Fanny Kemble’s Dual Consciousness: Memoir and Performance Theory

Autobiographical writing is often treated as innately truthful, and is characterized as a mode that allows unfiltered access to the interior lives of eminent public figures. The genre of the theatrical memoir, however, is perhaps by nature of the profession it chronicles one of the stagiest and least in-earnest modes of writing. From Colley Cibber (1740) and Charlotte Charke (1755) to Nick Hytner (2017) and Tim Pigott-Smith (2017), theatrical memoirists have compiled collections of histrionic anecdotes, loosely tied together by overt namedropping and subtle derision of contemporaries. These works, which appear to grant the kind of privileged access expected of memoir, in fact do a very different kind of work, often continuing the well-practiced public performance of the individual keen to keep some semblance of privacy while working in the public eye. Nineteenth-century theatrical memoirs of course did tell tales and drop names just as much as their eighteenth-century and modern counterparts, but actors also incorporated elements of their own stagecraft. In this essay I examine the theatrical memoirs of Fanny Kemble, alongside her letters and other writings, as documents that combine the many aspects of the theatrical memoir: acting handbook, factual life-writing, and edited image-making. I consider how Kemble uses her personal performance technique in collaboration with the more readily-recognizable techniques of literature and conventions of memoir to craft a very specific self-image, which does not always adhere to the innate truthfulness often associated with life-writing. In doing so, Kemble illustrates her own theories of effective performance in a medium more accessible to the theatre historian.

In the introduction to her 1882 Notes Upon Some of Shakespeare’s Plays, Fanny Kemble expounds at some length on the inability of actors to do justice to even their greatest, most affective parts through writing. She writes of her aunt, Sarah Siddons, that “Mrs. Siddons’ analysis of the part of ‘Lady Macbeth’ was to be found alone in her representation of it; of the magnificence of which the ‘essay’ she has left upon the character gives not the faintest idea” (12; original emphasis).¹ She goes on to say of Edmund Kean that, though he “possessed, beyond all actors whom I have seen, tragic inspiration, [he] could very hardly, I should think, have given a satisfactory reason for any one of the great effects which he produced” (13). Bookending her seemingly incontrovertible statements, however, are two explicit accounts of Kemble’s own performance theory. She begins the introduction by stating that “the combination of the power of representing passion and emotion with that of imagining or conceiving it—that is, of the theatrical talent with the dramatic temperament—is essential to make a good actor; their combination in the highest possible degree alone makes a great one” (5). And following her condemnation of Siddons’s writing and Kean’s hypothetical explanations, she goes on, of course, to expand (in writing) on her own theories of performance.

This exposition of performance theory runs as a thread through many of Kemble’s writings—not only her explicit commentaries on Shakespeare but also her extensive memoirs. Over the final decades of her life, Kemble published eleven volumes of memoir. These volumes cover most of her life, as actress, campaigner for the abolition of slavery, divorcee, and Shakespeare reader, and throughout they pair her experiences in these public guises with her personal reactions to the various worlds she has inhabited. Records of a Girlhood (1878), which covers the earliest period of Kemble’s life up to her marriage and leaving the profession temporarily, deals at length with Kemble’s career as an actress, doing just what she says the written word cannot: delineating her own performance techniques. In keeping with the conventions of the theatrical memoir, Kemble’s commentary on performance theory often appears in anecdotes about other actors and takes the form of a judgment on the relative powers of these other actors. The centre of Kemble’s performance theory, as outlined in Records of a Girlhood, is the necessary separation of self on stage, which William Archer later...