Kean, Edmund

Kean, Edmund (1789–1833), English tragedian, whose undoubted genius was offset by wild and undisciplined behaviour, an ungovernable temper, and habitual drunkenness. Very little is known about his early life. He was apparently the illegitimate son of a small-part actor and drunkard, related to the Savile family, and Ann Carey, granddaughter of Henry Carey, composer of the ballad ‘Sally in Our Alley’, also related to the Saviles. Left fatherless at 3, with a mother who had apparently abandoned him, Edmund was cared for by an elderly member of the Drury Lane company. She planned to make an actor of him (knowing no other life) and had him taught singing, dancing, fencing, and elocution. By 8 years old he was already something of a prodigy and had appeared in several small parts at Drury Lane. Anxious to exploit his talents for her own benefit, his mother then reclaimed him, and with her he became a strolling player, acting Hamlet before Nelson and Lady Hamilton in Carmarthen, and giving a command performance in Windsor Castle before George III. In 1804, tired of earning money for his mother to spend, he set out on his own, going from one provincial company to another. During the next nine years he endured not only all the privations of a strolling player's life but added to his burdens a wife, a mediocre actress, and two sons, of whom the elder died young.

On 26 Jan. 1814 Kean finally achieved his ambition and appeared at Drury Lane in a major role, playing Shylock in The Merchant of Venice not in the traditional red wig and beard of the low comedian, which even Macklin had not dared to discard, but as a swarthy embittered fiend with a butcher's knife in his grasp and blood-lust in his eyes. The audience acclaimed him, and he continued for a time to delight them in a series of villainous parts. The technical novelty of his acting is revealed by a contemporary comment that ‘by-play’ was one of his greatest excellencies; he relied less on his naturally harsh voice than on facial expression. In spirit the change was even greater. Deficient in dignity, grace, and tenderness, he needed a touch of the malign, of murderous frenzy, to inspire him. Comedy he seldom essayed; he was seen as Abel Drugger—Garrick's favourite comic part, in Jonson's The Alchemist—only three times. Mild villainy made no appeal to him, and he rejected the part of Joseph Surface, in Sheridan's The School for Scandal, with scorn. Even his magnificent Othello was too often overplayed, too constantly on the rack. But as Macbeth he was heartrending, and he gave his finest performances as the arch-villains Richard III and Iago. Two of his other great masterpieces were Sir Giles Overreach, with his ruthless frenzy of miserliness, in Massinger's A New Way to Pay Old Debts, and the barbarous fiend Barabas, in Marlowe's The Jew of Malta. After his enthusiastic reception at Drury Lane, Kean seemed about to embark on a career of unequalled splendour; but the wildness in his blood and the intemperate habits of the lost years overpowered him. He was seldom sober; his frequent absences from the stage and his poor showing when drunk, added to the many scandals which attached themselves to his name—particularly his affair with the wife of one of the members of the Drury Lane general committee—alienated the audiences who had been attracted by his superb acting; he could win them back time and again with a fine performance, only to lose them through his bad behaviour. In the United States, where he made his first appearance in 1820, the same thing happened. Audiences who had awaited him on tiptoe with expectation, and applauded his first appearances with fervour, turned against him when he fell back into his usual state of arrogance and unreliability. He returned to England, but his powers were waning, his wife had left him, and his health was deteriorating. He continued to act intermittently, and in 1831 took on the management of the King's Theatre at Richmond, near London. He even went on tour occasionally, and on his better days returned to the stage of Drury Lane, where on 25 Mar. 1833, while playing Othello to the Iago of his son Charles Kean, he finally collapsed, dying a few weeks later.