The Cult of Kean (review)

The nineteenth-century English tragedian Edmund Kean has long posed a problem for biographers. While the stories of his meteoric rise to fame, his ungoverned exploits, and his cavalier rebellions against propriety are thrilling, they are also so thoroughly infused with tall tales that forming a uniformly factual account is impossible. Even the year of his birth is contested. In The Cult of Kean, Jeffery Kahan moves beyond the impossible quest to uncover the historical truths buried beneath Kean’s legend. Rather than constructing a new biography of the contentious star, Kahan focuses on analyzing representations of Kean in an array of sources from different periods; from Kean’s self-constructed persona in his own lifetime, to twentieth-century fictionalizations. In The Cult of Kean, the “facts” of Kean’s life are less important than what the shifting manifestations of his mythology reveal about the cultural moments in which they appeared. The result is a study that interweaves intentional fictions, accounts from primary sources (including previously unpublished letters,) widely believed legends, and more conventional biographies into an intriguing blend of biography and cultural history.

Kahan organizes his project into a series of case studies, each delving into a particular aspect of Kean’s mythos. In his earlier chapters, the author focuses on Kean’s deliberate self-representation, examining the actor’s public persona through contemporary and near-contemporary accounts of his offstage antics and onstage performances. Chapter 1 uses anecdotes of Kean’s involvement in boxing matches at Drury Lane to explore both the actor’s athletic acting style and his public persona as an underdog hero competing against rival actors. Chapter 2 focuses on Kean’s selection, rejection, and intentional “sinking” of new plays, and speculates that he did so as a means of maintaining his preeminent position on the London stage. Kahan’s biographical approach resurfaces in chapter 5, “Kean and Mr. Keene,” in which he details the careers of Ira Aldridge (who toured under the name of “Keene”) and Kean’s son Charles, suggesting either actor as a possible successor to Edmund’s style and celebrity. The discussion of Kean’s cross-racial performances in this chapter raises intriguing possibilities, as does the suggestion that traces of what Kahan argues to be Kean’s essentially liberal views of race and class lingered in the acting styles of subsequent Keanian actors—including, improbably, the famously racist actor and assassin John Wilkes Booth.

Despite declaring the task impossible, in these chapters, Kahan—perhaps unavoidably—sometimes falls prey to the seductive mystery of uncovering the “real” Kean. Although such forays into biography or Kean’s motives might seem at odds with Kahan’s project, they are nonetheless some of the book’s most enticing moments. Kahan has a lively, engaging writing style and a contagious enthusiasm for his subject. As a result, The Cult of Kean’s more conventionally biographical sections draw the uninitiated reader into Kean’s thrilling mythology and provide, perhaps, the best indication of why the actor maintains such an enduring fascination.

But while narratives of Kean’s escapades might inspire some of Kahan’s most entertaining writing, it is in the sections that deal with Kean’s memory in subsequent literary and performative incarnations that Kahan does his most intriguing cultural analysis. In chapter 3, for example, Kahan combines lively accounts of Kean’s rebellious (and often sexual) antics with direct and indirect representations of the actor in fictionalized sources such as Alexandre Dumas’s Kean and Pierce Egan’s 1824 novel Life of an Actor, and also with the way Kean represented himself as a defiant egalitarian, working-class hero through politicized speeches and commissioned plays. Taking this broad look at Kean’s public misbehavior and reputation, Kahan examines his struggles for power against the backdrop of nineteenth-century English and French class politics. Chapter 4, similarly, uses Mark Twain’s invocation of Kean’s memory in Huckleberry Finn to discuss the changing place of Shakespeare in the American cultural landscape, as well as to argue that Kean’s...