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  • “Reading Shakespeare by Flashes of Lightning”: Challenging the Foundations of Romantic Acting Theory
  • Tracy C. Davis

Every once in a while, an artist presents a new combination of familiar tools and (from the public’s point of view) coalesces incipient trends so as to radically overhaul notions of style. We might say that the Beatles’s first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show was one such event: fundamental changes in the way rock ‘n’ roll is defined are traced to that night in 1964. Likewise, in art history, widespread appreciation of modernism is traced to the Armory Show in New York in 1913, when Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase scandalized spectators who had never before seen a human figure treated like a multiply-exposed overlapped construction of mere geometric shapes. In theater history, a comparably momentous event was the appearance of Edmund Kean on the stage of Drury Lane (London), 26 January 1814. He played Shylock, not pseudocomically with the traditional red beard, but as a dark, embittered, and impassioned villain. Kean’s greatest fan, William Hazlitt, found his performance a tour de force of playing against type, “more significant, more pregnant with meaning, more varied and alive in every part, than any we have almost ever witnessed,” and he remained enthusiastic about Kean’s subsequent interpretations of Richard III, Hamlet, Othello, and Iago. 1 After years of impoverishment as a provincial harlequin cum tragedy king, Kean was an overnight success: his mode of acting emphasizing intense emotions and marked mood swings won out over the neo-classical restrained style of the Kembles, who had seemed to emphasize showing ideals in statuesque standard poses (“points” held for applause) rather than embodying the emotional explosiveness of human experiences in made-to-order fluid combinations. Watching Kean was as different and startling in nature as viewing Dorothy’s and Toto’s arrival in Oz, the first use of full spectrum colour in cinematic history. For spectators in 1814, it was like seeing Technicolor after decades of black and white. Or, to dispense with anachronisms, it was like seeing the streets illuminated with coal gas light after groping around by moonlight and the occasional torch soaked in pitch, the system that earned London the reputation of being the worst lit capital in Europe. [End Page 933]

Mention of gaslight is not a frivolous detail; indeed, it suggests a possible decoding for some of the earliest written records of Kean’s performances. Gaslight was transforming life in the city. A charter for London’s first gasworks, the Gas Light and Coke Company, was granted in 1812; a year later the company set Westminster Bridge alight. In June 1814, as part of the government-sponsored celebrations for the anniversary of the Battle of the Nile, John Nash designed a seven-story pagoda in St. James’s Park. Within a matter of seconds, “more than ten thousand burners were ignited... the pagoda looking for all the world like an ascending rocket as the gas lights rose up the sides.” 2 Within three years, the major theaters were lit inside and out by gas, replacing the costly and dangerous system of candles and Argand oil-burning lamps. Formerly, actors were lit from in front (candles hanging over the forestage and audience), below (oil lamps or “floats” at their feet), and the sides (wing lights on ladders masked by canvas flats); gaslight did not change the direction of light but greatly enhanced its intensity, with strong overhead and side lighting particularly instrumental in rounding out the figure of the actor in space. As never before, the indoor actor was visible as a three-dimensional object within a scenic context. This explains Hazlitt’s comment that in “the impassioned parts of Mr. Kean’s acting, there is a flexibility and indefiniteness of outline about it, like a figure with a landscape back-ground.” 3 But this remark dates from 1828, fourteen years after Kean’s celebrated debut.

Kean’s debut occurred three and a half years before gas was introduced to Drury Lane. The horseshoe-shaped auditorium designed by Benjamin Wyatt in 1811 gave reasonable sight lines to all parts of the house, but intense gaslight did...

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