Keats in the company of Kean.(Critical Essay)

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-JUN-03

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Company. [Compagnie, F]: an Assembly of People; a Society, or Body Corporate; a small Body of Foot commanded by a Captain; also Conversation, Fellowship. (1)

Company. n.s. [compagnie, French; either from con and pagus, one of the same town; or con and panis, one that eats of the same mess.] ... 5. A number of persons united for the execution or performance of any thing; a band. (2)

I. Keeping "low company"

JUST BEFORE CHRISTMAS 1817, JOHN KEATS WROTE FROM HAMPSTEAD TO his brothers George and Tom in Teignmouth, Devonshire. The two younger Keatses had left London to seek better environs for Tom, who would die from tuberculosis within a year. Left behind in the city to put the finishing touches on Endymion, John informed his brothers that he was busying himself with customary diversions--theater, reading, and dinners:

I dined too (for I have been out too much lately) with Horace Smith & met his two Brothers with Hill & Kingston & one Du Bois, they only served to convince me, how superior humour is to wit in respect to enjoyment--These men say things which make one start, without making one feel, they are all alike; their manners are all alike; they all know fashionables; they have a mannerism in their very eating and drinking, in their mere handling a Decanter--They talked of Kean and his low company--Would I were with that company instead of yours said I to myself! I know such like acquaintances will never do for me ... (3)

The letter derides the "mannerism" of Smith and his friends, members of the merchant class who aspired to cultural legitimacy through literary pursuits. (4) To Keats, their speech and action betray a desire for conspicuous correctness. In the witticisms of "these men," which "make one start," and in the gestures of "their very eating and drinking," Keats perceives an affectation that inhibits genuine interaction. Knowledge of "fashionables" and display of social distinction replace "humour" and "feeling" as the cohesive forces of the gathering. The diners' disdain for "Kean and his low company," another attempt to demonstrate distinguished taste, elicits from Keats a socially symbolic reversal in which Kean comes to stand for those qualities the men themselves lack. (5)

I take Keats's explicit alliance with Edmund Kean here not only as an unapologetic embrace of a "low" social position against which critics commonly see him straining, but as an identification with the new modes of cultural experience Kean embodied on the early nineteenth-century London stage. Kean's conspicuously vexed relationship to the situational possibilities offered by the dramatic text was, in Hazlitt's apt formulation, a "radical" departure from John Philip Kemble's personification of rhetorical mastery. Whereas Kemble's excellence resided in a demonstration of the single emotion called for by each dramatic scene, Kean attracted audiences with an ability to present, in a moment, a mass of contradictory feelings. (6) With his pantomimic contortions and emotional outbursts, Kean imported an "illegitimate" grammar of representation onto the Drury Lane stage, rendering the traditional relation between performer and audience uncertain and exposing the legitimate theater's increasing commercial reliance on lower-class modes of consumption. (7) His presence--not only in the theater but in London society--called attention to those "low" aspects of middle-class life that aspirants such as Smith, Hill, and Du Bois would have wanted to mask.

The implications of Keats's emphatic desire to be of Kean's "company," then, are greater than a simple difference of opinion between dining fellows. Kean played a crucial role in shaping both Keats's attitudes towards his own social rank and his ideas about the changing nature of cultural experience. (8) Educated to an understanding of Kean by Hazlitt's theatrical criticism, Keats's attention to the actor in letters and theatrical reviews in late 1817 and early 1818 coincided with and, I will argue, occasioned his thoroughgoing revision of the poet's role as a cultural intermediary for readers. In contrast to the self-assured demeanor embodied by Smith, Hill, and DuBois, Keats imagines the poet continually engaged in an identity crisis brought on by encounters with actual and imagined cultural objects. The poems of early 1818, especially, begin to reshape contemporary notions of authorship because they present the poet speaking from--rather than merely reflecting on--the uncertain moments that characterize such encounters. Yet far from simply representing a lower-class (or even proletarian) perspective defined against middle-class experience, Keats naturalizes his crisis as a standard of true feeling surpassing the "mannerism" of the would-be cultural elite.

The most obvious link between Kean's acting and Keats's ideas about poetry in late 1817 can be found in the same December letter, which continues more famously:

Brown and Dilke walked with me & back from the Christmas pantomime. I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, on various subjects; several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously--I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason. (Letters 1.193)

At the time Keats wrote the letter, which mentions Kean twice as well as King Lear, the libel trials of T. J. Wooler and William Hone, and Benjamin West's Death on the Pale Horse, he was also writing several theatrical reviews for the liberal periodical the Champion, the first of which concerned Kean. As Nicholas Roe has recently shown, Keats was also in these weeks reading the Examiner's critique of the legitimate theater's attempts to "manage public opinion" by offering the actor David Fisher as a substitute for the "indisposed" Kean. (9) In these contexts, the letter that begins with Kean and ends with Keats's famous "negative capability" passage counters the contemporary, and persistent, view of Keats as a kind of perpetual social climber, and represents an unexplored connection between Keats's theatrical experience and his ideas about poetry's changing social function.

Keats has long been considered an exemplar of the upwardly mobile lower-class poet; even in his own lifetime, his work was invariably judged in relation to its author's humble beginnings. Citing repetitively enjambed lines, salacious detail, and an uneasy treatment of classical culture, Blackwood's "Cockney School" reviews attacked the 1817 volume as puerile, undisciplined, and immoral, establishing the critical vocabulary that would influence Keats criticism for two centuries. (10) In our own historical moment, Marjorie Levinson's Keats's Life of Allegory continues to provide the most thorough "materialist" formulation of the poet's position outside the realm of elite culture. For Levinson, the basic raw material of Keats's poetry, his life, is sadly deficient in content. Keats could not "draw from his everyday life, a monotonous struggle to get by and get ahead, for the interest, surprise, and suggestiveness which Byron and Shelley found in their large circumstances." (11) His was "a real life of substitute things," a life documented by poetry "which signifies--indeed fetishizes--its alienation from its representational objects and subjects, and, thus, from its audience. This poetry is a discourse whose self possession is a function of its profound structural dispossession" (28). The paragon to which Keats futilely aspires is Wordsworth, whose statement of poetic intentions in the 1815 "Essay, Supplementary to the Preface" represents for Levinson the position of "a man so assured of his entitlement that he can trust his originality to be received as intelligible and valuable" (10). (12) By contrast, Keats is "a literary entrepreneur" (18), whose "lapses in good taste" (3) reveal "a man with nothing but words ... a man whose real deficit was one of substance" (235) and whose "terribly labored" poetry has "no immediate rhetorical situation" (35) because it is defined entirely by its "display of bad access and misappropriation" of culture (15).

At bottom, Levinson's critique conflates cultural with Veblenesque social ambition; as a consequence she does not distinguish between those attitudes and behaviors driven by attention to poetic models and those produced by economic need. To be sure, Keats was continually in financial straits, always seeking a situation that would enable him to devote his full energies to poetry. And certainly his formal education and professional prospects did not equal those of the other major romantics, save perhaps Blake. But by extending the realities of Keats's economic situation, of his very real "struggle to get by," rendering them "monstrous" and constitutive of his cultural experience, Levinson denies the importance, indeed the existence, of an entire, varied, complicated, and fruitful life-world to which Keats had daffy and immediate "access." Ignoring this world, Levinson sees a man who "sidestepped Chatterton's final solution" (i.e. suicide) only by sublimating ever-unsatisfied desires into the "contained badness" of his poetry (11).

Considered in light of Keats's relationship to London's theater and its attendant print culture, what Levinson sees as Keats's "alienation" reveals itself rather as his communication of a new mode of cultural experience altogether. (13) Keats did represent in his poetry a "new social phenomenon," and self-consciously so. But this self-consciousness is driven more by Keats's dissatisfaction with...

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