His last appearance on
the stage was in "Othello" at Covent Garden, March 25, 1833.
"To see Kean act," said Coleridge, "is like reading Shakespeare by
flashes of lightning."
"Garrick's nature," writes Leigh Hunt, in the 'Tatler', July 25, 1831,
"displaced Quin's formalism; and in precisely the same way did Kean
displace Kemble. ... Everything with Kemble was literally a
'personation'--it was a mask and a sounding-pipe. It was all external
and artificial.... Kean's face is full of light and shade, his tones
vary, his voice trembles, his eye glistens, sometimes with a withering
scorn, sometimes with a tear."
It was the realism and nature of Kean which so strongly appealed to
Byron, and enabled the actor, to the last, in spite of his drunken
habits, poor figure, and weak voice, to sway his audiences. The same
qualities at first repelled more timid critics, and perhaps justified
Hazlitt's saying that Kean was "not much relished in the upper circles."
Miss Berry, for example, who saw him in all his principal parts in
1814--in "Richard III," "Hamlet," "Othello," and "Sir Giles
Overreach"--remained cold.
"His 'Richard III.' pleased me, but I was not enthusiastic. His
expression of the passions is natural and strong, but I do not like
his declamation; his voice, naturally not agreeable, becomes
monotonous"
('Diary', vol. iii. p. 7). Of his "Hamlet" she says,
"To my mind he is without grace and without elevation of mind, because
he never seems to rise with the poet in those sublime passages which
abound in 'Hamlet'"
('ibid.
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