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Penruddock Recreated: John Philip Kemble's Alterations of Cumberland's The Wheel of Fortune
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 March 2014
Extract
Since the publication of the John Philip Kemble Promptbooks in the Folger Library Series, it has been possible to determine both the extent and kind of changes made by Kemble in those roles most clearly associated with the great eighteenth-century actor-manager. Of these signature roles, perhaps none was so perfectly suited to his peculiar talents nor so universally acclaimed, by both his critics and supporters alike, as the role of Penruddock in Richard Cumberland's The Wheel of Fortune.
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- Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1984
References
NOTES
1 John Philip Kemble Promptbooks, ed. Charles H. Shattuck, 11 vols. (Charlottesville: Published for the Folger Shakespeare Library by the University Press of Virginia, 1974). Professor Shattuck's brief but evocative introduction to The Wheel of Fortune in vol. 11 is particularly useful in supplying historical accounts of the play's reception and of Kemble's performance, some of which I have drawn and expanded on here.
2 Dramatic Essays, ed. William Archer and Robert W. Lowe (London, 1894), pp. 5–6.
3 Genest, John, Some Account of the English Stage from the Restoration in 1660 to 1830 (Bath, 1832), VII, p. 187.Google Scholar
4 Memoirs of Richard Cumberland, Written by Himself (London, 1806), p. 334.
5 Kelly, Michael, Reminiscences (London, 1826), II, p. 84.Google Scholar
6 Boaden, James, Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble (Philadelphia, 1825), p. 338.Google Scholar
7 Baker, Herschel C., John Philip Kemble: The Actor in his Theatre (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1942), p. 193.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
8 One characteristic review written during the play's first run of eighteen performances appeared in the London Morning Chronicle for 10 March 1795. In it the critic remarks that Cumberland must be gratified by his play's reception, “for no play undoubtedly has, of late years, met with more general approbation than The Wheel of Fortune.” One week later the same critic is moved to declare that “certainly since The School for Scandal, no modern play has been better received than The Wheel of Fortune. It last night again occasioned an overflowing house.”
9 Thorndike, Ashley, English Comedy (New York: Macmillan, 1925), pp. 456–457.Google Scholar
10 From “Recapitulation and Summary of the Characteristics of Shakespeare's Dramas,” printed in His Infinite Variety, ed. Paul N. Siegal (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1964), p. 31.
11 For a contemporary view of Penruddock's internal conflict as dominating both the action of the play and the sympathies of the audience, see The London Morning Chronicle, 30 March 1795:
Roderick Penruddock is an admirable portrait, correctly drawn, strikingly placed, and strongly coloured. We have not, for a long, long time, seen so just a delineation of the workings of the human mind, in a situation, and under circumstances, uncommonly singular and dramatic. No artist, but a master of his science, and a perfect judge of hature, could have designed and executed a figure that, by the impressive force of its effect, arrests our whole attention from the moment he is seen, increases our regard for him the more we know him, and rivets our respect and veneration, till we feel the most poignant regret on seeing his work of duty done, and his occasion of acting well over. Penruddock's struggle between motives of well-justified resentment, and the nobler passion of pity, which necessarily leads to the best and most amiable impulse that can actuate the human mind, forgiveness, is not only perfectly natural, but takes away all the mawkishness with which modern dramatists are apt to lessen and destroy the dignity of pure benevolence.
12 Collected Works of William Hazlitt, ed. A. R. Waller and Arnold Glover (London: J. M. Dent, 1904), XI, pp. 205–206.