Wherefore art thou Folio? Actor linked to Bard book riddle
HAILED as the greatest actor of his age, he was also vilified for his sordid affairs and unchecked drunkenness.
Now 19th Century actor Edmund Kean, who played Shakespeare with a brilliance that left audiences breathless, is at the centre of a 21st Century intrigue.
Last week, one of the rarest books in the world – a first folio of William Shakespeare’s works – was unearthed in the library of Mount Stuart House on Bute.
But how the book, worth around £3 million, came to be in the ancestral home of the Marquess of Bute is a mystery.
Experts are trying to establish whether it could be linked to Kean, who fled the fallout from his dissolute lifestyle, taking refuge on the Mount Stuart estate.
Born in 1787, Kean began his acting career at 14 and made his name in London theatres playing Richard III, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and King Lear.
The poet Samuel Coleridge said: ‘Seeing him act was like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning.’
His eccentricities were as legendary as his affairs: as well as recklessly riding his horse, Shylock, through the night and playing with his tame lion, he was sued for £800 after committing adultery with an alderman’s wife and was pelted with fruit when he reappeared on stage.
Michael Dobson, Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Birmingham, is a Kean expert and said the link between him and the first folio was ‘a very interesting possibility’.
He said: ‘Kean fled to Bute when he was increasingly ill and in increasing need to escape from bad publicity.’
Kean owned a first folio, which was sold after his death in 1833. Records show the Second Marchioness of Bute was keen on buying it at auction – but the winning bidder was never recorded. The book, published seven years after the playwright’s death in 1616, was verified last week by Oxford academic Professor Emma Smith.
The Mount Stuart archives first mention it in 1896. Kean came to Bute in 1822 and built a mansion on the Mount Stuart estate. He later returned to London and died on stage performing Othello.
Professor Dobson said: ‘He was very sick by then. He’d been an alcoholic for years. He’d had goodness knows how many venereal infections.
‘He was incredibly controversial, threatening to flounce, to go off to America if he didn’t get the parts he wanted, or saying he wouldn’t go on if he didn’t feel like it or was too drunk.
‘He always had several women in the wings, who he would have sex with between going on stage.’
Professor Smith said: ‘The Bute connection seems such a coincidence. My own view is that this is not likely to be Kean’s copy.’
Only 234 first folios are known to exist.