ABSTRACT
First published in The Examiner, VIII, 26 February 1815, p. 140. Reprinted in Hunt, Dramatic, pp. 112–5. Hunt made his first trip to the theatre after his release from prison to see Edmund Kean on 20 February 1815. Kean had first appeared on the London stage as Shylock at Drury Lane on 26 January 1814 and had met with much critical praise, particularly from Hazlitt writing in The Morning Chronicle. Hunt, however, was disappointed in Kean, which would call forth a response from Hazlitt (The Examiner, VIII, 19 March 1815, pp. 190–2). For other reviews of Kean by Hunt, see, for example, The Examiner, IX, 3 November 1816, pp. 699–700; X, 28 December 1817, pp. 825–6; XI, 4 October 1818, p. 632, where Hunt proclaims ‘Mr Kean’s Othello is the masterpiece of the living stage’; and XII, 31 October 1819, pp. 699–700, where Hunt compares Kean and Macready in the part of Richard III. Kean, praised by Hazlitt and admired by Keats, in certain ways represented on stage the same kind of ‘Cockney’ culture the Hunt circle was seen as espousing; see Jane Moody, Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1779-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000).
