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Fanny Kemble
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At first glance Fanny Kemble's life was a series of paradoxes. She was a talented actress who hated the stage but loved drama. She cut an elegant picture onstage but was homely in person. She was a staunch abolitionist, but married a slaveholder. And she was a refined Englishwoman who spent most of her time schlepping her way across America in railway cars that were overcrowded, dirty and unhealthy.
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SYNOPSIS: Born in London, Fanny Kemble (1809-1893) was the youngest member of the Kemble theatrical dynasty. Her debut as Juliet saved Covent Garden from bankruptcy, and catapulted her to the heights of international celebrity.
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Schooled in England and Paris, Fanny Kemble had no intentions of becoming an actress with the Covent. Only because of her family's persistence and the Covent's dire financial straits did she agree to take the stage in the role of Juliet on October 15, 1829. The woman whom biographer Henry Gibbs proclaimed "the most unwilling actress in historv" was an instant hit, dazzling critics and audiences alike.
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For Fanny Kemble, the act of reading Shakespeare brings private experience into the public space. Even when Kemble is sitting alone and reading to herself, Shakespeare himself eavesdrops on the performance. In an unpublished letter at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Kemble ... represents herself, as a recently retired actress, eavesdropping on the reading of an amateur ladies' reading club. In both cases, the private becomes public. To put it another way, within the event of a Shakespeare reading, the individual is constructed through drama and exists only as a dramatic character--an actress in a private setting. Erving Goffman, whose Presentation of Self in Everyday Life was first published in 1959, defines the theatricality of everyday life in terms of a fluid relationship between backstage and front- stage.
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Ambitious to live the life of a romantic Artist, Fanny Kemble made her stage debut aged nineteen. In autumn 1829 Covent Garden in London's West End - the theatre managed by her father, Charles Kemble - faced bankruptcy. With very little training, Fanny Kemble stepped on stage as Shakespeare's Juliet and became an overnight star. Performing together, she and her father, Charles Kemble, became two the world's first "reality" celebrities, their family roles fascinating their audience as much as those they played on stage.
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The announcement of a new Kemble debut would draw a crowd because the London world would be looking for a second coming of divine Sarah. Fanny was ihe only possible debutante. She was endowed with the Kemble voice, a dancer’s grace (inherited from her mother), and a lace that could project the entire range of human emotions. That Fanny’s nalural bent was for something as unthealrical as the study of moral philosophy was irrelevant in this crisis. She loved Shakespeare, spoke his verse intelligently, and had a remarkable facility for committing it to memory.
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Fanny Kemble