THE LIFE OF EDMUND KEAN.

Hawke's Bay Herald, Volume 14, Issue 1118, 14 January 1870, Page 3

THE LIFE OF EDMUND KEAN.

The dilara6ter p£ E.drmi'n'd J£ea'n', h'iff datlf mishaps, his efforts, Ins success," and .Mff astonishing genius, make up a stfc'c'esslon' 1 of varied and dramatic scenes worthy of his own acting. He was the natural son of a man who is alternately described as a tailor, an architect, and a stage carpenter, and of a woman who was sometimes a strolling player and sometimes a hawker. The father had abandoned the mother before the child's birth, and three months after his birfch the child was deserted in his turn. He was picked up in the streets by a poor couple, and was. taken care of by them till his mother reclaimed him in order to train him for the stage. When three years old he figured as Cupid in a ballet at the Opera 5 he was afterwards a demon in the Drury Lane pantomime, and when Kemble brought out " Macbeth " at the same theatre, ifean, then aged sit, appeared as one of the goblin troupe in the scene of the witches' cauldron. On this occasion he played the manager and the rest pf the goblins a trick which "led the abandonment pf what Kemble is. reported to have termed the finest commentary on an illustration of Shakespeare ever attempted on the stage." ICean, being hampered by some irons which had been applied to his limbs as a cure for distortion, made a false step, tripped up his. neighbour, and sent the whole troop sprawling. One of the next events in JEean's boy-hood is his trial of a sea life.; He ran away-from home, walked to Portsmbiifch,"-and"shipped himself as cabin-boy on a. vessel bound to Madeira. Of course he was not long in discovering thafc he had made c change for the worse. To procure his freedom, he affected complete deafness and lameness, keeping up the deception so well thafc he was sent to hospital in Madeira, and thence back to England. We afterwards hear of sundry other pranks, of continual escapes from the uncle with whom he was staying, of his turning, head-over-heels and giving imitations of monkeys and knife-grinders at taverns, and of his being tarred and feathered at a public-house where he was tumbling for halfpence. The beginning of his dramatic career, when people wondered who was " thafc little man in the capes," waiting in the hall at Drury Lane, or when Mrs. Siddons, playing with.him at the Belfast Theatre, asked, " Who is thafc horrid little man ?" scarcely lead up to the sudden success he gained on his appearance as Shy lock. But from that time forward he rose from glory to glory. Among, his finest hits must be ranked the attitude he assumed inllichard 111., when the action of the play was suspended in order that he might stand for a while drawing figures on the sand and gazing into vacancy. Of his performance of Luke in Massinger's " City Madam" it is recorded that an old lady, who had intended leaving him a large sum of money, was so appalled by the cold-blooded villany he displayed, thafc she transferred the legacy to a distant relation. One or two more of the anecdotes in the book are worth repeating. Towards the end of his life, being with some friends in a room at the Castie Inn, Richmond, he was asked when he studied. " I am studying now," he replied, pointing to a man on the other side of the room who was far gone in liquor, bufc was trying to look as if he was sober. " I wish some of my Cassios were here. They might see thafc instead of rolling about in the ridiculous way they do, the greafc secret of delineating iritoxieafcioja is the endeavour to stand straight when it is impossible to do so." At the Ooburg Theatre, being called after the fall of, the curtain by an audience which had not appreciated his acting, but thought itself entitled to make him. bow his acknowledgments, Eean said calmly, i " Well, I have played in every civilized country where English is tho language of the people, bufc I never acted to an audience of such ignorant, unmitigated brutes as you are."