Monday 12 July 2021

ENTER LEFT: MR. KEAN'S FAITHFUL HOUND, EXETER, 1841.

The Exeter and Plymouth Gazette, 13th February 1841reported that Mr. Charles Kean, the celebrated Shakespearean actor, son of the legendary actor Edmund Kean,  looking rather thinner than before his visit to America, had commenced an engagement at the Exeter Theatre on Monday the eighth,

"The fire of his full bright eyes -  which Lady Bulwer describes as 'the finest that ever rolled in human head' (was beaming) with as much effulgence as ever."  

When he was on stage acting the part of the king in Shakespeare's  'Richard the Third', the Exeter audience was much amused by the unexpected appearance of his dog:

"During the fight of Richard and Richmond on Wednesday evening at our Theatre, a large dog belonging to Mr. Kean, rushed upon the stage, showed its teeth, growled at Richmond, and barked at the audience, who were cheering him.   

"When Richard fell, he walked around the dying warrior and licked his master's face.  At  last it was found necessary for Mr. Kean's servant to enter the field of Bosworth and make prisoner of the faithful animal." 

Curiously, in the same issue The Gazette notified its readers that:  "A report is now going the round of some of the papers that Mr. Charles Kean was married a short time since to Ellen Tree. We beg to contradict this, knowing it to be untrue, nothing of the kind having occured, or being even contemplated." 

In fact Charles and Ellen had long been loversThey married eleven months later.

It pleases me that The Gazette uses the personal pronoun, masculine, for the dog and also that he writes of  'our Theatre' and with a capital T!

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