recitations and one-person shows
recitations and one-person shows.In his London Labour and the London Poor, first published in 1851, Henry Mayhew described how one youthful reciter delivered Othello's ‘Most potent, grave and reverend signiors’ with such force that he felt compelled to explain, ‘When I act Shakespeare I cannot restrain myself, it seems to master my very soul.’ The reciter's pitch was the Commercial Road and Walworth Road and his best-ever receipts were at a public house near Brick Lane. At the other extreme the actor-manager Charles Kemble gave his first reading before Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace on 24 April 1844, when Cymbeline was selected by the Prince Consort. Thereafter Kemble gave readings of Shakespeare across the country, attracting the likes of the dissenting minister who told him that ‘though I abominate the stage … yet I am a patron of Shakespeare in my social hours’. Kemble's daughter Fanny continued the tradition, increasingly...
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