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 in the mid-nineteenth century was livelier, rather
cynical and intellectual, but not commanding. Sir Henry Irving was
said to have appeared (very successfully) as Sir Henry Irving in
Hamlet, and Oscar Wilde snidcly dismissed the performances as "funny
without being vulgar." Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson stressed two of
the (sometimes contradictory) trends featured in subsequent renditions
of the play. These were, and remain, the poetry and the plight of the
reluctant intellectual propelled into action. Sir Alec Guinness I did see,
in the fifties, and he brought none of the poetry to his aid but he did
seem intelligent, more so than any American actor I have ever
witnessed in the part. From Donald Madden, more hippie than heroic,
in rite sixties onward, American Hmnlets seem to be
