“Performing the Passions: David Garrick and Edmund Kean in King Richard The Third”

This article examines how David Garrick (1717-1779) and Edmund Kean (1789-1833) relate their styles of acting to contemporary aesthetics. Garrick’s and Kean’s modes of “naturalness” will be found to be not only different, but also strictly connected with their socio-cultural background. Garrick, embodying a tendency that was “emergent” in a century that worshipped “General Nature,” introduced a subjective approach to character in the theatre, while Kean was the champion of romantic individualism, which valued originality and aimed at reproducing Nature in its idiosyncratic aspects. Both of them were masters in representing the passions, as this was considered the chief test for an actor in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, but, again, the way in which they performed such passions was far from being the same. Garrick was praised for his vigorous acting and his sudden transitions from one passion to the other, but he unvaryingly proved to be graceful in his exertions. On the other hand, Kean was always “extreme” and unmindful of decorum not only in his celebrated bursts of passion, but also in his abrupt transitions of tone and in his prosaic attitudes.