1814–1818

Part III marks a shift in the exchange between the two families as Lady Beaumont begins to write independently to Wordsworth on a regular basis. A major focus of her letters to Wordsworth of 1814 and 1815 is the sale and reception of The Excursion. Another major concern around this time is the production of the frontispiece engravings (from paintings by Sir George) to Wordsworth’s Poems and The White Doe of Rylstone (1815). This section also contains details of paintings by Washington Allston, as well as insights into Edward Nash and William Westall, and Beaumont’s assessment of Haydon’s Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem. Beaumont gives detailed appraisals of the actors Edmund Kean, Eliza O’Neill, and John Philip Kemble. In addition, letters in Part III contain two eye-witness descriptions of the battlefield of Waterloo.

John Philip Kemble (1757-1823)

Portrait of John Philip Kemble, actor

Sarah Siddons and the Romantic Hamlet

This paper considers Sarah Siddons’s cross-gender performances as Hamlet in relation to critical fascination with the character’s interiority in the early Romantic era. An examination of the responses to Siddons’s Hamlet in the context of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century studies of the play reveals that Siddons’s contemporaries saw the actress’s femininity and acting methods as particularly effective for conveying the sensibility and irresolution that became increasingly associated with Hamlet in literary criticism of the period. In particular, the responses to Siddons’s performances emphasise Hamlet’s first encounter with his father’s Ghost, a scene often considered the focal point of definitive performances by actors like Thomas Betterton, David Garrick, and Siddons’s brother, John Philip Kemble. The fact that these commentators describe Siddons’s Hamlet as superior to her brother’s and praise her reactions in the Ghost scene suggests that Siddons succeeded in creating a dramatic interpretation of the character that aligned with the Romantic focus on Hamlet’s inner life.

Staging Shakespearean Tragedy

Drawing on contemporary reviews, promptbooks and other sources, this essay discusses the interplay between originality and tradition in the performance of the leading roles, and the ways in which passionate speech and behaviour were executed in line with prevailing definitions of what was deemed appropriate to ‘heroic’ status. Appeals to the example of notable players from the early 1800s—notably John Philip Kemble and Sarah Siddons—persisted in critical response until well into the middle of the nineteenth century, while innovations in the treatment of particular scenes and situations were consistently framed in terms of received wisdom regarding the plays themselves, as well as in response to divergent male and female sensibilities and, in the case of Othello, evolving ideas of 'race'.

Transacting Value on the Transatlantic Stage

With the modesty then expected of a daughter of Britain's theatrical royalty, Fanny Kemble attributed the necessity of her 1829 stage debut to the hard circumstance of financial need. As she explained in her journal, hers was not an act of self-promotion; rather, she exposed herself to the scrutiny of London's critical establishment with the hope that interest in her performance might draw much-needed revenue into the cashbox of the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, a venue jointly managed by her father and uncle, Charles and John Philip Kemble. However rhetorically necessary the narrative was for preserving her respectability, Kemble's financial motivation was also very real. The theatre was fiscally impaired, never quite able to square itself in relation to the expensive footing upon which the new building was erected after the fire of 1808. With construction costs high and materials scarce in the midst of the Napoleonic Wars, Charles attempted to raise ticket prices in the new theatre to help cover his expenses, raising instead public ire, in the form of protracted demonstrations known as the Old Price Riots, which bullied him into restoring the original ticket prices.