by Tana Wojczuk
“most remarkable pieces of acting ever witnessed”: Pittsburgh Morning Post, April 22, 1858, 3.
“lovemaking, as practiced by the other sex”: Mercury (Liverpool), January 18, 1847. Quoted in Merrill, “Charlotte Cushman,” 155.
Knowles was steeped in Shakespeare: Robin O. Warren, Women on Southern Stages 1800–1865: Performance, Gender and Identity in a Golden Age of American Theater (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016).
Charlotte reminded him of the famous British tragedian: Manchester Guardian, May 20, 1846.
“Charlotte’s was a character”: “The Misses Cushman,” Musical World, October 10, 1846.
“all in a blaze of enthusiasm”: Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh Carlyle, Brent E. Kisner, ed. The Carlyle Letters Online [CLO] (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2007–2016).
Charlotte sent a copy of Eliza’s poems: Geraldine Jewsbury to Charlotte Cushman, nd, Library of Congress, Charlotte Cushman Papers. Quoted in Merrill, When Romeo Was a Woman, 151.
“If you ever quarrel”: Ibid.
She searched Charlotte’s face: Eliza Cook, “To Charlotte Cushman: On Seeing Her Play Bianca in Milman’s Tragedy of Fazio,” in Poems (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 1861). Detail about Eliza growing ill from breakup with Charlotte is quoted in Merrill, When Romeo Was a Woman.
“Darling,” she wrote to a young actress: Charlotte Cushman to “Dearest,” Newcastle on Tyne, December 9, 1845, Library of Congress, Charlotte Cushman Papers. Merrill’s research points to a woman named Sarah Anderson as the recipient of the letter.
“I ought to answer immediately”: Charles Dickens to William Charles Macready, June 29, 1848, Morgan Library and Museum, Rare Books and Manuscripts.
“sell her soul”: Merrill, When Romeo Was a Woman, 159.
chapter eleven: The Greatest American Actress
“I have had a very interesting American visitor”: Quoted in Henry Chorley, Letters of Mary Russell Mitford (London: Second Series, RB Bentley, 1872), Vol. 1, 220.
“What a wonderful creature Miss Cushman is”: Thomas Higginson, Letters and Journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson 1846–1906 (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1921).
“Of course the mother [meant] to intimidate me and mine”: Charlotte Cushman to Benjamin Webster, January 31, nd, Folger Shakespeare Library.
criticizing the “stupid farces”: Charlotte Cushman to John Perry, October 14, 1847, New York Public Library, MSS Main.
“You seem to have no stars”: Ibid.
“I purpose coming to America in August next”: Ibid.
“a clear half the house each night”: Quoted in Merrill, Romeo Was a Woman, 163.
“I forgot to tell you that we met Miss Cushman”: Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Arabella Barrett, October 22, 1852, New York Public Library, MSS Main. Quoted in Robert Browning, Dearest Isa: Robert Browning’s Letters to Isa Blagden, Ed. Eric McAleer (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1951), 26.
“the greatest American Actress”: Daily Morning Post (Pittsburgh), August 10, 1849.
competing performances of Macbeth: Nigel Cliff, The Shakespeare Riots: Revenge, Drama and Death in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Random House, 2007).
If it was, as some said, a restaging of the Revolutionary War: Bruce McConachie, quoted in “The Astor Place Riot: Shakespeare as a Flashpoint for Class Conflict in 1849,” Shakespeare and Beyond, Folger Shakespeare Library, May 9, 2017.
“out on the open prairie”: “Charlotte Cushman,” nd (likely published in 1876 as a reminiscence of her life), New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
“An it is herself that is coming now be jabers!”: Ibid. This area is now the site of multi-hundred-megawatt wind farms.
“felt the power of her personal magnetism”: Ibid.
“as cordially as if it had been dressed in immaculate kid”: Ibid.
“vague sense of sadness”: Julia Markus, Across an Untried Sea: Uncovering Lives Hidden in the Shadow of Convention and Time (New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2013).
“selfishly sacrificing” Max’s happiness to her own: Charlotte Cushman to “Darling” (Matilda Hays), May 11, 1849. Library of Congress, Charlotte Cushman papers.
paraphrasing Leach, Bright Particular Star, 241.
“foreign stamp of approbation”: Foster, New York by Gaslight.
“thousand mouths [are] feeding on me”: Charlotte Cushman to “Darling” (Sarah Anderton,) quoted in Merrill, When Romeo Was a Woman, 170.
chapter twelve: Rome
“with more sunbeams”: Nathaniel Hawthorne to Grace Greenwood [Sarah Jane Clarke Lippincott], April 17, 1852, New York Public Library Digital Collections.
“detestation of pen and ink”: Nathaniel Hawthorne to Grace Greenwood [Sara Jane Clarke Lippincott], April 17, 1852, New York Public Library Digital Collections.
“After the impression of her own face”: Ibid.
women in the house liked him so much: Merrill, When Romeo Was a Woman, 173.
“if she has inventive powers as an artist”: Henry James, William Wetmore Story and His Friends (London: William Blackwood, 1903), 257.
her voice sounded savage and too masculine: Ibid., 255.
one guest felt that anyone who sat down at their “Apician feasts”: “Charlotte Cushman: An Interesting Reminiscence from Her Life in Rome Twenty Years Ago,” nd, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Billy Rose Theatre Collection.
“just touching the keys so as to give a background to the picture”: Ibid.
“I can never suffer so much again”: Charlotte Cushman to Emma Crow Cushman, nd, Library of Congress, Charlotte Cushman Papers.
black silk velvet, skillfully embroidered: Smithsonian Museum of American History, archive of costumes worn by Charlotte Cushman.
It was April 1857: Recounted by Annie Hampton Brewster in her papers at the Boston Historical Society. Some of this also quoted in Merrill, When Romeo Was a Woman, 183.
“like fishwives”: Ibid.
suing her for more than $2,000: Approximately $60,000 today.
she became more ladylike: Merrill, When Romeo Was a Lady, 190.
chapter thirteen: The Coming Storm
“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.
“an actress—not even second rate…”: Daniel J. Watermeier, American Tragedian: The Life of Edwin Booth (St. Louis: University of Missouri Press, 2015), 66.
“little sweetheart”: Ibid., 62.
“peculiar intimacy”: Adam Badeau, “A Night with the Booths,” quoted in Watermeier, American Tragedian, 63.
“felt that her fate was to marry him”: Fanny Seward, Diary, March 11, 1864, William Henry Seward Papers, A.S51, Rare Books, Special Collections and Preservation, River Campus Libraries, University of Rochester.
“never having seen it until then”: Merrill, When Romeo Was a Woman, 206.
“Darling mine, I wish you would burn my letters”: Charlotte Cushman to Emma Crow, June 20, 1858, Library of Congress, Charlotte Cushman Papers.
“a little Charlotte”: Emma Crow Cushman to Charlotte Cushman, Library of Congress, Charlotte Cushman Papers.
chapter fourteen: Civil Wars
“Standing beside the flag in front of his marble fireplace”: Leach, Bright Particular Star. (This meeting is correlated by a letter from William Seward to Lincoln in the Library of Congress Lincoln Papers and in a letter from Charlotte Cushman to William Seward in the same collection.)
felt his children’s education would not be complete: Henry Swift to William Winter, October 4, 1906, Folger Shakespeare Library. There are a few problems with Swift’s story. Cushman sailed for America in 1861 and again in 1863 but the dates of her travels don’t match up with the battles Swift describes. Swift dates this voyage around the battle of Antietam, which was fought in September 1862, and Lee’s temporary retreat to Virginia and march into Maryland shor
tly thereafter. Swift remembered meeting Cushman all his life, and he was eighty-six when he wrote to William Winter. It’s possible Swift conflated the battles of the war, or transposed one of his many voyages onto another.
a large, two-story red brick building: Glyndon Van Deusen, William Henry Seward (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967).
hoped to be a writer: Fanny Seward, Diary, Seward House Collections, Seward Family Papers at the University of Rochester.
“massive brows”: Ibid.
“with the ease and air of habit”: Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2006), 610–11.
“so overspread with sadness”: Ibid., 6.
“I think nothing equals Macbeth”: James Shapiro, Shakespeare in America: An Anthology from the Revolution to Now (New York: Library of America, 2014).
“Lincoln was eager to know”: Goodwin, Team of Rivals, 611–12.
A few days before the performance: Seward, Diary.
“he saw himself as an avenging Brutus”: Folger Shakespeare Library podcast Men of Letters: Shakespeare’s Influence on Abraham Lincoln.
“dare-devil”: Charlotte Cushman to Emma Crow Cushman, May 6, 1865, Library of Congress, Charlotte Cushman Papers.
A doctor was called to identify the body: William May to Captain Dudley Knox, “The positive identification of the body of John Wilkes Booth,” May 18, 1925, New York University Archives.
“We have heard with mingled emotions of horror and regret”: Draft by Charlotte Cushman, nd, Library of Congress, Charlotte Cushman Papers. Published without crediting her in Memorial Record of the Nation’s Tribute to Abraham Lincoln, Ed. Benjamin Franklin Morris (WH & OH Morrison, 1865).
“worn out broken wrinkled lunatic.”: Charlotte Cushman to Helen Hunt Jackson, July 18, 1869, Helen Hunt Jackson Papers, Colorado College.
Charlotte refused anesthetic: Reported by the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini to a friend, in Giuseppe Mazzini, Letters to an English Family Vol. I (Devon, UK: John Lane, 1920), 277.
“Newport is the place to live”: Charlotte Cushman to Kate Field, April 1865, Boston Historical Society.
After the war, Newport became a destination: John Sterngass, First Resorts: Pursuing Pleasure at Saratoga Springs, Newport and Coney Island (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).
chapter fifteen: Villa Cushman
“Nursing a nostalgia on the sun-warmed rocks”: Henry James, “The Sense of Newport,” Harpers, August 1906.
“my sea and my sunsets”: Quoted in Alexander Nemerov, Acting in the Night: Macbeth and the Places of the Civil War (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2010).
“It is cruel and wrong”: Helen Hunt Jackson to Emily Dickinson, Emily Dickinson Museum, Amherst, circa 1884.
“I don’t believe any of our American men”: Charlotte Cushman to Helen Hunt Jackson, August 18, 1871, Helen Hunt Jackson Papers, Colorado College.
“the gentlemanly little person”: Ibid., December 6, 1869.
“immediate present seized, held, grabbed, clutched”: Ibid., August 18, 1871.
“I won’t give up reading”: Charlotte Cushman obituary, New York Herald, February 1, 1876.
“When I wish to be antediluvian”: James, William Wetmore Story, 277.
“see every fibre of thatch on the roof”: Higginson, Letters and Journals, January 1872.
“magician”: George T. Ferris, March 21, 1874, Appleton’s Journal, reprinted in Waters, Charlotte Cushman, 151.
chapter sixteen: Contrary Winds
“Come auntie”: Charlotte Cushman Obituary, Harper’s Bazaar, August 26, 1876.
“profusely ornamented”: Charlotte Cushman obituary, Chicago Daily Tribune, February 24, 1876.
“We find little difference”: Charlotte Cushman obituary, New York Times, February 19, 1876.
“Thus we see that Charlotte Cushman”: “The Career of Charlotte Cushman,” Harper’s Bazaar, March 18, 1876.
“There was hardly a hearthstone”: Charlotte Cushman obituary, New York Times, February 19, 1876.
“Into a face that every man called ugly”: “The Career of Charlotte Cushman.”
epilogue
“Culture is not a fixed condition”:Levine, Highbrow / Lowbrow.
“neither man-woman nor woman-man”: Likely paraphrased from Beaumont and Fletcher’s play Love’s Cure or the Martial Maid, about a fierce girl who takes her gentle brother’s place as a warrior.
“whether any amount of histrionic art or genius”: “Charlotte Cushman: Some Notes Concerning Her and Her Appearance in Boston Saturday Evening,” New York Times, October 8, 1863.
than anywhere else in the world: From research conducted by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.
Selected Bibliography
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Bogar, Thomas Thomas Hamblin and the Bowery Theatre: The New York Reign of “Blood and Thunder” Melodramas. New York: Springer, 2017.
Bordman, Gerald and Thomas S. Hischak. Oxford Companion to American Theatre. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Brasher, Thomas L. Whitman as Editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970.
Browning, Robert and Edward C. McAleer, ed. Dearest Isa: Robert Browning’s Letters to Isa Blagden. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1951.
Child, Lydia Maria Francis. Letters from New York. New York: C.S. Francis & Co., 1846.
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Cook, Eliza. Poems. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 1861.
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