Fanny Kemble and Pierce Butler - pbs.org.
Robie has a grass-roots approach to spreading Kemble’s story, taking her one-woman play, “The Emancipation of Fanny Kemble,” to college campuses and small theaters around the nation.
Fanny Kemble (1809-1893). Portrait by Thomas Sully (1783-1872), 1834.Courtesy Wikimedia Commons. Frances Anne Kemble (27 November 1809 - 15 January 1893) was an English poet and a well-known actress, who also wrote plays, travel literature, works about the theatre, and 11 volumes of memoirs.
Fanny Kemble (1809-93) was the niece of two Shakespearean tragedians, Sarah Siddons and Siddons's brother, John Philip Kemble. Her father and her French mother were also actors.
Fanny Kemble was a noted London actress, but she preferred to write. When she did an American tour in 1832 she met and married Pierce Butler, a Georgia plantation owner. That experience darkened as she sank into the horrors of slavery at close quarters. The marriage foundered, but her writings on slavery emerged to rally abolitionists some.
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The Play. As the title page of the play's 1597 edition tells us, Romeo and Juliet was a popular success in its day: '.it hath been often (with great applause) plaid publiquely'.Shakespeare designed it to be played in daylight on the simple thrust stage of an Elizabethan playhouse, where the rear balcony provided Juliet's bedroom window and a trapdoor in the stage was her tomb.
February 26, 1839 Fanny Kemble Diary Entry on Inability to Help Slaves. On St. Simons Island, Fanny Kemble Butler did what she could for her husband’s slaves, but Pierce Butler felt that was doing too much and ordered her to stop. In one of the most poignant entries of her entire journal, Fanny described the depression, distress, and helplessness she now felt.