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Kean versus Macready: Sheridan Knowles's Virginius
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 July 2009
Extract
Certain historians delight in pinpointing moments of change, the intersection of trends that mirror social progress. Charts are drawn to establish the point in time when ascending television viewing crosses descending newspaper circulation, or where rising city surpasses falling rural population. Dramatic history is rarely the product of such simplistic trends, but perhaps such a nexus may be cited in London in the spring of 1820. On 17 May of that year, William Charles Macready opened in Sheridan Knowles's Virginius at Covent Garden. It was a great success and established Macready as the leading actor in England, confirming the supremacy of a new style based on “domesticity” and “humanity.” On 29 May 1820, Edmund Kean opened at Drury Lane in another version of the Virginius story and failed completely. This was Kean's first London defeat and started him on a ten-year slide to oblivion, a slide which took much of romantic acting and dramaturgy with him.
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- Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1976
References
1 For a summary of the contemporary comments on Kean's style, see Joseph, Bertram, The Tragic Actor (London, 1959), pp. 265–279Google Scholar.
2 Playfair, Giles, Kean (London, 1939), p. 15Google Scholar.
3 Hillebrand, Harold N., Edmund Kean (New York, 1933), pp. 38–39Google Scholar.
4 Macready's Reminiscences and Selections from his Diary and Letters, ed. Pollock, Frederick (London, 1875), I, 193Google Scholar.
5 For the best collection of reviews of the rival Richards, see Downer, Alan, The Eminent Tragedian, William Charles Macready (Cambridge, Mass., 1966), pp. 58–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Meeks, Leslie H., Sheridan Knowles and the Theatre of his Time (Bloomington, 1933), p. 200Google Scholar. Meeks calls himself “the only living student of the drama to have read all the plays of Sheridan Knowles”— a claim I am prepared to accept.
7 Hillebrand, p. 61.
8 There is a minor problem here. Most scholars refer to Kean's Virginius simply as written by George Soane. However, Allardyce Nicoll states that on the basis of the Lord Chamberlain's records in the John Larpent Collection, it was not a new play but merely a rewriting of Rev. John Bidlake's play Virginia, first written in 1800 but never produced in London: Early Nineteenth Century Drama (Cambridge, 1963), p. 267Google Scholar. My examination of the manuscript, currently in the Larpent Collection in the Huntington Library, tends to bear this out.
9 Macready's Reminiscences pp. 207–208Google Scholar.
10 Macready's Reminiscences, p. 208.
11 Macready to John Forster, 16 January [1851], Victoria and Albert Museum.
12 Macready's Reminiscences, pp. 209–210.
13 Joseph, p. 294.
14 Macready's Reminiscences, p. 211.
15 Downer, p. 65.
16 Downer, p. 67.
17 Theatre Journal, III, 147Google Scholar.
18 Macready's Reminiscences, p. 210.
19 Joseph, p. 294.
20 Clipping in the (1896) extra-illustrated edition of Pollock's Macready's Reminiscences, as collected and arranged by J. H. Leigh, II, 210.
21 Quotations from the Bidlake/Soane Virginius; or the Fall of the Decemvirs are taken from the John Larpent Collection manuscript, currently Huntington manuscript LA 2152, and are quoted here by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
22 Playfair, p. 284.