Accessibility and Archives: Disability and Performance 3: “an irresistible magnet of attraction”
In the third of three blogs drawing on his experience as a Performing Arts Archivist, Philip Milnes-Smith draws on his experience as a Performing Arts Archivist to underline the layers to be worked through when looking at historic images of performers and performance. An actor shown embodying a disabled character such as Shakespeare’s Richard III could have experienced and performed their own disability as well as feigning it.
In the previous blog we discussed performers regarded as eccentric by their contemporaries. This post is focused on another: Edmund Kean (1787-1833). His biographer suggests neglect in early childhood was to blame for the fact that Kean’s “legs became almost deformed, and were subsequently only brought to their proper shape by the use of irons.” Irons, here, does not mean shackles, but calipers. He was lamed again when he fell through a theatre trap-door, and subsequently also broke both his legs when venturing some unusual equestrian feat and thereafter “suffered through life from a swelling of his instep-bones.” It is possible that his leg differences contributed to him being considered noticeably short: he once corrected a heckler mocking his embodiment of Alexander the Great, with “Yes, Alexander the Little, with a great soul. “ A further accident seemingly resulted in concussion and a broken arm. An American newspaper also made reference to “his misshapen trunk.” The medical model thus suggests that “England’s greatest tragic actor” could be regarded as physically disabled. Since the audience drawing properties (see title) of such an actor were possible in the early nineteenth century, it looks unwise to presume it could not have been true of any performers in Shakespeare’s company.
Kean was famed for his portrayal of Richard III – a role he chose as his favourite when still a child and which remained so in adulthood. It was also one which a critic felt apt “as his person is suited to the deformities with which the tyrant is supposed to have been distinguished from his fellows.” By chance, we have a review from a physically disabled audience member (Lord Byron) who asserted: “Life, nature, truth, without exaggeration or diminution. Richard is a man, and Kean is Richard." There are twelve portraits of Kean on Byron’s decoupage screen (now in the National Portrait Gallery), seven of which are in the role of Richard III. Byron gave him a snuff-box decorated with a boar hunt and Kean subsequently took the boar as his emblem (as it had been Richard’s). This degree of identification means that when we see representations of Kean as Richard, such as “The Theatrical Atlas” in the preview image, it becomes hard to know where the representation of the character ends and the actor begins. It would be easy to presume that the cartoon showed his stage costume complete with prosthetic hump, but that is not how other illustrations and figurines represent him in the role.
Kean had feared that success would make him mad, as failure had done his father. When he failed to enact conventional stage madness as Hamlet, a hostile critic asserted “Without grace or dignity he comes forward; he shows an unconsciousness that anybody is before him, and is often so forgetful of the respect due to an audience that he turns his back upon them in some of those scenes in which contemplation is to be indulged, as if for the purpose of showing his abstractedness from all ordinary subjects." Could he have been drawing on personal observation of his father’s existence “in melancholy and silence”, “a vast waste where day and night were one, and time was all unknown”?
Some biographical details suggest he may also, in modern terms, have been neurodivergent. School “was irksome to his nature; his tasks were ignored, and he rebelled against punishment.” Impulsively, he ran away to sea to escape it and domestic constraints. Regretting it, he claimed to have lost his hearing: “To the shouts of the captain or the oaths of the sailors he was apparently insensible; neither expression nor movement betrayed the slightest consciousness of the commands addressed to him, or the imprecations hurled at him.” However, he also “feigned lameness, and declaring he had lost the use of his limbs remained in his bunk.” Having thus narrated how he scammed his way back to England, his biographer mentions a “love for excitement and desire for novelty, [which] caused him to wander for days in distant suburbs, where at various taverns he recited and sang, tumbled and danced, imitated monkeys and devils, and enjoyed brief independence.” In a performance of Macbeth while still a boy, he was unable to resist the impulse to trip up “his brother sprites so that they tumbled ‘like a pack of cards’… The manager was furious that his carefully planned scene should be ruined;.. and vented his anger on Kean with “thumps and reproaches.””
As an adult he is deemed to have engaged in “eccentric conduct”, failing to comply with societal expectations of social intercourse. He “had no regard for rank or position, and rather endured than enjoyed the society of those who would have posed as his patrons. Such were not congenial to his temperament.” Instead due to his “constant craving for excitement,.. he frequented prize rings, and associated with boxers on most friendly terms.” Boxers, it might be noted, were also featured on Byron’s screen.
There are stories of Kean keeping his carriage outside premises where he was a guest in case he needed to make a getaway, and sneaking out unobserved. There are also hints of sensory seeking behaviour: “he would… ride recklessly through the night, he knew not where, tearing through streets, rushing along country roads,.. jumping toll-gates, flying past frightened peasants, outriding footpads in search of prey. Not until daybreak did horse and horseman return home, exhausted, and covered with mud or dust.” He had also been gifted a tame lion, and “Visitors at his house found him engaged in his drawing-room in educating this animal, and timidly shrank from making the acquaintance of the colossal pet, who might also be seen seated in the stern of a wherry which his master rowed up and down the Thames, to the admiration of many.” Again, this might also put us in mind of Lord Byron, who took his pet bear to Cambridge and in Italy kept animals including monkeys and an eagle.
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Thumbnail: The Theatrical Atlas, print, George Cruikshank (MET, 17.3.888-130), CC0, via Wikimedia Commons