Page 67 - King Lear: The Cambridge Dover Wilson Shakespeare

kli KING LEAR
production was a triumph, never equalled in the later;
the house was packed with a fashionable audience. His
passionate intensity in his earliest renderings was, in the
later, Boaden felt, 1 'quenched' by over-elaboration of
Lear's age and infirmity.
Overlapping Kemble's was Cooke's at Covent Garden
in 1802 and 1807; but this was 'not one of Cooke's good
parts', says Genest, 2 and he played Kent in the 1808
revival. C. M. Young also played Lear at Bath for two
years before coming to the Garden with it in 1822. But
both were eclipsed by Kean, who first adopted the role on
24 April 1820 in the Lane. Though not such a triumph
as his Richard III six years before, the play ran for 28
nights, throwing into the shade two other revivals that
year at Covent Garden: J. B. Booth's on 13 April, and
Vandenhoff's on 9 December. On 21 August, Booth
was at Drury Lane as Edgar with Kean, on 15 November
he stood in for him as Lear, and migrated to the U.S.A.
the next year. Hazlitt, writing in June, reported a story
that Kean had said his London audiences should wait to
judge him finally till * they came to see him over the dead
body of Cordelia', but neither then nor in his next
revival, 1822, was the implied restoration of Shake-
speare's catastrophe carried out. For that London had
to wait till 1823, when on 10 and 24 February the
original act 5 was played, in deference, said the playbills,
to the views of 'men of literary eminence from the time
of Addison'. The reforms did not extend to the cutting
out of the love-scenes, nor to the recall of the Fool. This
version was repeated at Drury Lane in March and June,
and in three other years till 1829. He appeared in it
twice in 1828 at Covent Garden, and finally on 12 July
18 3 o at the Haymarket. For this last he had Miss F. H.
Kelly in the part of Cordelia, played till then by Mrs W.
1
Boaden, Memoirs ofj. P. Kemble (1825), I, 378-9, 386.
8
Op. cit. VII, 552.