The Cult of Kean

Jeffrey Kahan. The Cult of Kean. Alders hot (Hampshire) - Burlington: Ashgate, 2006. 205 pages + 15 b&w illustrations. $110 (£55) hardcover. ISBN 0754656500.The eternal problem with the mythopoietic figures of the Regency period is that today's fascination with their unruly - and, indeed, extraordinarily memorable - biographies proves too much of a temptation for even the saintliest of critics. Where tall tales meet speculation, and self-fashioning weds se If- marketing, there the hire of flamboyancy runs the ships of rigorous interpretation and textual exegesis aground. The problem of critical self-restraint and biographical rigour becomes particularly tantalising for the scholar of the Romantic fastliving star-actor, Edmund Kean (1787-1833). The critic is compelled to juggle and shift the several ambiguous masks of this character who artfully contributed to his own public mediatic consumption - or devouring, we might say - his unruly private life regularly taking precedence over his towering theatrical achievements.With the aim of deflating these problems, Jeffrey Kahan's The Cult of Kean chooses to perform both Kean's person and his persona - I would not be able to find another verb, which may more suitably define Kahan's chosen form of scholarship. Regrettably, the resulting book is an uneven labour - ambitious, full of energy, fitful, animated by the flashes of his exaggerated protagonist, and yet a work as profuse in detail as it is unorthodox in style. All these traits may not necessarily be faults and, in fact, they could have helped Kahan to turn up trumps had the plan of the work been only more coherent, and had Kean's sparkle not blinded the author. Kahan appears to find it indeed difficult to respect the critical pact established in the title of his book, The Cult of Kean, however broad an approach such an epitextual reference to cultural studies and the forms of cultural production may warrant.The structural unevenness of The Cult of Kean surfaces in the author's own webpage, where the book appears with its subtitle, A Study of Cultural Appropriation. This denomination - a savoury reminder of today's fashionable genre of metabiography - would in fact seem quite appropriate, at least in terms of Chapters Three to Six. These respectively analyse, among the sundry topics of discussion, Alexandre Dumas' 1836 play Kean (ch. 3), Mark Twain's parodie American 'Kean-eid' in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (ch. 4), the exploitation of the actor's name and style first by a self-styled Mr. Keene, aka the black performer Ira Aldridge, and later by Kean's own son, the thereafter-famous Charles (ch. 5), and, finally, some contemporary appropriations of Kean's life at the (existentialist) hands of Jean Paul Sartre, later viscerally brought on stage by those long-time Kean fans, Anthony Hopkins and Peter O'Toole.The two opening chapters of the study, however, resist this attempt at narrative and biographical plotting, and easily stand as individual pieces. The first of them, "Bare-Knuckle Kean," offers a convincing reading of the actor as a sort of working-class hero, who single-handedly and against all odds in only one night subjugated and donated to the people Kemble's aristocratic Drury Lane. Kahan ingeniously applies the metaphor of boxing to Kean's aggressive style of acting, which brought to their knees one after the other all his up-and-coming theatrical rivals: Junius Brutus Booth, Charles Mayne Young, and William Macready. This remains undoubtedly the best chapter of the book, and it is a pity that Kahan did not keep up the refreshing, yet sound approach he used here. The chapter offers many suggestions for further analysis, which could lead us toward a truly valuable cultural reappraisal of the figure of Kean positioned within his discursive networks.Chapter Two turns to the stage machia ve lisms of Kean-the-Tyrant-of-Drury-Lane. Kahan explores Kean's dealings with such diverse works as Thomas Colley Grattan's Ben Nazir, John Keats's Otho, and Joanna Baillie's De Monfort. …