This chapter takes as its point of departure public reaction to Kean’s January 1825 trial for “criminal conversation” with Charlotte Cox, the wife of London city alderman Robert Albion Cox, and his return to the Drury Lane stage the following week. With a view toward the field of periodical publishing described in chapters one and two, I argue that the publicity Kean generated not only in 1825 but throughout his career—what I call Kean’s “controversy”—illustrated the changing nature of theatrical experience in Britain. This change displays distinct class and gender dimensions, in which Kean’s low associations—manifested in his acting style and valued by the theater for the audience interest they generated—suggested to critics a looseness of moral and sexual identity. Fashioning himself as an interpreter rather than a straightforward orator of the dramatic text, Kean represented, in William Hazlitt’s formulation, a “radical” departure from earlier actors’ personifications of aristocratic cultural mastery. Responses to the 1825 trial, which included newspaper articles, journal reviews, court reports, literary travesties, and caricatures, display a British public’s attempts to come to terms with this social and cultural shift and its effect on contemporary notions of class and gender.