A one man play written by Raymund FitzSimons on the famous actor Edmund Kean (1787-1833).
link below to playlist of all 5 of these Kingsley/Kean video uploads:
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=DFF4BE8FA1E566D7
Judy Klemesrud writes:
Ben Kingsley was in India filming ''Gandhi'' in 1980 when a script was delivered to his home near Stratford-on-Avon.
''I've written this play for you,'' the author wrote in a note. The play was a one-character vehicle about Edmund Kean, the brilliant
19th-century British actor regarded as one of the greatest Shakespearean actors of all time. Coleridge, for example, said that to see Kean
act was ''to read Shakespeare by flashes of lightning.''
from "The life of Edmund Kean" By Frederick William Hawkins (1869):
"It is perhaps not generally known," writes Macaulay, when closing his narrative of the death, in 1695, of George Saville, Marquis of Halifax, " "that some adventurers who, without advantages of fortune or position, made themselves conspicuous by the mere force of ability, inherited the blood of Halifax. He left a natural son, Henry Carey, whose dramas once drew crowded audiences to the theatres, and some of whose gay and spirited verses live still in the memory of hundreds of thousands. From Henry Carey descended that Edmund Kean who, in our own time, transformed himself so marvellously into Shylock, Iago, and Othello."
From this it appears that Edmund Kean might have indulged in a pardonable pride of birth, inasmuch as the celebrated Lord Halifax belonged to a family which originated in this country with Drogo de Monte-acuto, a prominent member of the Conqueror's retinue at the battle of Hastings, and ancestor of the Dukes of Manchester and the Earls of Salisbury and Montague.
George Saville Carey was cursed in a worthless, inhuman daughter. Ann Carey had, at the age of fifteen, ran away from home to join a company of strolling players.....Shortly afterwards she became the mother of Edmund Kean, the circumstances attending whose birth were, as the reader will see, hardly of a nature suggestive of the extraordinary future which awaited him.....He was born on the 4th of November, 1787, in a deserted, solitary, and otherwise unoccupied chamber in the neighbourhood of Gray's Inn. "
About half-past three in the morning," writes
Miss Tidswell, the actress, " Aaron Kean, the
father, came to me and said ' Nance Carey is with
child, and begs you to go to her at her lodgings
in Chancery-lane.' Accordingly my aunt and I went
with him and found Nance Carey near her time. We
asked her if she had proper necessaries, and she replied '
No, nothing;' whereupon Mrs. Byrne begged
the loan of some baby clothes, and Nance Carey was
removed to the chambers in Gray's Inn, which her
father then occupied, and it was there that the future
tragedian was born."
Prom the moment of his birth, so to speak, Edmund Kean entered into that dark and foetid atmosphere of sorrow and depravity which, surrounding him during a period when the character is formed and moulded according to the nature of external influences, probably served to inculcate that established independence and uncontrollable self-will which retarded his advancement to prosperity, darkened the otherwise unclouded sky of his after career, and rendered him inaccessible to the healthy counsel of those who would have guided his steps away from that abyss into which he fell at the comparatively early age of forty-six.
Probably in that lonely and deserted Gray's Inn apartment, faintly illumined by the flickering and uncertain flame of a rush-light, there was no one who greeted him with the welcome usually accorded to the little stranger. Certainly, the last person who would hail the advent of the child was the mother, who appears to have been so destitute of natural and gentle affections that, after supporting the child for about three months, she abandoned him to the caprice—to the charity of strangers, and thereafter denied to her hapless boy the exercise of any maternal consideration whatsoever.
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Ben Kingsley as Edmund Kean (1982 TV) part 5 of 5by ShakespeareAndMore1,734 views
an electrifying performance by ben kinsley ! thanks for sharing
oldernwiser0 3 years ago