by Tana Wojczuk
The public spectacle of Charlotte’s Boston funeral was only the beginning of the national mourning that followed her death. In New York, nearly ten thousand people gathered in the streets for a candlelight vigil. It would have been difficult to find a newspaper that did not carry her obituary. All repeated the up-from-her-bootstraps story of a difficult childhood, a failure in New Orleans, and a remarkable success in London. Charlotte was compared to the best male actors of her age, and more than once to Beethoven.
She was even compared to Napoleon: “Thus we see that Charlotte Cushman did something more than walk upon the stage with a fine talent, and turn the world upside down at once. She did, indeed, what Napoleon did on another scale; she conquered circumstance; and she did it with laborious effort and indomitable will,” declared Harper’s Bazaar. “There was hardly a hearthstone among the English-speaking families of the world,” wrote one reporter, “where her name was not a household word.”
In life she had been famous, but in death she became a myth, one of the “Titanic beings, capable of lifting the drama to the place it held when in the old Greek amphitheaters beside the sea no roof intervened between the players and the sky above them,” as Harper’s Bazaar put it in a feature, published a month after her death, on March 18, 1876. Onstage, the writer explained, she had merged seamlessly with her characters, and in memory she fused with them entirely, making them “new beings.” She even usurped the authors of the plays themselves. Charles Dickens’s character Nancy was remembered as “the character [Cushman] made famous,” while “her Meg Merrilies was something beyond the wild woman of Walter Scott’s imagining. The indignation and defiance and pathos of her Queen Katharine made a magnificent apparition that escapes us when simply reading Shakespeare at home.”
In mourning Charlotte Cushman, America also mourned its youth, forever obscured behind the fog of war: “To see her Romeo was to see the height of love and youth and joy, the very apotheosis of tragic loss at last, that made old veins tremble with the impulse of young blood spinning through them, as if it were night and summer and youth in Italian gardens and under Italian skies.”
“Into a face that every man called ugly,” the Harper’s Bazaar feature continued, “she gathered a divine sweetness and strength that every woman called beauty.” Her life was held up as a model for women across the world. Her success had been “snatched from the fate that has brought women so little… something silencing to the vast defamatory tongue that declares women of so small purpose.” Charlotte’s career had proved them all wrong. Since she was a girl, she had been confident of her larger purpose, and when she failed she drove herself forward anyway, creating a life of daring adventure.
epilogue
Culture is not a fixed condition,
it is the unremitting interaction
between the past and the present.
—Lawrence Levine
But even as Charlotte was being eulogized, she was being forgotten. The late nineteenth century had been a decade of steady progress for women, including legal protections for married women, programs to keep poor women out of prostitution, and new women-only universities, but these advances had created a backlash among socially conservative critics in America and Victorian England.
To these critics, Charlotte’s life was useful only as a morality tale, edited to show the most convenient and teachable moments. Many Victorian writers expressed surprise that she had been so successful despite her “plainness” and her “manly” appearance. Actors with whom she had competed for men’s roles wrote in relief that women would no longer “push us from our seats.” Shortly after Charlotte’s death, her former friend George Vandenhoff wrote that she was “neither man-woman nor woman-man,” but something unnatural and “epicene.” Another obituary said that while Miss Cushman was a fine actress, American culture had so advanced that women no longer had to sully themselves by playing men onstage. When Horace Howard Furness published the definitive New Variorum of Macbeth, an anthology of writing by and about prominent actors associated with the play, he did not mention Charlotte Cushman once. Despite living for most of her life around sculptors, no public statue of Charlotte was ever commissioned. But the people who had seen her perform never forgot, and wrote in their own memoirs about the night they saw Charlotte Cushman as Romeo, Lady Macbeth, Meg, Nancy, Queen Katharine, or Hamlet. Then, for a time, she disappeared.
* * *
After Charlotte’s death, the American public turned away from Shakespeare. Charlotte’s genius made Shakespeare come alive for her audience, but on her death critics doubted “whether any amount of histrionic art or genius [would] be sufficient to keep Shakespeare always on the stage.” Americans were more focused on work and individual success. They worked longer hours and were more exhausted during their leisure time. They wanted entertainment that asked less of them. Shakespeare gradually receded, “from congregated crowds to solitary and individual readers; more and more he becomes to thoughtful minds the POET and less and less the PLAYER.” The winged communication made possible by the telegraph and popular presses also provided new opportunities for entertainment and distraction, while industrialization and longer workweeks meant less time to cram that entertainment into. Before long, Americans were more likely to encounter the Bard at a university than in the theatre.
For nearly a century, the trend toward reading rather than performing Shakespeare continued, doing no good to Shakespeare, who became associated with high culture and was avoided as a difficult text. Once a popular entertainment, now Shakespeare became canonized, and academics could make a living providing an exegesis of his work, making Shakespeare scholars into a kind of priesthood.
But somewhere around the 1960s the trend began to reverse. Shakespeare festivals began to proliferate across the country. Many were free, and all offered affordable ways for working-class Americans to see Shakespeare onstage. Americans have always been Shakespearean, and Shakespeare came to America in the first settlers’ saddlebags. The love affair was rekindled, and by the 400th anniversary of the Bard’s birth there were more Shakespeare festivals in America than anywhere else in the world.
Charlotte’s legacy is present, though invisible, in every one of these performances. She was the first to prove that an American could interpret Shakespeare onstage. She resurrected the original text of Romeo and Juliet, and her interpretations of many of Shakespeare’s characters survive today. She inspired generations of women to wear the breeches, on- and offstage.
It’s springtime in New York, and the Angel’s wings are covered in dogwood blooms. Swan boats float by on the lake, while tourists underdressed for the chill take photographs of themselves standing in front of The Angel of the Waters. The Bethesda Fountain was unveiled in the spring of 1873 in front of a large crowd. Some critics complained the Angel did not look womanly enough, her strong thighs and broad shoulders making her look like a servant girl “jumping over stepping stones,” with “a distinctly male head,” others found the overall impression a confusing mix of male and female. But the audience adored the statue, as they had its inspiration. It remains a secret memorial to the Greatest American Actress.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to my parents, Niko and Michael, for their inspiration, love, and support and for giving me early access to art of all kinds, including taking me to Shakespeare festivals from a young age. Thank you to my sister, Carla, a true artist and my first friend. To other courageous women in my family: my grandmothers, Sarah and Signe; my aunts, Ann and Annie. My love, Alexander Landfair, for being married to this book as well as to me, and for being a caring partner and coparent who moved mountains (and toddlers) so I could have time to write. My son, Rowan, for his humor, sensitivity, and hunger for stories. My family-in-law Barbara, James, and David Landfair and Matt Taylor-Gross. My dear friends and writing companions Rachel Riederer, Meaghan Winter, Abigail Rabinowitz, Maggie Sowell, Julie Cohen, and Belinda Mckeon for their wisdom, levity, and encouragement. Thank you to my wond
erful agent, Kiele Raymond, and amazing editor, Julianna Haubner, for believing in Charlotte. Thank you also to the team at Avid Reader, in particular Alexandra Pirimani, Allie Lawrence, and Morgan Hoit.
Thank you to Nicole Wallack, Sue Mendelsohn, Kristine Dahl, Patricia O’Toole, Aaron Ritzenberg, Glenn Gordon, and Bridget Potter for their friendship and generosity; their ongoing support and advice have been essential to this book. Thank you to Stacy Shiff, Margo Jefferson, Richard Locke, Arthur Phillips, Katherine Rowland, Amy Brady, Joel Whitney, Michael Archer, and the late Michael Janeway. To James Shapiro for many conversations about American Shakespeare and for being an early supporter of this book. To Jane Ackermann for excellent research assistance and providing loving childcare so I could bang my head against this manuscript. Thank you to the amazing people at Tin House who have nurtured so many writers: Holly MacArthur, Rob Spillman, Elissa Schappell, Michelle Wildgen, Win McCormack, and others. Thank you also to Andi Winette at The Believer, Michelle Legro at Lapham’s Quarterly, Michael Knight at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and the Global Scholars Institute at NYU.
Thank you to my Guernica family and to my colleagues at Columbia and NYU. To my teachers in and out of school: Art Lande, Jack Collum, Isolde Stewart, Kay Cook, Doug Berger, Stephen Weeks, Mike Parker, and John Zola. Thank you to my students, who have so many stories of their own to tell.
To Amy Thomas, Jennifer Heath, EJ Meade, and Frank and Viki Solomon for opening their homes to me during the writing of this book. To Paul Prescott and Paul Edmondson at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust for inviting me along on their Great American Shakespeare Road Trip. The following people helped during critical stages in the research process: Matthew Wittmann at Harvard’s Houghton Theatre Library, Meghan Carafano at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Jennifer Lee at Columbia University’s rare books and manuscripts division, Kenneth Cohen at the Smithsonian National Museum for American History, the librarians at the Schlesinger Library, Alexander Nemerov, Tom Bogar, Faye Charpentier, Barbara Wallace Grossman, Robin Rausch, and many, many others.
About the Author
Tana Wojczuk is an editor at Guernica and teaches at New York University, where she has been a Global Research Initiative fellow. She has written for the New York Times, Tin House, BOMB, The Believer, Vice, and elsewhere. Wojczuk holds an MFA from Columbia University. She was a finalist for the Gulf Coast Prize in Nonfiction and a poetry fellow at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation and the Tin House Summer Workshop. Originally from Boulder, Colorado, she lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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Notes on Sources
The Charlotte Cushman papers in the Library of Congress contain thousands of letters and many of Cushman’s personal scrapbooks; even bad notices were preserved with care. That these letters survive is remarkable. Cushman, like many nineteenth-century luminaries, preferred to keep her public and private lives separate and consigned most of her personal correspondence to the fire. But her lover of many years and later daughter-in-law, Emma Crow, ignored Cushman’s repeated requests to “burn this letter.” It is thanks to Crow’s loving rebellion that we have this wealth of material on one of the greatest American actresses. This period is explored in detail in Lisa Merrill’s book When Romeo Was a Woman: Charlotte Cushman and Her Circle of Female Spectators. Thank you in particular to Walter Zvonchenko at the Library of Congress. The work of Lawrence Levine was especially transformative, as was the work of Bruce McConachie.
Materials that speak to Cushman as an artist—her goals, methods, the high and low points of her career, what she meant to her audiences—are scattered across the country and across the globe. The Folger Shakespeare Library houses several of Cushman’s original playbills, as well as letters and reviews that help establish her as a prime mover in America’s love affair with Shakespeare. The Houghton Theatre Library at Harvard was essential in reconstructing Cushman’s nineteenth-century context. Their archives also hold letters to Cushman from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow about a play he wanted to write for her, and theatrical ephemera including the “Macready dagger.” Smithsonian curator Kenneth Cohen’s article “The Woman Who Would Be Cardinal” alerted me to the existence of several of Cushman’s original costumes in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. These costumes, one of which was once preserved in arsenic, gave me a valuable glimpse of Cushman onstage. The Annie Fields papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society and Harriet Hosmer papers at the Schlesinger Library helped illuminate Cushman’s friendships with other women artists.
Columbia University’s rare books and manuscripts division at Butler Library preserves Cushman’s only extant diary, a tiny, pocket-size journal bound in red leather. The Morgan Library archives contain correspondence between Charles Dickens and William Macready about Cushman. The Thomas Sully journals at the New York Public Library rare books and manuscripts division helped fill in details about Cushman’s life with Rosalie Sully’s family.
The New England Historical society kindly provided copies of their Cushman letters as did the National Library of Scotland. The New York Historical Society houses letters from Cushman’s early years, and the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts is a treasure trove of material on New York theatre and contains reviews of Cushman’s roles not found elsewhere. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle digital archives were useful in locating Walt Whitman’s early reviews of Cushman. The Seward House Museum generously shared material about Cushman found in Fanny Seward’s diary. Jessy Randall at Colorado College was a great help in pointing me to and sharing the papers of Helen Hunt Jackson and the many letters between Jackson and Cushman in the archive.
In New Orleans, I discovered that the site of the St. Charles Theatre is now a Marriott, but maps of nineteenth-century New Orleans digitized by the Louisiana Historical Society made it possible to piece together the city as Cushman knew it. In Boston, Cushman’s residences no longer stand, but you can find tours that will lead you through her old stomping grounds. In New York, the Bowery and Park Theatres are long gone, but the lively theatrical culture they inspired remains. A fellowship from New York University’s Global Research Initiative supported research in Italy, which filled in important details about the female artist colony Cushman helped create in Rome.
prologue
“She is the rage”: George C. Foster, New York by Gaslight and Other Urban Sketches (California: University of California Press, 1990), 151.
An enormous crystal chandelier: The Cambridge Guide to American Theatre, Eds. Don B. Wilmeth and Tice L. Miller (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
“American Queen of Tragedy”: “Charlotte Cushman,” New York Herald, November 21, 1874.
“Shakespeare!”: Richard Henry Stoddard, The Poems of Richard Henry Stoddard (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Library, 2005), 405.
“our Charlotte”: Foster, New York By Gaslight, 149.
“I was, by a press of circumstances”: William Thompson Price, A Life of Charlotte Cushman (New York: Brentano’s, 1894), 169.
“take me quickly at any moment”: Clara Erskine Clement Waters, Charlotte Cushman (Boston, Massachusetts: James R. Osgood and Company, 1882), 105.
“rockets set up all the way”: Emma Stebbins, Charlotte Cushman: Her Letters and Memories of Her Life (Boston, Massachusetts: James R. Osgood and Company, 1879), 265.
“
What is or can be the record of an actress”: Ibid., 11.
“towering grandeur of her genius”: Walt Whitman, “About Acting,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 14, 1846.
“Saw Charlotte Cushman and had a stage-struck fit”: Louisa May Alcott, Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters and Journals (Boston, Massachusetts: Roberts Brothers, 1892), 99.
“that these dead shall not have died in vain”: Abraham Lincoln, “Gettysburg Address,” Nicolay copy, Library of Congress, 1863.
“incarnate power”: William Winter, Other Days (New York: Moffat, Yard and Company, 1908), 152–53, quoted in Sharon Marcus, The Drama of Celebrity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 45.
chaper one: The First Disaster
“The effect of democracy”: Alexis de Toqueville, Democracy in America: Complete and Unabridged Volumes I and II (New York: Random House, 2004), 752, originally published in 1835.
America was considered a “vulgar” nation: Ibid., 183. He calls Americans vulgar no less than thirteen times. Also see Fanny Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832); Charles Dickens, American Notes (1850). Also Simon Linguet (1780) quoted in Barry Rubin and Judith Kolp Rubin, Hating America, A History (London: Oxford University Press, 2004), 23.
“a good singer, a good scholar”: Henry Wyles Cushman, “Genealogy of the Cushmans,” Library of Congress, Charlotte Cushman Papers.
