Edmund Kean — How Can a Man Have Real Self Expression?

What Can Acting Teach a Man about Expression?

In his 1951 lecture, "Aesthetic Realism as Beauty: Acting," Eli Siegel describes acting as "the known showing of another feeling than you, as you see yourself, are disposed to have." This has every man's hope in it whether he goes on the stage or not: to see the feelings of another person so well you become that person. And Mr. Siegel says about the man I now speak of:

The actor on the whole in England who most electrified audiences, and who got the most intense reaction, is Edmund Kean. There is something unexplainably amazing about him....as we read what Kean could do, we feel the strange power, the power which is like an oak, and the power in sparks.

That power came from a life-long drive in Kean that, I believe, men today are desperate to have. As an actor, Kean felt he would take care of himself only if he gave his all, that the giving was the same as getting his own bedrock integrity, and also the same as terrific precision. Kean didn't hold back. He shows the truth of what I am learning from Miss Reiss, and also from my acting teacher, Aesthetic Realism consultant and actress Anne Fielding: great, accurate feeling about the world is the same as selfishness, stature, expression.

Edmund Kean had, as Mr. Siegel said, a "rather troubled childhood." He was born at Gray's Inn, London, in early 1789, the out-of-wedlock son of Ann Carey, a poor young woman who led a turbulent life in the streets of London. At two years old, when, according to Giles Playfair in his biography Kean, "he would...have died of starvation and neglect," the little boy was taken to live with Charlotte Tidswell, an actress at the Drury Lane Theatre who took a deep interest in Edmund's life. Playfair writes that Miss Tidswell:

had him taught singing...and fencing by...masters at Drury Lane....She gave Edmund his first groundings in the study of Shakespeare, encouraging him to feel as well as understand the lines he repeated after her and making him rehearse his speeches for hours on end in front of a mirror.

I believe that in the plays of Shakespeare, Edmund Kean early found a beauty, a structure in the world he found nowhere else. Even as a child he became known in London for his readings from Shakespeare, and then when he was nine, his mother, seeing that he could make money, reclaimed her son and again, says Playfair, "he became the child vagabond." She had him travel with shows to fair-grounds where he learned tumbling and clowning, and had to scrape together whatever food he could find.

Early, Edmund Kean met a confusing world. Playfair writes that by fifteen, "he had been buffeted and caressed...praised and insulted and in sum he had learned that the world was cruel and relentless and had to be fought back hard." Kean endured terrible things, and I believe that along with his mighty impulsion to art, unknowingly he also saw the world as an enemy, an opponent he had to beat to get anywhere. Here he was like many men.

Over the next nine years Kean and the woman he married, Mary Chambers, were strolling players in the provinces of England, often penniless and hungry, trying desperately to feed and clothe their two young sons who performed with them, one of whom died. Yet Kean maintained a burning desire to express himself with grandeur, and in his biography Edmund Kean, Howard Hillebrand quotes Kean's wife saying that he would go off for hours "thinking intensely on his characters," that he "studied...beyond any actor I knew."

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