B (30:30)
That's the thing. It reminds me of those sitcoms where the husband is like awful and the long suffering wife and you're like, why are you with him? Why are you with this man? And it's, it's that sort of thing. So anyway, he turns to Mary, you know, this is when he's famous and rich and later on he says, do you want to live in a yacht? She's like, no, we've got a really nice house that we bought with our money. And he's like, oh, okay. And he has to pay the guy to go away again. So he sort of has to pay him £30 to sort of leave. And so there is an element to keen that I really like on a personal level. There is a charm to him, there is a sort of naturalness to him and there is a tragic element to him whereby I'M rooting for him to sort himself out and just, just get himself back on an even keel because there are times in his life and career where he's like, sober for a year or two and you, like, you're like, yes, come on, Edmund, you've got this. You're nailing. And then he falls off the wagon again. So the tragedy of his poverty is, yes, he walks his wife to Swansea and it doesn't work. So then he's walking her again to other places and they're, you know, they're scrabbling by. They are touring Scotland, Ireland, England, Wales. It is not working. It is not working. He is, he's a screw up. He's, he's, he's getting gigs, but he's a screw up. He's always finding a way to ruin them. And Mary has a child. They have a second child. The first child is very sickly Howard. He is named after the Duke of Norfolk already, Edmund. He's like role playing some sort of daddy issues with his son. He's calling his son after his supposed father. And little Howard is going to die. It's very tragic. They're going to lose their firstborn. And that is horrific and devastating for him. And it clearly wounds him, it clearly devastates Mary. Clearly. We see it in their kind of letters and in, in their emotions. So that grief is real. And I feel for him immensely. But what's extraordinary is that it's during this period of grief that he gets his huge break. The break is such a weird left field. What on earth are you talking about? Kind of break? It should not have worked. He should not have been famous. He is the definitive case study, the exception that proves the rule. As a historian of celebrity, I spent a lot of my kind of early part of the book saying, look, when people talk about overnight fame, that doesn't happen. That is not real. Overnight fame takes years to incubate. You have to, like, work it quietly in the shadows. You're developing your craft, your trade, you're building networks, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You're waiting for that moment where you break through. And famously, Lord Byron, you know, had sort of like said, I, you know, I woke to find myself famous. He was on his third book by that point. His second book is him attacking his critics. It's a book called Scotch Bards and English Reviewers, where he's literally attacking his haters because his first book had already received kind of backlash. So in his third book, you can't say I woke up to be famous. It's like, no, no, no, no. Come on, you're on book three. So there is this sort of myth that people have overnight fame, stardom. It happens now because of the Internet sometimes, you know, it can happen to the hawk, to a girl or whatever. It can happen to, like, viral people who, like, suddenly go viral. But in the 18th century. No, it doesn't happen. You have to work at it. Edmund Kean is the only example of overnight fame. That is astonishing. And it's why I kind of love him. It should not have worked. So here's the story. He's in Exeter, down in the southwest of England, a long way from the capital, London. A bit of provincial backwater, very pretty. But you are a long way from where the rich, nice, fancy people are. He's acting in various plays and whatever, but he is playing Shakespeare. He's doing Shakespeare and he's finally got a lead role. Hooray. Good for him. And what's happened is that the main theatre in London. There are two main. Well, there are three theatres in London which are licensed to put on plays with speaking. The other theatres aren't allowed to put on spoken plays. They're allowed to put on melodramas or they had to put on, like, mime, but they can't have, like, plays, plays. So you've got the Drury Lane and the Covent Garden are the two main ones. The Drury Lane Theatre had burned down. It is the kind of prestigious, grand theatre. It burned down, they rebuilt it and they are in serious megadeths. And they're like, oh, no, we are in trouble. And their stars are not pulling in the punters. People are not coming to the theatre. The year is 1814. It is the time in the Napoleonic Wars. It is a time of enormous fear and tension and radicalism in Britain. People are scared. Napoleon has tried to invade with, you know, the Battle of Trafalgar, and Britain won that just about. But, like, Napoleon is this big threat and he's in exile, but obviously we know he's going to escape and come back and Waterloo and yada yada. So it's a really tumultuous time of, like, underlying drumbeat of tension and the stars are not working, the people are not coming to the theaters. The theater is in debt and their debts are spiraling and they. They can't clear their debts and it's only getting worse. And one day they get this letter, the committee gets this letter from a retired headmaster, what you call a principal, I guess, retired principal of Harrow School, a Very fancy, posh school. And the headmaster says, I've just seen this weird, furious owl man. My words, not his.
