Stephen Kemble - Actor

Actor

He was also famous for playing Falstaff. Contemporary critics acclaimed that in this role Kemble achieved the "optimum balance between comedy and gravity.". After his performance in London at Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in 1802, the Morning Chronicle wrote that "It is to be regretted that his associations in the country prevent him from accepting a permanent engagement in London." Kemble would return to play Falstaff in London at Covent Garden (1806) and the Drury Lane (1816), for which he received great acclaim. After Kemble's death, The Edinburgh literary journal wrote, " Kemble was perhaps the best Sir John Falstaff which the British stage ever saw."

Kemble also played Hamlet, King Lear, Othello and many other roles.

Writer for The London Magazine John Taylor wrote, "Mr. Stephen Kemble was an actor of considerable merit." Taylor writes about Kemble's commitment to address injustice through theatre: "All characters of an open, blunt nature, and requiring a vehement expression of justice and integrity, particularly those exemplifying an honest indignation against vice, he delivered in so forcible a manner, as to show. obviously that he was developing his own feelings and character. This manner was very successfully displayed in his representation of the Governor,Sir Christopher Curry, in the opera of Inkle and Yarico."

Taylor writes of Kemble's reputation in the provincial theatre circuit: "Stephen Kemble, who was an accurate observer of human life, and an able delineater of character and manners, was so intelligent and humorous a companion, that he was received with respect into the best company in the several provincial towns, which he occasionally visited in the exercise of his profession."