19th century AD

Magazine Antiques, Oct, 2001 by Gloria Deak

By my troth I am not nervous," [1] avowed Fanny Kemble to visitors who called at her hotel some hours before she was to make her first stage appearance in New York City. The English actress was under contract for an extended engagement in the city and, on that eighteenth day of September in 1832, she would mount the boards at the Park Theatre just opposite the public gardens fronting City Hall. New Yorkers, it seems, were in a fever of anticipation. "There is no doubt that we shall be furnished with a theatrical treat of the highest order," exulted the diarist Philip Hone (1780-1851). [2] He was right to be so expectant, for young Fanny Kemble had become the latest sensation in London acting circles and now, traveling with her father, she had crossed the Atlantic to face the traditional uncertainties of show business, this time in the new world. Why would she not be somewhat fearful? "Not because I feel sure of success," she confided to her journal that afternoon,

for I think it very probable the Yankees may like to show their critical judgment and independence by damning me; but because, thank God, I do not care whether they do or not; the whole thing is too loathsome to me, for either failure or success to affect me in the least, and therefore I feel neither nervoiw nor anxious about it. [5]

The Yankees assuredly did not damn her. To the contrary. The twenty-three-year-old actress could thrill to the roar of their resounding applause when the curtain came down on her sparkling performance as Bianca in Henry Hart Millman's Fazio. "I have never witnesed an audience so moved, astonished, and delighted," declared Philip Hone:

Her display of the strong feelings which belong to the part was great beyond description, and the expression of her wonderful face would have been a rich treat if her tongue had uttered no sound. The fifth act was such an exhibition of female powers as we have never before witnessed, and the curtain fell amid the deafening shouts and plaudits of an astonished audience. [4]

What did Fanny Kemble herself make of this extraordinary Yankee response to her Gotham debut? No doubt she was flushed with success, but she preferred to make light of it, remarking only that she "got through very satisfactorily" At the start of the play, tingles of apprehension had flooded her spirit for fear that her costar William Keppel would muddle his part. She went on stage thinking him highly unsuited for the role of Fazio, terming him "that washed out man" [5] in her diary. During rehearsal he kept forgetting his lines, and, when the curtain went up that evening, his uncertainty as to his positions and crossings on stage was so palpable as to nearly unsettle his leading lady. Fanny's confidence was restored in scenes where Keppel was not required to appear, and she took some refuge in the fact that the gowns designed for her part as Bianca were very beautiful and would please the audience. Ever conscious of dress, Fanny had carefully seen to all of her stage costumes and had lugged them across the A tlantic in huge boxes. The bodice she wore for her Covent Garden debut as Juliet, and again in her New York appearances, survives to this day (P1. VIII). The Yankees were unfailingly beguiled by both her appearance and her performances.

During the next few weeks, the acclaimed actress appeared in an astonishing variety of plays, all of which garnered flattering notices. Following Fazio, she charmed American audiences with Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The School for Scandal ("It's so English, how do they ever understand?" she wrote in her journal), Thomas Otway's Venice Preserved ("with Mr. Keppel who did not appear to me to know the words even"), George Farquhar's The Inconstant ("played Bizarre for the first time. Acted so-so, looked very pretty"), James Sheridan Knowles's The Hunchback ("wore my red satin and looked like a bonfire"), and Shakespeare's King John, Romeo and Juliet, and Much Ado About Nothing. [6] These dramas represent kaleidoscopic changes in thespian tempo and a prodigious number of lines to commit to memory, yet Fanny appears not to have been fazed by the challenges, except for wishing that she could be equally sure of the others appearing onstage with her. We learn from her journal how indignant she became when a fellow actor faltered in his movements or stumbled over his lines. In the Otway piece, her irritation reached fever pitch because not only had she been constantly forced to prompt the ill-favored Keppel (who "stuck" to her skirts, she claimed), but

once, after struggling in vain to free myself from him, was obliged in the middle of my part to exclaim 'you hurt me dreadfully Mr Keppell!' He clung to me, cramped me; crumpled me,--dreadful!" [7]

For all that, Venice Preserved delighted the audience (even Keppel was applauded, though Fanny determined "not to go upon the stage again, with that gentleman for a hero"). Here was a strong-minded young lady with an intellectual grasp of the theater, and with sights set most perceptively on what constituted a good play, good acting, appropriate sets, striking costumes, and inspired interpretation of the role. Only when these components of stagecraft were brought to their highest pitch were they worthy of applause, or worthy of the kind of giddy adulation that greeted actors: nothing less, in her view, warranted approbation. But show business, as was well known to Fanny, followed notoriously fickle ways, and neither player, manager, nor director could control histrionic incongruities. The very incontrovertibility of this fact led her to denounce what she called the "worthless clapping of hands." Applause that was undeserved, the voluble actress insisted, "is what, by the nature of my craft, I am bound to car e for; I spit at it [my craft] from the bottom of my soul!" [8]