WITH a dramatic reading of Henry VIII, Fanny Kemble (Mrs. Frances Kemble Butler until her divorce was finalized later in the same year) closed a series of one-woman performances from the stage of New York’s Stuyvesant Institute. After solo renditions before audiences in Boston, New York City and Brooklyn through the winter and spring of 1849, the London-born star went on to present Shakespeare’s plays in other cities, leaving throngs of admirers, some detractors, and not a few imitators in her wake.1
The sensation caused by these performances was hard to overlook. In a column penned for the Newark Daily Advertiser in May, William A. Whitehead gave a somewhat grudging approval. “All this is well,” he wrote; Kemble had enabled new audiences, including many who shunned the theater “on principle,” to discover Shakespeare’s glories undistracted by “the trick and tinsel of the stage….” Even a listener sensitive to the true genius of his plays, their capacity to “hold the mirror up to nature,” was afforded “greater scope for true discernment … and increased facilities for study and reflection….”2
Whitehead hoped these “refined and intellectual entertainments” would lead, not to enlarged audiences for productions of Shakespeare, or even for such public performances as Kemble’s, but to an appreciation for reading in the home, and for reading aloud. Family ties would be stronger, the “winter fireside” more attractive if every household had “an accomplished reader” properly instructed and practiced in the art of making plain an author’s meaning. This was not the negligent, listless, barely intelligible reader “such as our schools and colleges annually turn out upon the world….” The voices even of distinguished orators seemed to fail “the moment they look upon a book,” and clergymen read every text “in the same monotonous tone” and “unexpressive manner.”
Unabashedly “proud of the human voice,” Whitehead encouraged a modulation that varied the “utterance, time, and emphasis” of words. He urged that syllables be enunciated carefully and correctly, spoken from the chest rather than the mouth or throat, letting “the sharp and wiry whisperings of the latter” yield to “the full and deep tones of the former.” Cultivation of these lower notes he believed especially beneficial “to females, and those much employed in sedentary occupations,” and it would render the experience more pleasant for speakers and listeners alike.
The rather striking attention in this piece to elocution shouldn’t obscure the fact that it is rooted, not in extemporaneous speech, but in the reading of texts. Whitehead’s age was awash in ink, his intellectual life centered on knowledge produced and disseminated through books, journals, newspapers and libraries, and the human voice represented a God-given instrument for faithful and meaningful interpretation of the printed word.
From “habits of particularity” developed in his youth,3 Whitehead acquired a predilection for what could be observed and measured, but this in no way diminished his lifelong attachment to less empirical sorts of reading matter. From boyhood he collected fine writing from newspapers, pasting the clippings into scrapbooks of which not an inch was left unfilled. As an adult he contributed notices of new novels to the Newark Daily, and many lengthier articles on literary topics. Passages excerpted from that most inventive genre, poetry, ornament his writings on the widest array of subjects far more frequently than any other kind of text, including scripture.
For his writing and, by implication, his reading, Whitehead drew almost exclusively from works in English. Favorite British versifiers of prior centuries such as James Thomson and William Cowper yielded to poets of his parents’ generation, the likes of Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron, who themselves gradually gave way to his contemporaries, both British and American. Whitehead found special resonance in the “fireside” poets, captained by Longfellow and William Cullen Bryant. Although Bryant’s output slowed after becoming editor-in-chief of the New York Evening Post, he made that paper a vessel for the work of younger poets.4 Whitehead, in his own sphere, aspired to and promoted a similar use of daily journalism for literary ends.
One writer met those ends more than any, the one James Fenimore Cooper called “the great author of America, as he is of England.” Just as it appeared to Tocqueville that every “pioneer hut” in America harbored at least one volume of Shakespeare, so Shakespeare proved Whitehead’s most accessible, replete and resplendent treasury of word and thought.
Drawing from the Bard to encapsulate the fortunes of New Jersey’s first colonial governor, Whitehead reckoned him “in his public relations at least, ‘more sinned against than sinning’” (King Lear),5 and he foreshadowed the Revolution a century later, “importing change of times and states” (1 Henry VI).6 He portrayed the Havana coffee house where “merchants most do congregate” (The Merchant of Venice),7 and found for Perth Amboy, the capital of East New Jersey, no motto more fitting than the line, “More than I seem, and less than I was born to” (3 Henry VI).8 He even claimed an apt characterization of himself, “a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles” (The Winter’s Tale).9
Whitehead could employ Shakespeare to indulge in gentle mockery of parents who pressed their tin-eared daughters to play and sing: “tax them not, to slander music any more than once” (Much Ado About Nothing);10 to rue a forgotten friendship: “Blow! blow! thou winter wind, Thou art not so unkind As man’s ingratitude” (As You Like It);11 or to express his revulsion at the obliteration of a potter’s field: “Has this fellow no feeling of his business? … That skull had a tongue in it and could sing once” (Hamlet).12
Whitehead’s meteorological reviews, gracing the Daily month after month for nearly forty years, laid out weather phenomena and their variations often in a businesslike, almost utilitarian manner. But in the tradition of almanacs that interwove the natural cycles of the year with literary fragments, these monthly reports were a perfect small stage for Shakespeare’s buskin to tread on. An unusually warm November could not but evoke the strange interchange by the seasons of “their wonted liveries,” so that “the maz’d world … now knows not which is which” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream).13 Another warm stretch of November recalled “Saint Martin’s Summer, halcyons’ days” (1 Henry VI),14 while a bitter February blew in “eager air” (Hamlet) and a “wrathful, nipping cold” (2 Henry VI).15
To know Shakespeare was to be more alive to the drama of nature: the booming of “heaven’s artillery” heralded summer showers (The Taming of the Shrew);16 lightning flashes might be “precursors o’ the dreadful thunder claps” (The Tempest).17 Nature, in its turn, could make the poetry more real: a late July descent of flies “in unwonted numbers, adding to the discomfort occasioned by the heat,” corroborated the villainy of Iago’s ill wishes: “Plague him with flies; though that his joy be joy, Yet throw such changes of vexation on’t, As it may lose some color” (Othello).18 To declare a spell of weather the hottest ever (or for that matter the coldest, wettest, driest or most noxious) was to meet the meteorologist’s stern rebuttal, backed by his meticulous records and finished off with a pentameter: “Past and to come seem best; things present, worst” (2 Henry IV).19
Appointed to write occasional pieces about literature, Whitehead would sometimes pass judgment on poetical works, but only those of his own day. The Shakespearean canon was safe from any reproach of his. Yet he was moved at least once to question whether the received text represented what Shakespeare actually meant.
An article in the Cyclopædia of American Literature, a publication appearing in 1855, complimented the learning of the Puritan divine Cotton Mather with a quotation from the fourth act of Henry VIII. Drawing an implicit comparison with the fallen Cardinal Wolsey, it ran:
From his cradle,
He was a scholar, and a ripe and good one.20
Seeing the article reprinted in the Evening Post, Whitehead dashed off a letter that appeared the next day. “I am aware,” he wrote, “that the punctuation in some editions of the play justifies such reading; but does the sense of the passage?”21
The punctuation appeared to him defective, and the lines misconstrued.22 The entire passage should read instead:
This cardinal,
Though from an humble stock, undoubtedly
Was fashioned to much honor from his cradle.
He was a scholar, and a ripe and good one.
Whitehead had an ally, albeit not a living one, in the first scholar ever to produce a critical edition of the complete plays. Lewis Theobald in 1732 had shifted the full stop after “honor” to the end of the line: “That Wolsey should be a ripe Scholar from his Cradle, is most extraordinary and incredible,” he noted, rejecting earlier versions of the passage as “most absurdly pointed.”23
Another writer to the Post, who signed his letter simply W., took issue with Whitehead’s critique: Shakespeare’s meaning was plain no matter where the period was placed. Should Wolsey be thought “fashioned to much honor” from infancy, or from infancy “a scholar,” either statement was an exaggeration, but neither seemed “unpoetical or wrong.”24
Whether Whitehead, with neither leisure nor learning enough to press his point, held onto his view or came around to the opposing one isn’t known. The punctuation to which he objected happened to be that of the First Folio, which most modern editors adopt, dismissing Theobald’s disagreement.25 But we may be sure Whitehead’s was not a frivolous challenge, proceeding, as it did, from a devoted reader of the Bard, who looked “not on his picture, but his book.”
Copyright © 2023-2025 Gregory J. Guderian
[1] Kemble’s reading of Henry VIII on Saturday, 28 April 1849, was the last in a second series staged that year at the Stuyvesant Institute. The Evening Post, numbering these appearances “among the highest and purest intellectual entertainments that has ever been vouchsafed us,” nonetheless admitted to finding “room for censure,” it being impossible “that a single individual could personate with the same fidelity and truthfulness, the wondrous range of characters which was presented us from seventeen different plays.” The evening post (New York, N.Y.) 30 April 1849 2:3-4. Not all newspapers thought so highly of Kemble’s feat; see e.g. “Shaksperean readings and fashionable vulgarity,” The weekly herald (New York, N.Y.) 28 April 1849 131:6. For background, see Gerald Kahan, “Fanny Kemble reads Shakespeare: her first American tour, 1849-50,” Theatre survey 24:1-2 (May 1983) 77-98.
[2] G. P., “Reading aloud,” Newark (N.J.) daily advertiser 25 May 1849 2:4. Whitehead gives more than a nod to an antitheatrical sentiment, common among certain classes and religious denominations, in which literature’s embodiment on the stage was thought to promote social upheaval and immorality. It’s worth noting that his article appeared just two weeks after the deadly Astor Place Riot, fueled by the enmity of two Shakespearean actors.
[3] Transcription of an unpublished memoir under the title “Childhood and youth of W. A. Whitehead 1810-1830,” of which copies are held by the Florida Keys History Center, Monroe County Library, Key West, Florida, and by the P. K. Yonge Library of Florida, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida; page 16 of the transcription contains the reference.
[4] See Allan Nevins, The Evening Post. A century of journalism (New York 1922; hereafter “Nevins, The Evening Post”) 134-136, 217.
[5] G. P., “Glimpses of the past in New Jersey. No. VIII.–Gov. Carteret,” Newark daily advertiser 5 April 1842 2:1-2.
[6] William A. Whitehead, Contributions to the early history of Perth Amboy and adjoining country, with sketches of men and events in New Jersey during the provincial era (New York 1856; hereafter “Whitehead, Contributions”) 325.
[7] G. P., “Letters from Havana.–No. VIII,” Newark daily advertiser 24 August 1838 2:1-2.
[8] G. P., “Amboy, and its history,” Newark daily advertiser 12 June 1849 2:1-2; cf. Whitehead, Contributions 50.
[9] G. P., “Flying machine–steam–the past,” Newark daily advertiser 6 July 1849 2:1.
[10] G. P., “Reading aloud.”
[11] G. P., “Glimpses of the past,” Newark daily advertiser 25 August 1849 2:4-5.
[12] “Bones,” Newark daily advertiser 30 March 1857 2:2. Sketches of the scene, an abandoned graveyard at East 50th Street and Fourth Avenue in New York City, appeared with “The old potter’s field–shameful indifference to the remains of the dead,” Frank Leslie’s illustrated newspaper 3:69 (4 April 1857) 276.
[13] W., “Meteorological report. No. CCCXXXI.–November 1870,” Newark daily advertiser 1 December 1870 2:3-4.
[14] W., “Meteorological report. No. CCLXXI.–November, 1865,” Newark daily advertiser 4 December 1865 2:2. The quotation is mistakenly ascribed to “Henry IV.”
[15] W., “Meteorological report for February, 1855,” Newark daily advertiser 1 March 1855 2:4.
[16] W., “Meteorological report. No. CCLXXIX.–July, 1866,” Newark daily advertiser 1 August 1866 2:4.
[17] W., “Meteorological report. No. CCLXVIII.–August, 1865,” Newark daily advertiser 1 September 1865 2:2.
[18] W., “Meteorological report. No. CCCLI–July, 1872,” Newark daily advertiser 1 August 1872 2:4.
[19] W., “Report of the weather for July, 1846,” Newark daily advertiser 1 August 1846 2:1. Whitehead calls the line “proverbial,” and it may indeed have been a commonplace already in Shakespeare’s day.
[20] “Increase Mather–Cotton Mather,” in Evert A. Duyckinck and George L. Duyckinck, Cyclopædia of American literature; embracing personal and critical notices of authors, and selections from their writings from the earliest period to the present day; with portraits, autographs, and other illustrations (2 vols. New York 1855) 1:(59-64) 60; reprinted (complete with footnotes) in The evening post 11 September 1855 1:1-3. The Duyckincks cited this excerpt as “the old reading of Shakespeare.”
[21] G. P., “‘A scholar from his cradle’,” The evening post 14 September 1855 2:2. Whitehead addressed his query ironically to “Friar Lubin,” an alias of John Bigelow, co-editor and co-owner of the Post. Writing under that pseudonym, Bigelow had brought to light the questionable editing practices of Jared Sparks, an historian of early America much admired by Whitehead. Rising to Sparks’s defense Whitehead had observed that “Friar Lubin,” the “erudite correspondent” of the Post, was said to be “more closely connected with that paper than the word ‘correspondent’ would imply.” G. P., “Washington’s writings,” Newark daily advertiser 12 April 1852 2:1. For the role of “Friar Lubin” in the Sparks controversy, see Nevins, The Evening Post 231-234, and Margaret Clapp, Forgotten first citizen: John Bigelow (Boston 1947) 75-77.
[22] “Defective punctuation perpetuates error marvelously,” wrote Whitehead, “constantly” producing false interpretations of scripture. Whitehead further pointed out that, by a comma mistakenly introduced into the Episcopal liturgy between the words “God” and “the Father, … the parental attributes of the Almighty are not extended to the earth and its inhabitants….” G. P., “‘A scholar from his cradle’.”
[23] The works of Shakespeare (7 vols. London 1732) 5:77 n29. The notorious falsifier John Payne Collier, “finding” the emendation already present in the hand of his “old corrector,” expressed astonishment “that so decided a blunder, as to represent that the Cardinal was a ripe and good scholar ‘from his cradle,’ should have been repeated over and over again ….” Notes and emendations to the text of Shakespeare’s plays, from early manuscript corrections in a copy of the folio, 1632, in the possession of J. Payne Collier, Esq. F.S.A. forming a supplemental volume to the works of Shakespeare by the same editor, in eight volumes, octavo (London 1853) 325. Theobald’s attention to such minutiæ was not, in the main, trivial: see Peter Seary, Lewis Theobald and the editing of Shakespeare (Oxford 1990) 167-170.
[24] The evening post 14 September 1855 2:2.
[25] The very authorship of the lines has been questioned. Even Fanny Kemble came to believe the “eulogium on Wolsey” that includes them should be ascribed to Shakespeare’s collaborator John Fletcher. Frances Anne Kemble, Notes upon some of Shakespeare’s plays (London 1882) 99.
An attractive presence 