Posted in art, life, tagged anecdote, art, Benny Thomas, Edmund Kean, King Lear, life, Nahum Tate, Shakespeare, Tatum version, theatre, tragicomedy on December 19, 2011|
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King Lear is one of Shakespeare’s plays to which I have taken to with avidity as and when I had found time. On checking its background I read that English theatre- goers at first preferred a tragicomedy version than the original. This was an adaptation by Nahum Tate which first appeared in 1681, some seventy-five years after Shakespeare’s original text, and is believed to have replaced it on the English stage in whole or in part until 1838. Unlike Shakespeare’s tragedy, Tate’s play has a happy ending, with Lear regaining his throne, Cordelia marrying Edgar, and Edgar joyfully declaring that “truth and virtue shall at last succeed..”
Edmund Keane had previously acted Tate’s Lear but “stimulated by Hazlitt’s remonstrances and Charles Lamb’s essays,” became the first to restore the tragic ending, though much of Tate remained in the earlier acts. “The London audience,” Kean told his wife, “have no notion of what I can do till they see me over the dead body of Cordelia.” Kean knew in his bones the audience would believe it in the way he played it. The fate of King Lear lay in the way he essayed it. Is Life tragedy or comedy?
Edmund Keane (17 March 1789 – 15 May 1833) in his time was considered the greatest Shakespearen actor ever despite other thespians like David Garrick and William Charles Macready.
Over a scandal his wife left him in 1825 and the adverse news report in the Times aroused against him such bitter feeling, that he was booed and pelted with fruit when he re-appeared at Drury Lane, as nearly to compel him to retire permanently into private life. Later he was received with favor by which time he was merely a shadow of his former glory. His last appearance on the stage was at Covent Garden, on 25 March 1833, when he played Othello to the Iago of his son, Charles Kean, who was also an accomplished actor. At the words “Villain, be sure,” in scene 3 of act iii, he suddenly broke down, and crying in a faltering voice “O God, I am dying. Speak to them, Charles,” fell insensible into his son’s arms. He died at Richmond, Surrey where he had spent his last years as manager of the local theatre, and is commemorated in the Parish Church where there is a floor plaque marking his grave and a wall plaque. He is buried in the parish church of All Saints, in the village of Catherington, Hampshire. His last words were alleged to be “dying is easy; comedy is hard.”
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