James Fennell was an English-born American actor and dramatist, one of the most erratic figures ever connected with the American stage.
Background
James Fennell was born in London of Welsh, Scotch, and Irish ancestry. His father, John Fennell, in the Pay Corps of the navy, who had lived in New York for some years, and his mother, a former Miss Brady, were, according to Fennell’s own statement, so indulgent that he early developed the vice of obstinacy.
Education
After some preliminary schooling he was sent to Eton at about thirteen, and then to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he enjoyed a frolicsome career—inadequate preparation for the church, for which his parents had destined him.
After leaving the university, Fennell undertook to study law in London, but, having contracted heavy gambling debts, he turned to the stage in an effort to recoup his losses.
Career
Given his first opportunity by John Jackson, manager of the Theatre Royal, Edinburgh, he made his début in June 1787, as Othello, a character which remained one of his principal rôles.
After a short engagement at Edinburgh, Thomas Harris, director of Covent Garden Theatre, London, accepted hint for a half dozen performances and then attempted to retain him for the coming season, but, being bound to Jackson, Fennell returned to Scotland for the winter.
At the end of this season a quarrel arose between hint and Woods, a favorite Scotch actor, over the matter of parts, and Fennell was compelled to leave the Edinburgh stage.
After some acting in the provinces, he returned to Covent Garden for a short engagement, but when differences of opinion necessitated his withdrawal, he started a weekly paper, the Theatrical Guardian, in which, during its brief existence, he professed to right all stage wrongs.
Following this sojourn he wrote A Review of the Proceedings at Paris during the Last Summer (1792).
In the summer of 1793, having signed a contract with Thomas Wignell, manager of the new Chestnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia, Fennell arrived in America.
At his Philadelphia debut, which, because of an epidemic of yellow fever, was delayed until February 19, 1794, he was received with great favor.
Accepted with equal cordiality by the social world, he soon found that his expenditures were exceeding his income.
To remedy the situation he patented a device for extracting salt from sea-water, induced many influential Philadelphians to invest in the project, and temporarily abandoned the stage.
But the enterprise failed and brought ruin upon its originator.
Fennell’s subsequent career was largely an alternation between the stage, where he always made money, and the salt-works, where he always lost it.
With amazing persistence he erected a succession of manufactories along the coast, but disaster invariably befell them, and he was repeatedly jailed—once for sixteen months—for fraudulent practises, although apparently he had no intent to deceive, being always one of the heaviest losers himself.
On September 8, 1797, Fennell made his first appearance in New York and won the enthusiastic approval of the audience.
Between 1800 and 1806 he played with some regularity at the Park Theatre, New York, but much of his time then, as throughout his whole life, was occupied with assorted and ill-fated projects— salt making, lectures on physics, lectures in defense of the Bible, a school of elocution, a boys’ school on the Eton model, a magazine, a Shakespeare concordance, etc.
In his later years ill-health and dissipation so weakened his powers that, when he took his farewell of the stage at Philadelphia in 1814 in the role of Lear, his decay matched that of the character he was impersonating.
In his prime Fennell was one of the most prominent tragedians in America.
Personality
Although his gigantic figure lacked grace and his powerful voice lacked flexibility, he possessed histrionic gifts which, if cultivated as assiduously as he cultivated salt, might have placed him at the very top of his profession.
As it was, he was sure of an audience whenever he chose to perform.