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

The Whole Self Taking An Outside Form

In his lecture on expression, Mr. Siegel says:

Expression is never expression until it's complete and also accurate...True expression is that which shows the whole self taking an outside form. If the whole self is not taking an outside form, it doesn't join with a friendly outside...anytime part of the self is expressed and the whole self is not, we are saying, Unhappiness, come to me, and ailment, join me.

When Edmund Kean, after hardship that had him destitute and frantic, made his debut at London's Drury Lane Theatre on January 26, 1814, the audience saw the self of a man taking an outside form in a way that was tremendous and new. At this time when a formal, restrained style of acting was in vogue, Kean astonished the audience with his fire, his subtlety, his spontaneity and naturalness, all of which brought new honesty to his Shylock in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice.

Shylock, a Jewish money-lender, had traditionally been played as a villain, instantly recognizable as such in a stock red wig and dirty costume. But Kean refused to go along with this convention, making Shylock more ordinary in appearance in a black wig and clean costume, a move the other actors thought was courting disaster. This was because he saw in Shylock, in his evil, "the human touch that made him kin to all men," said one critic. As Hillebrand tells more we see Kean's beautiful impulsion to have his whole self walk the boards. Kean was:

...alive, alive with energy, in every muscle, glance, and intonation. The arms and hands were eloquent, the whole face spoke before the words were uttered, the eyes, the marvelous black eyes which were Kean's most precious instrument, darted intelligence. As the familiar lines fell from his lips they seemed to be rediscovered, as though for the first time was revealed their true meaning.

"Line after line bit incisively into the hearers' ears," writes Hillebrand, and one of the hearers that night was the young critic William Hazlitt, then a reviewer for the Morning Chronicle. Hazlitt, who said he did not think it possible for Shakespeare's characters to be acted truly, loved what he saw then and for years after, saying that Kean's "life and spirit...fill[ed] the stage, and burn[ed] in every part of it," that he displayed, as no other could, "the tumult and conflict of opposite passions in the soul."

Here, Hazlitt is seeing and describing something which Eli Siegel was to make clear for the first time in history in his magnificent principle: "All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves." Two great opposites in Kean's acting are passion and control, and these are throughout an essay which Mr. Siegel said is "The most valuable description of acting perhaps in the world," by the American writer, Richard Henry Dana. Dana saw Kean act in what Mr. Siegel referred to as "careful Boston" of the early 1800s, and felt the honesty of Kean changed him, made him a better person. He says that to see Kean was an "intellectual feast," and writes:

In his highest wrought passion, when every limb [is] alive and quivering, and his gestures...violent, nothing appears ranted or over-acted; because he makes us feel that, with all this, there is something still within him vainly struggling for utterance....[he] runs along the dizzy edge of the roaring and beating sea, with feet as sure as we walk our parlours.

Commenting, Eli Siegel described the essence of Kean's appeal when he said, "He makes us feel art consists of hanging about necessary precipices that you never jump over."

Kean played Shakespeare's Richard III, Shylock, Iago, Othello, Hamlet and Sir Giles Overreach in Massinger's A New Way to Pay Old Debts. The poet Lord Byron was at a performance of this latter role when, near the end of the play, Sir Giles is cornered by his enemies, lashes out and goes mad. Kean was so utter the audience thought he was "possessed by the devil." Writes Giles Playfair, Kean:

Even the actors on the stage—hard-boiled professionals ...were frightened. And then the pit rose up in a body and cheered and went on cheering...

"By God he is a Soul," said Byron.

Kean became "the fullest expression in [acting]...of the Romantic Movement," says Howard Hillebrand, whose book Eli Siegel reviewed for Scribner's Magazine in 1933, praising Hillebrand's "live and scholarly words," and saying of Kean:

This acting person had something; a new, big and divine something. I can say, without putting on, that this...famous actor, teamed with Shakespeare, put me in a pleasing, definite tremor—in 1933. Kean brought a new excitement to England.

What Kean's acting shows powerfully—the whole self joining with what is not oneself—stands for the expression men today hope to have in their everyday lives.

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