ABSTRACT
Edmund Kean had been to America once before, with mixed reviews. If Kean's first American tour had nothing to do with art and everything to do with money, his first visit was initially a great triumph. If Kean really were planning on moving to America, he may have done so because he believed that this new land was more sexually liberated than England. Kean, or at least the tragic side of Kean, had to die and be reborn in comedy for his audiences to know for certain that they, not Kean, were firmly in charge. Audiences in England and America would no longer be told what was tragic merely because Kean said so; they would now decide if Kean's life was tragic, or whether his Othello, given their opinion of Kean, was now unproblematically comic. The aforementioned pastiche of Shakespearean verse broadly recalls Kean's own performances after the Cox affair, in which he garbled lines from different Shakespeare plays.
