Hazlitt on "Whether Actors Ought to Sit in the Boxes"

Abstract

In January, 1825, appearance of celebrated actor Edmund Kean at Court of King's Bench, Guildhall, prompted following frantic scene: As soon as doors were opened, a rush was made, and body of court nearly filled, when door-keepers had a difficult task to do their duty, by keeping out those who attended merely out of curiosity, and in performance of which they were obliged to put up with impertinent threats of STUDENTS, who never studied law, reporters who never reported, and witnesses who never gave evidence; and it being impossible for them to be acquainted with all, many unprivileged persons gained excellent situations, while others, who were actually engaged to perform their important duties for press, c or, Green-Room Spy (1827) with their unapologetic focus on personal lives of actors and actresses. Among other things, these works reveal limits of prurient curiosity--which is to say that there are no limits. Given its still dubious social status in late Georgian England, acting would hardly have seemed like a profession ripe for exposure. For readers of green-room exposes appeal presumably lay in dichotomy between appearances of stage and an often sordid reality offstage. For regular theatre-goers, offstage reality might actually seem more intriguing than onstage spectacles. Indeed, appeal of theatrical secret history is found in knowing juxtaposition of these spheres, onstage and offstage, one evidently fictional, other purportedly factual. As Joseph Haslewood observes in his Secret History of Grern-Room: The Heroes and Heroines of Buskin, in their real, as well as their assumed characters, experience that vicissitude and adventure to which unvaried tenor of mechanical industry is a stranger, Their life teems with incident which almost seems destined to realize fictions they represent (Haslewood l:vi). Thus when Edmund Kean stepped off stage of Drury Lane into Court of King's Bench, Guildhall, on January 17, 1825, publicists like anonymous author of Cox versus Kean: Fairburn's edition of Trial between Robert Albion Cox, Esq., Plaintiff, and Edmund Kean. Defendant, for Criminal Conversation with Plaintiff's Wife, including Evidence, Speeches of Counsel, and all Curious Love Letters, @c. @c. were there to record it for inquiring minds. For an observer like William Hazlitt, Kean's plight exhibited public opinion at its passive-aggressive worst--like promiscuous audience he described at Queen Caroline's trial five years before, the people, wretched, helpless, doating, credulous, meddlesome people (Howe 20:136). In an Examiner article entitled Actors and Public, he asks: Who that had felt Kean's immeasurable superiority in Othello, was not glad to see him brought to ordinary level in a vulgar crim. …