Keats in the Company of Kean

Abstract

Company. [Compagnie, F]: an Assembly of People; a Society, or Body Corporate; a small Body of Foot commanded by a Captain; also Conversation, Fellowship. (1) Company. n.s. [compagnie, French; either from con and pagus, one of the same town; or con and panis, one that eats of the same mess.] ... 5. A number of persons united for the execution or performance of any thing; a band. (2) I. Keeping JUST BEFORE CHRISTMAS 1817, JOHN KEATS WROTE FROM HAMPSTEAD TO his brothers George and Tom in Teignmouth, Devonshire. The two younger Keatses had left London to seek better environs for Tom, who would die from tuberculosis within a year. Left behind in the city to put the finishing touches on Endymion, John informed his brothers that he was busying himself with customary diversions--theater, reading, and dinners: I dined too (for I have been out too much lately) with Horace Smith & met his two Brothers with Hill & Kingston & one Du Bois, they only served to convince me, how superior is to wit in respect to enjoyment--These men say things which one without making one feel, they are all alike; manners are all alike; they all know fashionables; they have a in very eating and in mere handling a Decanter--They talked of and his company--Would I were with that company instead of yours said I to myself! I know such like acquaintances will never do for me ... (3) The letter derides the mannerism of Smith and his friends, members of the merchant class who aspired to cultural legitimacy through literary pursuits. (4) To Keats, speech and action betray a desire for conspicuous correctness. In the witticisms of these men, which make one start, and in the gestures of their very eating and drinking, Keats perceives an affectation that inhibits genuine interaction. Knowledge of fashionables and display of social distinction replace humour and feeling as the cohesive forces of the gathering. The diners' disdain for Kean and his another attempt to demonstrate distinguished taste, elicits from Keats a socially symbolic reversal in which comes to stand for those qualities the men themselves lack. (5) I take Keats's explicit alliance with Edmund here not only as an unapologetic embrace of a low social position against which critics commonly see him straining, but as an identification with the new modes of cultural experience embodied on the early nineteenth-century London stage. Kean's conspicuously vexed relationship to the situational possibilities offered by the dramatic text was, in Hazlitt's apt formulation, a radical departure from John Philip Kemble's personification of rhetorical mastery. Whereas Kemble's excellence resided in a demonstration of the single emotion called for by each dramatic scene, attracted audiences with an ability to present, in a moment, a mass of contradictory feelings. (6) With his pantomimic contortions and emotional outbursts, imported an illegitimate grammar of representation onto the Drury Lane stage, rendering the traditional relation between performer and audience uncertain and exposing the legitimate theater's increasing commercial reliance on lower-class modes of consumption. (7) His presence--not only in the theater but in London society--called attention to those low aspects of middle-class life that aspirants such as Smith, Hill, and Du Bois would have wanted to mask. The implications of Keats's emphatic desire to be of Kean's company, then, are greater than a simple difference of opinion between dining fellows. played a crucial role in shaping both Keats's attitudes towards his own social rank and his ideas about the changing nature of cultural experience. (8) Educated to an understanding of by Hazlitt's theatrical criticism, Keats's attention to the actor in letters and theatrical reviews in late 1817 and early 1818 coincided with and, I will argue, occasioned his thoroughgoing revision of the poet's role as a cultural intermediary for readers. …