Edmund Kean, By Harold Newcomb Hillebrand.
Columbia University. $5.
Mr. Hillebrand’s book hits the emotions in various ways. In it there is the nicely authenticated narrative of a young man, who had endured and longed much before, suddenly making a whole nation delighted and profoundly aware of him. Shakespeare (acted by the young man), Edmund Kean, and our own symbolic Horatio Alger, here make God’s own trio.
Through Mr. Hillebrand’s live and scholarly words one can see plainly more than a hundred years after that this acting person had something; a new, big and divine something. I can say, without putting on, that this dead and famous actor, teamed with Shakespeare, put me in a pleasing, definite tremor—in 1933. Kean brought a new excitement to an England just about getting through its Napoleonic Wars.
William Hazlitt, who was around to criticise Kean, gets into the book a good deal, and we can feel his forthright and complicated presence. A very stirring Shakespeare walks, somehow, all through these modern pages. Also, old-time theatre managers, male and female, are here, and some of them are soothingly quaint and mightily good to read about; the petulant and poetic and unforgot Lord Byron is here—he has been taken by the strangely flashing Kean. With all this and all these persons, there is Charlotte Cox, wife of a not so noble Alderman; Kean and she have what some might call a “vulgar amour”; the news of Kean’s adulterous action puts England into a moralistic turmoil and the anger and fun-making that go with the morality and interest affect aesthetics, Kean and Shakespeare. It is all a fierce universal jumble.
And the playgoing America of the 1820’s—its enthusiasms, hates, and indifferences—is in this diversely affecting book. Also a wife and a mysterious, not so kind mother. But I believe that Shakespeare and Kean are the real heroes. No matter what else is afoot, they’re around and they represent a thrilling, dark world; the junction is Romanticism, true, rich, solid, and more than literary or theatrical. Mr. Hillebrand has shown how useful scholarship can be and how gracefully it can go about its arduous business by gathering and putting in order the documentary manifestations of an endlessly interesting world.
Eli Siegel.
1933