In 1785, Thomas Whately was persuaded to publish something he’d first drafted in the 1760s and put back in the cupboard in order to work on a treatise on Modern Gardening. This was his Remarks on the Characters of Shakespeare, which, when it finally did appear, had some success (whether more or less than the gardening manual, I don’t know), a third edition being published in 1839, and many of Whately’s points incorporated into Steevens’s annotated edition of Shakespeare’s plays in the final few decades of the eighteenth century. The text has some similarities to Richardson and Morgann’s ‘character criticism’. It caught my interest, though, for the scathing critique published of it by the actor John Philip Kemble in 1786, which brings to bear the authority of what an actor knows to counter the critic.

In Whately’s defence, he begins his book with the stage. Connecting his study of ‘character’ in Shakespeare to the foundations of successful performance.

[…]there is, within the colder provinces of judgment and knowledge, a subject for criticism, more worthy of attention than the common topics of discussion: I mean the distinction and preservation of character, without which the piece is at best a tale, not an action; for the actors in it are not produced upon the scene.

Having made this point, however, Whately then studies the characters of Macbeth and Richard III in a vacuum (not, as Morgann and Richardson call them, ‘dramatic’ characters). He reaches the following conclusion:

In Richared it is intrepidity, and in Macbeth no more than resolution: in him [Macbeth] it proceeds from exertion, not from nature; in enterprise he betrays a degree of fear, though he is able, when occasion requires, to stifle and subdue it

Enter Kemble.

Kemble’s problem with Whately is simple enough: if Whately is right and Macbeth such a man, then the audience would not connect with the performance and the stage offer no moral instruction. Kemble puts it better than I can.

If Macbeth is really what Mr Whately and Mr Steevens would have him pass for, we must undergo our virtuous satisfaction in his repugnance to guilt, for it arises from mere cowardice; nor can we take any salutary warning from his remorse, for it is only the effect of imbecility. The stage will not conduce to our improvement, by presenting to us the example of a wretch who is uniformly the object of our contempt.

From this dilemma, the course of Kemble’s response is clear: he must prove Macbeth a better person that Whately makes him out to be. To do this, Kemble begins by assembling descriptions of Macbeth by other characters in the play. One might object here that these descriptions are hardly trustworthy, but Kemble answers this critique with an actor’s awareness of Shakespeare’s dramatic economy.

The shortness of the time allotted for the performance of a play, usually makes it impracticable to allow the principal personages space sufficient for their unfolding themselves gradually before the spectator; it is, therefore, a necessary and beautiful artifice with dramatic writers, to bring us in great measure acquainted with them, before they are visibly engaged in action on the stage; where, without this previous delineation, their proceedings might often appear confused and sometimes perhaps be unintelligible.

Needless to say, Kemble extracts a great deal in favour of his reading of Macbeth from the comments of others. He then furthers his argument with reference to Banquo and Macduff, comparing their behaviour to Macbeth’s. At one point, criticising Whately’s analysis of Banquo, Kemble goes so far as to blur the lines between watching a play and reading it.

A play is written on some event, for the purpose of being acted; and plays are so inseparable from the notion of action that, in reading them, our Reflexion, necessarily bodying forth the carriage which it conceives the various characters would sustain on the stage, becomes its own theatre, and gratifies itself with an ideal representation of the piece: This operation of the mind demonstrates that Mr Whateley has, in this place, once more misconstrued Shakespeare; for there is no risk in saying, that the eye of a spectator would turn, offended, from the affront offered to credibility, by the impassive levity of manner set down for Banquo in the Remarks.

The point of this passage is to offer a model for close-reading, that of close observation at the theatre, where Kemble’s superior knowledge as an actor allows him to crush Whately’s point. If we imagine the performance of the play we’re reading, then it follows that Kemble’s reading of Macbeth will be superior, so superior that any errors of interpretation would be just as evident as they would be on the stage.

Not content, however, with trouncing Whately. Kemble wages another war in his footnotes. Here, and I am now quoting from a later, expanded edition of Kemble’s pamphlet, he is keen to defend Heminge and Condell – the actor-editors, maligned by Johnson – and Steevens, who recycled Whately for his notes.

If Heminge and Condell were, in fairness, chargeable with all the faults which Mr Steevens, their unsparing censor, industriously lays to their account; still they have not done Shakespeare half the injury he would receive, if the interpolations, omissions, and transpositions of the edition of 1803 should ever be permitted to form the text of his works. […because] Mr Steevens had no ear for the colloquial metre of our old dramatists: it is not possible, on any other supposition, to account for the whimsical desire, and the pains he takes, to fetter the enchanting freedom of Shakespeare’s numbers, and compel them into the heroic march and measured cadence of epic versification. The native wood notes wild that could delight the cultivated ear of Milton, must not be modulated anew, to indulge the fastidiousness of those who read verses by their fingers.

Again, there is another example of the actor’s superior knowledge: the actor hears Shakespeare’s lines, whereas the editor is reduced to the dull labour of regularising meters better left irregular.

I’m yet to find other texts like Kemble’s pamphlet. It is a rare example of a performers disdain for those writing on Shakespeare without an actor’s knowledge of the stage. It would be such a pity if such texts did not come down to us, when so much editorial quibbling does. In fairness, neither Kemble nor Garrick were above such quibbles in their writing, but that’s a story for another day.