Edmund Kean – How Can a Man Have Real Self Expression?

Edmun Kean’s acting and his life can help us answer that question. First presented at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation, NYC.

I learned from Aesthetic Realism that a man will feel truly expressed when he’s consciously going after his deepest desire, which is there from birth: honestly to like the world, to see meaning in what is not himself, and this very much includes other people.

The thing that stifles true expression in us is also explained for the first time by Aesthetic Realism. It’s in this principle, “The greatest danger or temptation of man is to get a false importance or glory from the lessening of things not himself; which lessening is Contempt.”

I’ll speak about what I’ve learned, about a young man having Aesthetic Realism consultations, and about some aspects of the life and work of the great English actor who, in the early 1800s, electrified audiences with his passionate, intelligent, sincere performances: Edmund Kean. Kean’s acting stands for the expression men want today in ordinary life – to be both all out and tremendously exact in behalf of fairness to the world.

Expression Is a Oneness of Inside and Outside

In his 1949 lecture “Aesthetic Realism and Expression,” Eli Siegel the founder of Aesthetic Realism, said:

In every instance of expression the self must be put outside…The business of the self doing a murky job in itself is not expression. In fact, it’s poison…To express means that you see yourself as an outside thing, and you send yourself abroad.

And so, when a person expresses himself truly, he puts together inside and outside – what is deep within him comes out and joins with what Mr. Siegel called a “friendly outside.” But the self can object to this, can want to stay inside and hide. Discussing this lecture in a class, Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism Chairman of Education, asked: “Do we have a self to hug and caress it, and stay in the self armchair? Or do we have a self to go forth, to see meaning in what is not ourselves?”

Growing up in South Florida I was in that debate. In the early love I had for acting and performing, my self did “go forth.” At Pine Crest High, I was excited to be in The Singing Pines, putting on shows of songs and dance at school and hotels around Ft. Lauderdale. I relished our rehearsals, learning the tenor parts and the choreography. I didn’t know then that I felt proud and deeply expressed because I was trying be fair to what was not me – notes, rhythms, dance steps, my partner.

But most of the time, I felt stuck in myself, lonely and moody. I used my family’s affluence to be a snob and look down on other people. There was an unspoken agreement between my mother and me – which I now see as very hurtful to both of us and unintelligent – that people who expressed themselves outwardly were vulgar and gushy, and lacked refinement. I saw any showing of large feeling, being pleased or angry, as distasteful and embarrassing. Secretly, I envied people who could show large emotion, but mainly I lived by what Mr. Siegel described:

One thing people do is imagine that they are expressing themselves by restraining themselves…They think that by keeping themselves to themselves…they are expressing themselves. About that, Aesthetic Realism says very carefully, even solemnly, and most decidedly: Phooey!

I went for that restraint which is really contempt – taking the life and vigor out of things and people – and it nearly took the life out of me. When I was about 20, I found it so hard to talk with people I’d get stuck on the words and was afraid I was beginning to stutter. With every year, I felt more locked up inside.

Studying Aesthetic Realism, I’ve had the richest education about expression that any man could hope for – as an actor, a husband, a man. My life as an expressed human being has turned around 180 degrees – and that’s still continuing! I’m very thankful for what Ellen Reiss has taught me and feel so fortunate to be her student. Once, preparing for a musical event here, I was having difficulty singing a song in which a man has passionate, tender feeling for a woman. In a class, Ms. Reiss asked if showing a large emotion would make me feel foolish?  I did feel that, and she explained:

The important thing here is accuracy – it isn’t so much tremendous emotion, but accurate emotion. And if there is that in the world that deserves [large emotion], the only accurate thing to do is to give it.

And she said that in having feeling and expressing it, I needed to feel “never was I so tough, so savvy. A person is being born right now,” she continued. “Would it be good for that person to have great feeling or little feeling?” Hearing this question articulated, it is so clear the answer is great feeling. And this is true in every aspect of my life – in the work I love as an Aesthetic Realism consultant, as an actor, husband, son, friend. This has me feel expressed in a way I once thought would be impossible, and I am enormously grateful.

What Can Acting Teach a Man about Expression?

In his 1951 lecture, “Aesthetic Realism as Beauty: Acting,” Eli Siegel describes acting as “the known showing of another feeling than you, as you see yourself, are disposed to have.” This has every man’s hope in it, whether he goes on the stage or not: to see the feelings of another person as to be known and mattering. Mr. Siegel continues:

The actor on the whole in England who most electrified audiences, and who got the most intense reaction, is Edmund Kean. There is something unexplainably amazing about him….as we read what Kean could do, we feel the strange power, the power which is like an oak, and the power in sparks.

That power came from a life-long drive in Edmund Kean that, I feel strongly, men today are desperate to have. Kean felt he would take care of himself if he gave his all in being just to a character he was playing, and that giving was the same as terrific precision and his own bedrock integrity. He didn’t hold back. He shows the truth of what Aesthetic Realism taught me: Great, accurate feeling about the world is the same as selfishness, stature, expression.

Edmund Kean had a tough childhood. He was born at Gray’s Inn, London, in 1789, the out-of-wedlock son of Ann Carey, a poor young woman who led a turbulent life in the streets of London. At two years old, when, according to Giles Playfair in his biography Kean, “he would…have died of starvation and neglect,” he was taken to live with Charlotte Tidswell, an actress at the Drury Lane Theatre who took a deep interest in the little boy’s life. His biographer writes that Miss Tidswell:

had him taught singing…and fencing by…masters at Drury Lane….She gave Edmund his first groundings in the study of Shakespeare, encouraging him to feel as well as understand the lines he repeated after her and making him rehearse his speeches for hours on end in front of a mirror.

In the plays of Shakespeare, the young Edmund Kean found a beauty, a structure in the world that made sense. As a child he became known in London for his readings from Shakespeare. Then, when he was nine, his mother, seeing that her boy could make money, reclaimed her son and again, says Playfair, “he became the child vagabond.”  She had him travel with shows to fair-grounds where he learned tumbling and clowning, and had to scrape together whatever food he could find.

By fifteen Edmund Kean “had been buffeted and caressed… praised and insulted and in sum he had learned that the world was cruel and relentless and had to be fought back hard.”  It’s understandable that unknowingly Kean came to see the world as an enemy, an opponent he had to beat. Here he was like many men.

Over the next years Kean and the woman he married, Mary Chambers, were strolling players in the provinces of England, often penniless and hungry, trying desperately to feed and clothe their two young sons who performed with them, one of whom died later. Yet Kean maintained a burning desire to express himself with grandeur, and in his biography, Howard Hillebrand quotes Kean’s wife saying that he “studied…beyond any actor I knew.”

Aesthetic Realism Consultations & the Self-Expression Men Are Looking For

Jonathan White, a young man of today, cares for sports and is studying the art of acting. In Aesthetic Realism consultations, he’s spoken deeply to us about hoping to express himself with sincerity as a son, an actor, and with the woman he cares for. But like many men he’s felt hemmed in, unable to give his thought to people and things in a steady way. Instead, he’s banked on charm, good looks, and kidding people along. He once wrote to us, “I have betrayed myself thousands and thousands of times because I wanted to get people’s approval.”

Mr. White told us he was having a hard time with his father. His parents had been quarreling and he was bitter, somewhat blaming his father, who worked in a non-profit company and was not a “go-getter” in business as he, Jonathan, thought he should be. In a document for a consultation he wrote:

My relationship with my father…is not something of which I am proud. I feel like a cold person almost every time someone asks how my father is doing…because…I have put him out of my mind so much….I feel terrible saying this, but I often think of him as a downer, a loser.

We asked, “Why do you think he chose work that is more in behalf of justice to people than in making profit? Do you think there is something to respect there?” Hearing this, he nodded. “Have you been a snob about your father?” we asked. “Do you want him to feel he’s a success or a failure?” We gave him assignments, such as “A soliloquy of James White at age twenty-two” and “10 places I am the same as and different from my father.”

In a later consultation he told us, “I’m happy to say my relationship with my father has improved a lot in the last weeks.” He said he’d been talking more with his father, trying to know him, and he looked forward to these conversations. Mr. White’s life as a whole began to bloom, and he wrote to us:

I’m extremely excited by the world that’s opening up to me, or I should say that I’m opening up to, as a person and an actor. I feel very fortunate to be studying Aesthetic Realism – it is enabling me to see so much more than before.

The Whole Self Taking An Outside Form

In his lecture on expression, Mr. Siegel says:

Expression is never expression until it’s complete and also accurate…True expression is that which shows the whole self taking an outside form.

That is what audiences saw in Edmund Kean. After years of hardship that had him destitute and frantic, Kean made his debut at London’s Drury Lane Theatre in January 1814. At a time when a more formal, restrained style of acting had been predominant for decades, Kean astonished the audience with his fire and subtlety, his spontaneity and naturalness, all of which brought new honesty to his Shylock in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.

Shylock, a Jewish money-lender, had traditionally been played as a villain, instantly recognizable as such in a stock red wig and dirty costume. Kean refused this convention, making Shylock ordinary in appearance in a black wig and clean costume, a choice other actors thought was courting disaster. He saw in Shylock’s evil, “the human touch that made him kin to all men,” said one critic. As Hillebrand tells, Kean was:

…alive, alive with energy, in every muscle, glance, and intonation. The arms and hands were eloquent, the whole face spoke before the words were uttered, the eyes, the marvelous black eyes which were Kean’s most precious instrument, darted intelligence. As the familiar lines fell from his lips they seemed to be rediscovered, as though for the first time was revealed their true meaning.

In the audience was the young William Hazlitt, who became one of the most noted critics of all time. He loved what he saw that night and for years afterward, saying that Edmund Kean displayed, as no other could, “the tumult and conflict of opposite passions in the soul.”

Here, Hazlitt points to what Eli Siegel made clear for the first time when he said: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”  Two great opposites in Edmund Kean’s acting were passion and control. Eli Siegel pointed to these as the essence of Kean’s appeal when he said, “He makes us feel art consists of hanging about necessary precipices that you never jump over.”

Kean played Shakespeare’s Richard III, Shylock, Iago, Othello, Hamlet and Sir Giles Overreach in Massinger’s A New Way to Pay Old Debts. The poet Byron was at a performance of this latter role when, near the end of the play, Sir Giles is cornered by his enemies, lashes out and goes mad. Kean’s acting was so sincere the audience thought he was “possessed by the devil.”  There was a shocked silence, and then writes Giles Playfair, “the pit rose up in a body and cheered and went on cheering.” “By God he is a Soul,” said Byron.

Here I want to say I feel very fortunate to be an actor in the noted Aesthetic Realism Theatre Company, giving performances with my colleagues of magnificent literary works – Eli Siegel’s lectures on world drama. Just last month, it was a big experience for me to play Torvald Helmer in our production of Mr. Siegel’s lecture on Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, trying fully to become a vicious husband who wants to own and run his wife and does not want her to be expressed at all. It did me good to feel that from within and try to give it outward form, and I’m grateful for the critical artistic and life encouragement I got to do so.

Should We Be Impressed by the World or Fight It

“Expression,” Mr. Siegel said, “is activity, but it begins with how we think.” And he says this which I love: “We have to be impressed before we can be expressed.”