Here’s all the words that thou art worth.”
Davenport: The City Nightcap.
Dignum and Moses Kean, the latter the uncle of Edmund Kean, were one day standing employed in jovial converse under the Piazza in Covent Garden, when Charles Bannister passed by with a friend. Dignum and Moses had been but indifferent tailors, before the one turned vocalist and the other mimic. “I never see those two fellows together,” said Charles, “without thinking of one of Shakspeare’s plays.” “And which is that?” inquired his friend. “Measure for Measure,” said Charles.
It is a custom with some Arab tribes for a man, when he becomes a father, to take his name from his son. Thus the bachelor Mahmoud ben Youssef, or Mahmoud son of Joseph, if he marries, no sooner has a boy, whom we will call Taleb, then he becomes Mahmoud Abu Taleb, or Mahmoud father of Taleb. In some such fashion the poor tailor Aaron Kean has no other name in history than that of the father of Edmund,—the greatest of our actors since the days of Garrick. The family of the Trees has, from as humble a source, been as bountiful, in its way, to the stage.
The ever-youthful Harley,—who looks almost as young now as he did when in 1815 he first appeared in London, at the Lyceum, as Marcelli in ‘The Devil’s Bridge,’—is not far removed from the profession on which I have been touching. His sire was a draper, and he himself is said to have been initiated into the mysteries of stay-making, and to have tried those of physic and the law, ere he settled down to comic acting and delighting the town.
But I must go further back than this, for my illustration of one who passed from a humble calling to add dignity to and gain credit in the exercise of a difficult vocation. When the manager was busy “casting” a new tragedy called ‘Cato,’ written by a gentleman about town, whose name is connected with the ‘Spectator,’ and lives in the “Addison” roads and terraces about Kensington, there was some hesitation as to the actor who should represent Marcus. A youthful and aspiring player looked blushingly on as the hesitation occurred. “There is hope, ay, and promise too, in that blush,” said Addison; “Dick Ryan shall be my lover.” “Why, a year ago he was only a tailor,” whispered Booth, who played the principal character. “A London tailor,” said the manager, Syphax Cibber. “And a present pretty fellow,” murmured Maria Oldfield. “And my Marcus,” said Addison, “or I do not make over the profits to the house.” And it was so. It may be a legitimate boast for the profession, that Addison selected a young tailor to play Marcus in his tragedy of ‘Cato,’ and that Garrick took from the same source some hints for the improvement of his Richard.
In the latter case, Garrick and Woodward went together to see Ryan’s Richard, thinking to be merry at witnessing such a character played by such a person. Ryan was then ungraceful in carriage, slovenly in style, and exceedingly ill-dressed; but Garrick discerned, in spite of all, some original ideas, to which he gave development, and therewith he struck out new beauties which he perhaps fairly claimed as his own. Foote alluded to this in a prologue spoke by him at Ryan’s benefit in 1754, in which he said, in allusion to Ryan himself,
“From him succeeding Richard took the cue;
And hence the style, if not the colour, drew.”