42 HAMLET STUDIES 24 (2002) in order to suit the rage for order in his century. The eighteenth
century English audience liked Hamlet above all other plays, but not
as Shakespeare wrote it. John Philip Kemble went beyond Garrick's
conception of the hero feigning madness to somthing more Romantic
if not melodramatic. Charles Kemble's Hamlet was downright insane
and Edmund Kean's erratic if exciting. Coleridge said that watching
Kean was like "reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning." Kean's
pyrotechnics left little room for an introspective tragic hero. Kean's
son Charles was not up to his father's brilliance; Charles Kean was
self-important and stodgy, and not nearly handsome enough to be the
kind of hero we see in, for example, the film Shakespeare in Love.
Barry Sullivan i
