ABSTRACT
As a playwright, poet, and copious journalist and diarist, Fanny Kemble's (1809–1893) bent was intellectual, and it resulted in what George Arliss has called “the most careful analysis of the actor in juxtaposition with his art that one is likely to find in dramatic literature” (1). In this short piece, Kemble introduces a dichotomy crucial to her theory–dividing the instinctual (“the dramatic”) from the self-conscious (“the theatrical”)–in order to clarify why she found acting so “repugnant” (10). In her view, a performing career aligns one with children: they are “only ‘theatrical’ when they become aware that they are the objects of admiring attention; in which case the assuming and dissembling capacity of acting develops itself comically and sadly in them” (4). That “which is dramatic in human nature,” Kemble writes, “is the passionate, emotional, humourous element, the simplest portion of our composition, after our mere instincts, to which it is closely allied; and this has no relation whatever, beyond its momentary excitement and gratification, to that which imitates it.” (3).
