by Kean, in a room at a tavern. There was one auditor, and he paid sixpence! There were even worse disappointments than these; and, under their accumulation, I do not wonder that Kean broke into curses at his perverse destiny; or that Mrs. Kean, looking at her children, prayed to God that He would remove them and her!
And so from town to town they pursued their hapless pilgrimage. He sometimes driven to fury and to drink; she only asking for death to her and the two younger sufferers. Now and then a divine charity enabled them to rest and refresh; and once, a divine by profession, in a country town, forbade them the use of a school-room, because they were actors! The reverend gentleman himself, probably, thought it very good amusement to listen to his own boys enacting the "Eunuchus" of Terence.
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 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; but also to enjoy some antepast of metropolitan triumph at Exeter, where his success was great, but not remunerative; where, with a greatcoat flung over his stage-dress, he might too often be seen at the bar of the tavern near the theatre, and where he enlarged his means by teaching dancing and fencing, elocution and boxing—or "a word and a blow," as some wag styled the latter two accomplishments. Exeter foretold that he would not have to wait long, but all the prophetic patronage of Exeter did not furnish him with means to get to Dorchester by any other process than on foot, and with his son Charles on his back. The poor sick little Howard, the elder son, had to be conveyed thither by his mother. Howard had shown some promise of histrionic talent already, and he helped to win a little bread for the family before he died. For this, perhaps, the father loved him; and toiled on till the tide came in his affairs which promised to raise him at its flood to highest fortune. That tide began to flow, after Dr. Drury had seen him act, and reported well to the Drury Lane Committee of his acting; it was running fast in the same direction when Kean saw a gentleman, in the boxes at Dorchester, so attentive to his playing, that Edmund acted to him alone, as Booth had done in his day, but under other influences, to Mr. Stanyan, the judicious gentleman from Oxford. Kean's gentleman was Arnold, stage-manager from Drury Lane, and he commenced negotiations with Kean for an engagement, before they parted for the night. The poor player rushed home, hysterical with agitation and delight, and all his good impulses uppermost. He announced the glad intelligence to his wife, with the touching comment—"If Howard only get well, we shall be all happy yet!"
Howard died, and Kean played, danced, sorrowed, and hoped—for the time at which he was to go up to London was at hand; and thither they went at the close of the year 1813. When that season of 1813-14 opened, Drury was in a condition from which it could be relieved only by a genius;—and there he stood, in that cold hall, a little, pale, restless, dark-eyed man, in a coat with two or three capes, and nobody noticed him. In Cecil Street, his family was living on little more than air; and he was daily growing sick, as he stood, waiting in that hall, for an audience with the manager; and subject to the sneers of passing actors. Even Rae, handsome and a fool, affected not to know him, though they had played together, when Rae's mother was matron at St. George's Hospital, and they had acted together at the Haymarket, in 1806, when Rae led the business, and Kean was but a supernumerary. Arnold treated him superciliously, with a "young man!"—as he condescended to speak, and put him off. Other new actors obtained trial parts, but there was none for that chafed, hungry, restless little man in the capes. Even drunken Tokely, like himself, from Exeter, could obtain a "first appearance," but Kean was put off. Stephen Kemble played Shylock, and failed! why not try a new actor? The Committee did so, and Mr. Huddart, from Dublin, went on as Shylock, and was never heard of more. And the poor stroller looked through the darkness of that miserable passage the while, and murmured, "Let me but get my foot before the floats, and I'll show them—!"
The permission came. Would he,—no, he must play Richard. "Shylock, or nothing!" was his bold reply. He was afraid of the littleness of his figure,—which he had heard scoffed at, being exposed in the "trunks" of Glo'ster. He hoped to hide it under the gown of Shylock. The Jew, or nothing! The young fellow, he was not yet six and twenty, was allowed to have his way.
At the one morning rehearsal he fluttered his fellow-actors, and scared the manager, by his independence and originality. "Sir, this will never do!" cried Raymond, the acting manager. "It is quite an innovation; it cannot be permitted." "Sir," said the poor, proud man, "I wish it to be so;" and the players smiled, and Kean went home, that is, to his lodgings, in Cecil Street, on that snowy, foggy, 26th of February 1814,[106] calm, hopeful, and hungry. "To-day," said he, "I must dine."
Having accomplished that rare feat, he went forth alone, and on foot. "I wish," he remarked, "I was going to be shot!" He had with him a few properties which he was bound to procure for himself, tied up in a poor handkerchief, under his arm. His wife remained, with their child, at home. Kean tramped on beneath the falling snow, and over that which thickly encumbered the ground,—solid here; there in slush; and, by and by, pale, quiet, but fearless, he dressed in a room shared by two or three others, and went down to the wing by which he was to enter. Hitherto no one had spoken to him, save Jack Bannister, who said a cheering word; and Oxberry, who had tended to him a glass, and wished him good fortune. "By Jove!" exclaimed a first-rater, looking at him, "Shylock in a black wig! Well!!"
The house could hold, as it is called, £600; there was not more than a sixth of that sum in front. Winter without, his comrades within;—all was against him. At length, he went on, with Rae, as Bassanio, in ill-humour; and groups of actors at the wings, to witness the first scene of a new candidate. All that Edmund Kean ever did, was gracefully done; and the bow which he made, in return to the usual welcoming applause, was eminently graceful. Dr. Drury, the head-master of Harrow, who took great interest in him, looked fixedly at him as he came forward. Shylock leant over his crutched stick, with both hands; and, looking askance at Bassanio, said: "Three thousand ducats?" paused, bethought himself, and then added: "Well?" He is safe, said Dr. Drury.
The groups of actors soon after dispersed to the green-room. As they reached it, there reached there, too, an echo of the loud applause given to Shylock's reply to Bassanio's assurance that he may take the bond. "I will be assured I may!"—later came the sounds of the increased approbation bestowed on the delivery of the passage ending with, "and for these courtesies, I'll lend you thus much moneys." The act came to an end gloriously; and the players in the green-room looked for the coming among them of the new Shylock. He proudly kept aloof; knew he was friendless, but felt that he was, in himself, sufficient.
He wandered about the back of the stage, thinking, perhaps, of the mother and child at home; and sure, now, of having at least made a step towards triumph. He wanted no congratulations; and he walked cheerfully down to the wing when the scene was about to take place between him and his daughter, Jessica, in his very calling to whom:—"Why, Jessica! I say"—there was, as some of us may remember, from an after night's experience, a charm, as of music. The whole scene was played with rare merit; but the absolute triumph was not won till the scene (which was marvellous in his hands) in the third act, between Shylock, Solanio, and Salarino,—ending with the dialogue between the first and Tubal. Shylock's anguish at his daughter's flight; his wrath at the two Christians who make sport of his anguish; his hatred of all Christians, generally, and of Antonio in particular; and then his alternations of rage, grief, and ecstasy, as Tubal relates the losses incurred in the search of that naughty Jessica, her extravagances, and then the ill luck that had fallen upon Antonio;—in all this, there was such originality, such terrible force, such assurance of a new and mighty master,—that the house burst forth into a very whirlwind of approbation. "What now?" was the cry in the green-room. The answer was, that the presence and the power of the genius were acknowledged with an enthusiasm which shook the very roof. How so select an audience contrived to raise such a roar of exultation, was a permanent perplexity to Billy Oxberry.
They who had seen Stephen Kemble's Shylock, and that of Huddart, this season, must have by this time confessed that the new actor had superseded both. He must himself have felt, that if he had not yet surpassed Cooke, and Henderson, and Macklin, he was tending that way; and was already their equal. Whatever he felt, he remained reserved and solitary; but he was now sought after. Raymond, the acting manager, who had haughtily told him his innovations "would not do," came to offer him oranges. Arnold, the stage manager, who had young-manned him, came to present him, "sir!" with some negus. Kean cared for nothing more now, than for his fourth and last act; and in that his triumph culminated. His calm demeanour at first; his confident appeal to justice; his deafness, when appeal is made to him for mercy; his steady joyousness, when the young lawyer recognises the validity of the bond; his burst of exultation, when his right is confessed; his fiendish eagerness, when whetting the knife:—and then, the sudden collapse of disappointment and terror, with the words,—"Is that—the Law?"—in all was made manifest, that a noble successor to the noblest of the actors of old had arisen. Then, his trembling anxiety to recover what he had before refused; his sordid abjectness, as he finds himself foiled, at every turn; his subdued fury; and, at the last (and it was always the crowning glory of his acting in this play), the withering sneer, hardly concealing the crushed heart, with which he replied to the jibes of Gratiano, as he left the court,—all raised a new sensation in an audience, who acknowledged it in a perfect tumult of acclamation. As he passed to his dressing-room, Raymond saluted him with the confession, that he had made a hit; Pope, more generous, avowed that he had saved the house from ruin.
And then, while Bannister was dashing through Dick, in the "Apprentice," I seem to see the hero of the night staggering home through the snow, drunk with delicious ecstasy, all his brightest dreams realised, and all his good impulses surging within him. He may be in a sort of frenzy, as he tells of his proud achievement; but, at its very wildest, he exclaims: "Mary, you shall ride in your carriage yet!" and, taking his son Charles from the cradle, swears he "shall go to Eton;" but therewith something overshadows his joy, and he murmurs, "If Howard had but lived to see it!"
That poor wife and mother must have enjoyed, on that eventful night, the very brightest of the few gleams of sunshine that fell upon her early, hapless life. Thenceforth, there was never to be misery or sorrow in that household again! Poor lady! She did not, perhaps, remember that Edmund had said, "If I succeed,—it will drive me mad!"
But not yet: all was triumph for awhile; and worthily it was won. His audiences rose, from one of a £100 to audiences of £600; and £20 a week rewarded efforts, for far less than which he subsequently received £50 a night. He was advanced to the dignity of having a dressing-room to himself. Legislators, poets, nobles, thronged his tiring-room, where Arnold took as much care of him, as if on his life hung more than the well-being of the theatre. Friends flocked to him, as they are wont to do, where there is an opportunity of basking in pleasant sunshine, imparted by genius. And old Nance Carey turned up, to exact £50 a year from her not too delighted son, and to introduce a Henry Darnley, who would call Edmund, "dear brother!"
Some years later, in 1829, Moore was talking with Mrs. Kean of this critical period in Edmund's career. The poet suggested, that some memorial of his first appearance should be preserved. "Oh!" exclaimed Mrs. Kean; "will you write his life? You shall have half the profits;" adding, as she probably remembered the dark time which had come upon her since the sunshine,—"if you will only give me a little."
But success was not to be considered as achieved, by playing one character supremely well. Kean had, in the general memory, shaken Macklin from his supremacy in Shylock. He was now summoned to show himself worthy of being the successor of Garrick,—by acting Richard III. A few nights before he played that part, it was performed at Covent Garden, by John Kemble; and a short time after Kean had triumphed, it was personated by Young; but Kemble could not prevent, nor Young impede, the triumph of the new actor, who now made Richard his own, as he had previously done with Shylock.
His Richard settled his position with the critics; and the criticism to which he was subjected was, for the most part, admirably and impartially written. He is sometimes spoken of as "this young man;" at others, "this young gentleman." "Even Cooke's performance," says one, "was left at an immeasurable distance." A second adds, "it was the most perfect performance of any that has been witnessed since the days of Garrick." Of the grand effects followed by a storm of applause, a third writes that "electricity itself was never more instantaneous in its operation." They are, however, occasionally hypercritical. The able critic of the Morning Chronicle objected that in the young man's Richard "too great reliance was placed on the expression of the countenance, which is a language intelligible only to a part of the house;" and a contemporary thought that when the young gentleman, as Richard, crossed his hands behind his back, during his familiar colloquy with Buckingham, the action was altogether too natural! Others point to attitudes which Titian might have painted. Such use of eye, and lip, and muscle, had never had anything comparable to it since the best days of Garrick. Even Sylvanus Urban aroused himself, and declared, that Mr. Kean's success had given new interest to the biography of Richard III.
Indeed, this second glory was greater than the first, for the difficulties were greater, and they were all surmounted. Joyous and sarcastic in the opening soliloquy; devilish, as he passed his bright sword through the still breathing body of Lancaster; audaciously hypocritical, and almost too exulting, in the wooing of Lady Anne; cruelly kind to the young Princes, his eye smiling while his foot seemed restless to crush the two spiders that so vexed his heart;—in representing all this there was an originality and a nature which were entirely new to the delighted audience. Then they seemed to behold altogether a new man revealed to them, in the first words uttered by him from the throne.—"Stand all apart!" from which period to the last struggle with Richmond, there was an uninterrupted succession of beauties; even in the bye-play he found means to extort applause, and a graceful attitude, an almost silent chuckle, a significant glance,—even so commonplace a phrase as "Good night, my lords," uttered before the battle of the morrow, were responded to by acclamations such as are awarded to none but the great masters of the art.
The triumph was accumulative, and it was crowned by the tent-scene, the battle, and the death. Probably no actor ever even approached Kean in the last two incidents. He fenced with consummate grace and skill; and fought with an energy that seemed a fierce reality.
Rae had sneered at the "little man," but Rae now felt bound to be civil to the great tragedian, and referring to the passage of arms in "Richard III.," he, having to play Richmond, asked, "Where shall I hit you, sir, to-night?" "Where you can, sir," answered Kean; and he kept Richmond off, in that famous struggle, till Rae's sword-arm was weary with making passes.
His attempt to "collar" Richmond when his own sword had fallen from him was so doubtful in taste that he subsequently abandoned it;[107] but in the faint, yet deadly-meant passes, which he made with his swordless arm, after he had received his death-blow, there was the conception of a great artist; and there died with him a malignity which mortal man had never before so terribly pourtrayed. Young, in his dying scene of Richard used to fling his sword at Richmond, a trick which the critics very properly denounced.
They who said that Mr. Kean's figure and voice were against him, unconsciously exalted the genius which had triumphed over the difficulties of Shakspeare and Cibber's Richard. They who accepted rather than rejoiced in his triumph, called him "The Fortunate Actor!" They did not know that under slavery, starvation, and every disadvantage but despair, Kean had silently and solitarily studied these characters, and had come to conclusions which he hoped would enable him to achieve a success which, if accomplished, he was, after all, afraid would drive him mad.
At this time, 1814, Moore speaks of "poor Mr. Kean," as being "in the honeymoon of criticism;" and then the bard speaks disrespectfully of the critics. "Next to the pleasure," he says, "of crying a man down, your critics enjoy the vanity of writing him up; but when once up, and fixed there, he is a mark for their arrows ever after."
His other characters this season were Hamlet, when to John Bannister was assigned the first of the two Grave-diggers, whom he had restored to the stage from which they had been abolished by Garrick; Othello, to the Iago of Pope; and Iago, to the Othello of Sowerby, Pope, Rae, and Elliston; Miss Smith, who refused to play the Queen, in "Richard," being his Desdemona. He also acted Luke, in "Riches" ("City Madam"), to the Lacy of Wallack; and the Lady Traffic of Mrs. Edwin. Of these, he was always inclined to think Hamlet his best character. He had, perhaps, studied it more deeply than the others, and Mrs. Garrick took such especial interest in his representation of it, that on comparing it with her husband's, she saw only one great defect,—in the closet scene. Garrick was severer with the Queen of Denmark than Kean, and Mrs. Garrick persuaded him, though unconvinced by her, to throw more sternness into this celebrated scene. The good old lady merited some, yet not such concession; but then she invited Kean to Adelphi Terrace, and sent him fruit from Hampton, and made him a present of Garrick's stage-jewels. The young man was in a fair way of being spoiled, as Pope said of Garrick, when thinking of the laborious, but splendid time of his friend and favourite, Betterton.
Tenderness to Ophelia, affection for his mother, reverential awe of his father, and a fixed resolution to fulfil the mission confided to him by that father, were the distinct "motives," so to speak, of his Hamlet.
The critics especially dwell on the tender vibration of his voice when uttering the word "father" to the Ghost; they approve of his sinking on one knee before the solemn spirit, and they are lost in admiration of his original action when, instead of keeping the Ghost off with his sword, when he bids it, "go on," he pointed it back at his friends to deter them from preventing his following the visionary figure. This, and another original point, have become stage-property. I allude to the scene in which he seems to deal so harshly with Ophelia. At the close of it, Kean used to return from the very extremity of the stage, take Ophelia's hand, kiss it with a tender rapture, look mournfully loving upon her, with eyes full of beautiful significance, and then rush off. The effect never failed, and the approbation was tumultuous.
Gracefully and earnestly as his Hamlet[108] was played, it yielded in attractiveness to his Othello, which despite some little exaggeration of action, when told to beware of jealousy, was, perhaps, the greatest of his achievements. In the tender scenes, and love for Desdemona was above all other passion, even when for love he jealously slew her, he had as much power over his "bad voice," as his adversaries called it, as John Kemble over his asthmatic cough, and attuned it to the tenderness to which he had to give expression. In the fiercer scenes he was unsurpassable, and in the great third act none who remember him will, I think, be prepared to allow that he ever had, or is ever likely to have, an equal.
John Kemble himself said of Kean's Othello:—"If the justness of its conception had been but equal to the brilliancy of execution it would have been perfect; but," added the older actor, with some sense, perhaps, of being disturbed by the younger player, "the whole thing is a mistake; the fact being that Othello was a slow man,"—to be moved, he was; but being moved, swift and terrible in moving to consequent purpose.
Iago, curiously enough, was not so welcome a part to Kean as Othello. Its characteristic was the concealment of his hypocrisy, and in the delineation of such a part Kean was usually unrivalled. Some of his admirers considered his Iago as fine as his Richard, but he never played the two with equal care and equal success. On the other hand, he was pleased with the strong oppositions in the character of Luke, but his audiences were not satisfied in the same degree, and it fell out of his repertory. He of course thought them in the wrong; lamented on the few competent judges of acting, and limited these to lawyers, doctors, artists, critics, and literary men. He was then the (often unwilling) guest of noblemen who, I doubt not, were excellent judges too; but Kean thought otherwise: "They talk a great deal," he said, "of what I don't understand,"—politics, and equally abstruse matters; "but when it comes to plays, they talk such nonsense!"
I am not about to follow this actor through his score of seasons, but as a sample of his value to the treasury of Drury Lane, at this time, and therefore to the stage, I may just make record of the fact that in this first season, he played Shylock fifteen times, Richard twenty-five, Hamlet eight, Othello ten, Iago eight, and Luke four; and that in those seventy nights, the delighted treasurer of Drury Lane struck a balance of profit to the theatre, amounting in round numbers to £170,000.[109] Previous to the appearance granted to him so tardily, there had been one hundred and thirty-nine nights of continual loss. Mr. Whitbread, a proprietor, might well say of him that "he was one of those prodigies that occur only once or twice in a century."
In this same season, Kemble stood his ground against Kean in the one character played by both—Hamlet; but two new actors—tall, earnest, handsome, but ungainly Conway, from Dublin, and Terry, from Edinburgh—only took a respectable position. The Othello of the first, and the Shylock of the second, were never heard of after Kean had played and made them his own.
In Kean's second season, he added to his other characters, Macbeth, which had some magnificent points, but in which Kemble had personal advantages over him: Romeo, which continues the traditional glory of Barry; Reuben Glenroy and Penruddock, in neither of which he equalled Kemble; Zanga, played in a style which made the fame of Mossop pale, and shook Young and Kemble from an old possession; Richard II., in an adaptation by Merivale,[110] acted with a new grace to the expression of melancholy; Abel Drugger, concerning which he answered the legendary—"I know it," to the "you can't play it," of Mrs. Garrick; Leon, performed with moderate success, and Octavian, with rare sweetness, but not with such rare ability as to make John Kemble uneasy.
Kean also acted his first original character, Egbert, in the tragedy of that name,[111] by Mrs. Wilmot. His prestige suffered a little in consequence, for Egbert was condemned on the first night. He had compensation enough in Zanga. As one who stood among the crowd in the pit passage heard a shout and clamour of approbation within, he asked if Zanga had not just previously said, "Then lose her!" for that phrase, in the country, when uttered by Kean, used to make the walls shake; and he was answered that it was so. I remember having read that some one was with Southey, when the "Revenge" was played, and that when Zanga consummated his vengeance in the words, "Know then 'twas I"—lifting up his arms, as he spoke, over the fainting Alonzo, and seeming to fill the theatre—the same image was simultaneously presented to the minds of the two friends. "He looks like Michael Angelo's rebellious Archangel!" thought one. "He looks like the Arch-Fiend himself," said the other.[112]
Covent Garden struggled nobly, with its old and strong company, against the single power of Kean at the other house; but found its best ally in a new actress. On the 13th of October 1814,[113] Miss O'Neill made her first appearance in Belvidera. It is not my intention to do more than record the names of the players who made their début after the coming of Edmund Kean, but there is something so singular in the lucky chance which led to Miss O'Neill's well-merited fortune, that I venture to tell it in the words of Michael Kelly.[114]
Let me first remark that, no doubt, some of us are old enough to have seen, as many of us have heard, of Miss Walstein, that "sort of Crow Street Bonaparte," who struggled so bravely, though so briefly, at Drury Lane against Miss O'Neill, when the latter carried the town by her superior charms and talents. Miss O'Neill was furnished by her undoubtedly great rival with the means of supplanting her. Had not Walstein been arrogant, the famous Juliet of our infantine days might never have sighed on the Covent Garden balcony. Her first step, however, was made on the stage at Crow Street, and Miss Walstein unwittingly helped her to obtain a secure footing. The story is thus told by garrulous Mike Kelly:—"Miss Walstein, who was the heroine of the Dublin stage, and a great and deserved favourite, was to open the theatre in the character of Juliet. Mr. Jones received an intimation from Miss Walstein that without a certain increase of salary, and other privileges, she would not come to the house. Mr. Jones had arrived at the determination to shut up his theatre sooner than submit to what he thought an unwarrantable demand, when Mac Nally, the box-keeper, who had been the bearer of Miss Walstein's message, told Mr. Jones that it would be a pity to shut up the house; that there was a remedy if Mr. Jones chose to avail himself of it. 'The girl, sir,' said he, 'who has been so often recommended to you as a promising actress, is now at an hotel in Dublin with her father and brother, where they have just arrived, and is proceeding to Drogheda, to act at her father's theatre there. I have heard it said by persons who have seen her, that she plays Juliet extremely well, and is very young and very pretty. I am sure that she would be delighted to have the opportunity of appearing before a Dublin audience, and if you please I will make her the proposal.' The proposal was made, and accepted; and on the following Saturday, 'the girl,' who was Miss O'Neill, made her début on the Dublin stage as Juliet.[115] The audience was delighted; she acted the part several nights, and Mr. Jones offered her father and brother engagements on very liberal terms, which were thankfully accepted. In Dublin," adds Kelly, "she was not only a great favourite in tragedy, but also in many parts of genteel comedy. I have there seen her play Letitia Hardy; she danced very gracefully, and introduced my song, 'In the rough Blast heave the Billows,' originally sung by Mrs. Jordan, at Drury Lane, which she sang so well as to produce a general call for its repetition from the audience. She was in private life highly esteemed for her many good qualities. Her engagement in Dublin wafted Miss Walstein from Dublin, where she had been for many years the heroine of Crow Street, to Drury Lane, where she made her appearance as Calista, in 'The Fair Penitent,' on the 15th November 1814, but only remained one season."
It would seem as if Drury Lane were weary by this time of its success, for early in 1815-16 that excellent actor, Dowton, who disliked seeing Kean's name in large type, tried to extinguish him by playing Shylock! The Kentish baker's son could play Sheva and Cantwell, and many other parts admirably; but Shylock!—No, let us pass to more equal adversaries; in a contest between whom, Kean did fairly extinguish his antagonist. In this season Kean acted all his old and many new parts, among the latter, Shakspeare's Richard II.,[116] Bajazet, Duke Aranza (in which Elliston had the better of him), Goswin ("Beggars' Bush"), Sir Giles Overreach, and Sforza. Among these, Sir Giles stands pre-eminent for its perfectness, from the first words, "Still cloistered up," to the last convulsive breath drawn by him in that famous one scene of the fifth act, in which, through his terrible intensity, he once made so experienced an actress as Mrs. Glover faint away,—not at all out of flattery, but from emotion.
Now, Sir Giles had been one of Kemble's weaknesses; and he affected it as he might have done Coriolanus. He had played it since Mr. Kean had come to London, but as no comparison could be drawn, his performance was accepted, as even an indifferent but honest effort by a great artist deserves to be. But after Edmund Kean had added another rose to his chaplet, by his marvellous impersonation of Sir Giles, Kemble played it again, as if to challenge comparison. I am sorry to say it, but John Kemble was hissed! No! It was his Sir Giles that was hissed. Two nights later he acted Coriolanus, the merits of which were acknowledged with enthusiasm by his audience. But he never ventured on Sir Giles again! In this last character, all the qualities of Kean's voice came out to wonderful purpose, especially in the scene where Lovel asks him,
"Are you not moved with the sad imprecations
And curses of whole families, made wretched
By your sinister practices?"
to which Sir Giles replies:—
"Yes, as rocks are
When foamy billows split themselves against
Their flinty ribs; or as the moon is moved
When wolves with hunger pined, howl at her brightness."
I seem still to hear the words and the voice as I pen this passage; now composed, now grand as the foamy billows; so flute-like on the word "moon," creating a scene with the sound; and anon sharp, harsh, fierce in the last line, with a look upward from those matchless eyes, that rendered the troop visible, and their howl perceptible to the ear;—the whole serenity of the man, and the solidity of his temper, being illustrated less by the assurance in the succeeding words than by the exquisite music in the tone with which he uttered the word "brightness."
It was on the night he played Sir Giles for the first time in London, that Mrs. Kean, who seems to have been too nervous to witness his new essays, asked him what that hanger-on at the theatres, Lord Essex, had thought of it. You know the jubilant reply:—"D—— Lord Essex, Mary! The pit rose at me!"
But to Sir Giles were not confined Kean's triumphs of this year. He created the part of Bertram, in Maturin's tragedy of that name; and he alone stands associated with the part. It suited him admirably,—for it is full of passion, pathos, wild love, and tenderness. One great point made by the actor (whose Imogine was Miss Somerville, afterwards Mrs. Bunn) was in the exquisite delivery of the words, "God bless the child!" They have made many a tear to flow, and he acquired the necessary pathos and power by first repeating them at home, while he looked on his sleeping boy; and I do not know a prettier incident in the life of this impulsive actor. Would there were more of them!
In the season of 1816-17 John Kemble withdrew, full of honours, though his laurels had been a little shaken. As opponents to the now well-established actor at Drury Lane, two gentlemen were brought forward, Mr. Macready, from Dublin, and Mr. Junius Booth, from Worthing. The former is the son of the respectable actor and dramatic author, whose abandonment of upholstery, in Dublin, did something towards giving to the stage the son who long refined and adorned it. Mr. Macready made all the more progress by not coming in contrast, or comparison with Kean. He was of the Kemble school, but with ideas of his own, and he made his way to fame, independently. But Booth was so perfectly of the Kean school that his Richard appeared to be as good as his master's. Indeed, some thought it better. Whereupon, Kean counselled the Drury Lane management to bring him over to that theatre. It was done. They played in Othello,—the Moor, by Kean; Iago, by Booth. The contact was fatal to the latter. He fell ingloriously, even as a Mr. Cobham had done before him in an audacious attempt on Richard; but both gentlemen became heroes to transpontine audiences.
Kean's other achievements this season were his fine interpretation of Timon, after Shakspeare's text, "with no other omissions than such as the refinement of manners has rendered necessary;" his creation of Maturin's "Manuel," and his last triumph over Kemble, in doing what the latter had failed to do, stirring the souls, raising the terror, and winning the sympathy of his audience by one of the most finished of his impersonations,—Sir Edward Mortimer. Oroonoko, Selim, and Paul were the other characters newly essayed by him during this season. The last two were for his benefit,[117] and therewith he closed a season,—the last very fruitful in great triumphs, but not the first in the chronicle of his decline.
He was now the oft-invited guest of people with whom he did not particularly care to associate. Moore chronicles his name as one of the guests with Lord Petersham, Lord Nugent, the Hon. William Spencer, Colonel Berkeley, and Moore, at an "odd dinner," given by Horace Twiss, in Chancery Lane, in 1819, in "a borrowed room, with champagne, pewter spoons, and old Lady Cork." Lord Byron was reluctant to believe in him, but after seeing him in Richard, he presented the actor with a sword, and a box adorned by a richly-chased boar-hunt; when Lord Byron had seen his Sir Giles, he sent to the player a valuable Damascus blade. His compliments, at Kean's benefit, took the shape of a fifty-pound note; and he once invited him to dinner, which Kean left early, that he might take the chair at some pugilistic supper!
Mr. Weston as Dr. Last.