#screaming!!

In contrast to the sustained bullying of Ophelia that characterized the performances of Garrick and John Philip Kemble, Edmund Kean was careful to show Hamlet’s true feelings later in the scene. Having delivered his final “To a nunnery,” he quickly moved off, only to stop at the edge of the stage. He then returned to Ophelia and with a deep sigh tenderly kissed her hand. This was a moment that deeply affected the Romantic critic Hazlitt, who in a review in The Morning Chronicle (14 March 1814) said that he thought the revelation “the finest commentary that was ever made on Shakespeare. It explained the character at once (as he meant it), as one of disappointed hope, of bitter regret, of affection suspended, not obliterated, by the distractions of the scene around him!” As Hazlitt also noted, Kean’s innovation “had an electrical effect on the house” (Farley-Hills 1996, 112). —Alan Young, Hamlet and the Visual Arts, 1709-1900