Shakespeare in a Divided America

by James Shapiro

  That was the warm-up act, delivered by the Tammany politician Edward Strahan. When he finished, Rynders spoke, excoriating Macready and claiming that citizens were killed “to please an aristocratic Englishman, backed by a few sycophantic Americans.” Mike Walsh, another incendiary speaker, followed. He told the crowd that this was about more than Forrest and Macready: “When the Opera House was opened,” he reminded the crowd, “it was restricted to those only who wore white kid gloves, such was the spirit of pride and presumption of the nabobs of the Fifteenth ward, who, led by the Mayor, have brought troops to fire upon the people. Who will take care of the families they have made desolate?” He ended the rally on an inflammatory note, interrupted by loud cries for vengeance from the crowd: “We owe it to ourselves, to our fellow-citizens, and to society, if ever there is a repetition of this shooting, to arm ourselves, and to call upon every man to arm himself.”

  Stirred by these orations and shouting “To the Opera House” and “Burn the den of the aristocracy,” five thousand protesters marched up Broadway toward Astor Place. The militia was ready and waiting. Hussars, dragoons, and artillery moved into position as soldiers cordoned off the area, blocking the march. For an hour or so, the outcome hung in the balance, as the protesters jammed the streets, set up their own barricades, and lit bonfires opposite the line of troops. The police tried forcing their way into the crowd to arrest ringleaders, but were beaten back. Finally, the militia leveled their muskets and the protesters were warned that if the bombardment of cobblestones didn’t stop, the troops would open fire. Further bloodshed was averted as the stone throwing ended. The soldiers then cleared the streets with fixed bayonet charges. The rioting was over.

  There were no winners in the Astor Place riots, which seem to have tarnished everyone and everything they touched. Macready skipped town, leaving his hotel before a lynch mob arrived, and sailed home from Boston. He would never perform in America again and soon retired from the stage. Though Forrest was careful to say little during the rioting, his reputation was damaged by it. While Rynders managed to avoid arrest, Buntline was jailed for a year for his role in the riots, and after his release resumed his writing career, specializing in dime novels.

  The violence at the Opera House brought into sharp relief the growing problem of income inequality in an America that preferred the fiction that it was still a classless society. A few days after the rioting ended, the New York correspondent for the Philadelphia Public Ledger wrote that the events at Astor Place left “behind a feeling to which this community has hitherto been a stranger—an opposition of classes—the rich and poor,” a “feeling that there is now in our country, in New York City, what every good patriot hitherto has considered it his duty to deny—a high and a low class.”

  Some saw an upside to the bloodshed, including the Whig newspaper the Courier and Enquirer. The willingness of the troops to fire on the protesters, the newspaper argued, was “an excellent advertisement to the capitalists of the old world, that they might send their property to New York and rely upon the certainty that it would be safe from the clutches of red republicanism, or chartists, or communionists of any description.” The message to the wealthy in Paris, Vienna, Venice, Berlin, Milan, and other European cities that had recently seen revolutionary violence was: bank here, where we shoot protesters.

  Others saw only social corrosion, not benefits. An editorial in the Tribune argued that “the evils that follow such a conflict do not end with the repairing of the damages, nor even with the sorrow of the dead. They penetrate into all the relations of industry and citizenship. They appear in the diminution of confidence in the silent and peaceful force of the law, in the weakening of neighborly feeling among the different classes of society.” Decades later, Henry James, who was a 6-year-old living on Fourteenth Street at the time, called Forrest’s willingness to “suffer his followers to organize the disgraceful scenes” at Astor Place “the instinctive response of barbarism to culture.”

  Historians have pointed to a number of other consequences, including the reorganization of the New York police force. Some have traced the fallout from the Astor Place riots to such reforms as the end of child labor, the institution of a ten-hour workday, better public education, and unionization. There was certainly a greater recognition of the need for shared public space: two years after the riots, in early May 1851, Woodhull’s successor as mayor, Ambrose Kingsland, proposed building a large park suited for “the wants of our citizens.” Though still conceived from the top down, Central Park would be carved out by the end of that decade. The bloody events of May 1849 had a sobering effect: there would not be another major outbreak of violence in the streets of New York City until the draft riots of 1863.

  When the historian Lawrence Levine reflected on the Astor Place riots in Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, in what remains the most influential account of Shakespeare in America, he reached two conclusions. The first is surely right: that what happened at the Opera House “was a struggle for power and cultural authority within theatrical space,” and “simultaneously an indication of and a catalyst for the cultural changes that came to characterize the United States at the end of the century.” But his other conclusion is unwarranted: that after Astor Place, theater “no longer functioned as an expressive form that embodied all classes with a shared public space, nor did Shakespeare much longer remain the common property of all Americans.” If anything, the story of these riots spoke, rather, to an intense desire by the middle and lower classes to continue sharing that space, and to oppose, violently if necessary, efforts to exclude them from it. Shakespeare continued to matter and would remain common cultural property in America. The transformations Levine describes would come, but not because of the riots, and not until after a Civil War in which Shakespeare would matter, to both sides, more than ever. What did change in the aftermath of Astor Place was that violent protests in theaters were no longer tolerated. When competing claims over freedom of speech collided, the right of actors to be heard would prevail over the right of protesters to shout them down. Forrest’s supporters lost that battle. Theatergoing in America would henceforth be a quieter and more passive experience.

  One of the most astute contemporary commentators on what the riots were ultimately about was Nathaniel Parker Willis, a popular writer who published his “After-Lesson of the Astor-Place Riot” two weeks after the events. While accepting that “the law is supreme,” he also believed that “wealth, in a republic, should be mindful where its luxuries offend.” He located the roots of the Astor Place riots not in a quarrel between actors, or between nations, but rather in the fatal decision by wealthy New Yorkers to change the rules: by “aristocratizing” the pit they had overstepped the “most jealously guarded line of human distinction.”

  The “Massacre Place Opera House” or “Dis-Astor Place,” as some now mockingly called it, did not survive as a theater for long. In 1852 the managers tried renaming it to avoid the lingering stigma, but that change was merely cosmetic. It took a few years, but the wealthy subscribers finally learned their lesson; when in 1854 they relocated farther uptown and built the Academy of Music on the corner of Fourteenth Street and Irving Place, they did away with the offending “cockloft” where the lower classes had been shunted and ensured that there would be inexpensive seats for sale. The Opera House was auctioned off that same year to the Mercantile Library Association, and for the next few decades (before the building was torn down in 1891) its library there, serving city clerks, was known as Clinton Hall. The building that now stands on the site went up in 1904. A ghostly trace of the original can be found at the southbound Astor Place subway station, where over a bricked-off staircase is a lintel that reads: “Clinton Hall.”

  Astor Place remains a contentious site, straddling the cultural divide of New York’s West and East Village. Joe Papp understood its significance when he established the Public Theater—providing free Shakespeare for a
ll—in an Astor Place building a stone’s throw from where the Opera House had stood. The wealthy still claim this real estate as their own; Jared Kushner owned a multimillion-dollar apartment on the site (at 21 Astor Place) and Ivanka Trump moved in there briefly when they married. Rumblings of dissent are still felt on the site from time to time, as protesters push back against perceived incursions by wealthy capitalists and the forces of “law and order” that protect their interests. In April 2012 there was a fresh riot when those attending an anarchist book fair nearby, chanting “cops are murderers,” scuffled with police and tried to smash the windows of the Starbucks now located on the site where the Opera House once stood “during a wild, hours-long spree.” The Opera House may be gone, but the divisions remain.

  John Wilkes Booth (left), Edwin Thomas Booth, and Junius Brutus Booth Jr. in Julius Caesar, 1864.

  CHAPTER 4

  1865: Assassination

  On April 26, 1865, twelve days after he assassinated Abraham Lincoln, the fugitive John Wilkes Booth was caught and killed by Union soldiers. A letter was found in his possession addressed to Dr. Richard Stuart, a Confederate sympathizer. Booth had written it two days earlier, on a page of an appointment book he used as a diary. Hobbled by a broken ankle, running out of cash, and demoralized by how even Southern newspapers were vilifying him for murdering Lincoln, Booth arrived at Stuart’s house in King George County, Virginia, along with three companions, late in the afternoon of April 23—Shakespeare’s birthday—having been directed there by Confederate agents. But Stuart refused to treat Booth’s injury, denied the men shelter, and only grudgingly provided a meal before sending them on their way. Booth saw in Stuart’s chilly reception a mirror of how his act was being received in the South. Though he knew that his capture or death was imminent, Booth paused to draft this biting letter, before sending a slightly revised copy of it, in which the money he enclosed was halved:

  I was sick and tired, with a broken leg, in need of medical advice. I would not have turned a dog from my door in such a condition. However, you were kind enough to give me something to eat, for which I not only thank you, but on account of the reluctant manner in which it was bestowed, I feel bound to pay for it. It is not the substance, but the manner in which kindness is extended, that makes one happy in the acceptance thereof. The sauce in meat is ceremony; meeting were bare without it. Be kind enough to accept the enclosed two dollars and a half (though hard to spare) for what we have received.

  The letter is straightforward enough (once past the glancing allusion to King Lear—“Mine enemy’s dog, / Though he had bit me, should have stood that night / Against my fire” [4.7.37–39])—until its next-to-last sentence, which is lifted from the scene in Macbeth in which Lady Macbeth upbraids her husband for his lack of hospitality:

  My royal lord,

  You do not give the cheer. The feast is sold

  That is not often vouched, while ’tis a-making,

  ’Tis given with welcome. To feed were best at home;

  From thence, the sauce to meat is ceremony;

  Meeting were bare without it. (3.4.32–37)

  It’s one of the more impenetrable speeches in Shakespeare, so dense that Booth has to supply his own paraphrase in the preceding sentence. Shamed by how Stuart had treated him, Booth offers a Shakespearean rebuke—yet the words he quotes were themselves a rebuke of an assassin. Pride, self-justification, self-doubt, and suppressed guilt commingle in this complicated allusion.

  Booth’s thoughts kept returning to Shakespeare during these desperate days. A diary entry written soon after he shot Lincoln invokes Julius Caesar: “After being hunted like a dog through swamps, woods . . . with every man’s hand against me, I am here in despair. And why? For doing what Brutus was honored for.” Like Shakespeare’s conspirators “groaning underneath this age’s yoke” (1.2.61), Booth laments finding himself in a “country that groaned beneath this tyranny.” The same diary entry closes with another quotation from Macbeth, one that valorizes courage in the face of inevitable defeat: “I do not wish to shed a drop of blood, but I must fight the course,” Booth concludes, likening himself to a doomed Shakespearean hero fighting against the odds, a role that had been the hallmark of his theatrical career. He lifts these words from one of Macbeth’s last speeches, spoken when hemmed in by his enemies: “They have tied me to a stake. I cannot fly, / But, bearlike, I must fight the course” (5.7.1–2). Having performed these words for years, he found himself enacting them for real. That the reviews were already in, and dismissive (“I struck boldly, and not as the papers say,” he insisted in his diary), must have been crushing. The part he was playing aligned with what would soon be labeled the “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy, a catchphrase he anticipates when he writes in his diary of how, “our cause being almost lost, something decisive and great must be done.”

  * * *

  • • •

  ABRAHAM LINCOLN HAD SEEN Booth act and knew Shakespeare’s plays as intimately as his murderer did. Lincoln didn’t have much formal education; he told an interviewer in 1861 that “I never went to school more than six months in my life.” Even the brief time that he spent in rural schoolhouses was broken up, a few weeks here, a few months there, usually in the winter when the never-ending demands of farm life—planting and harvesting, clearing land, caring for livestock—slackened a bit. There weren’t many books around either, other than a Bible. His father was illiterate; his mother could read but not write. Lincoln was born in 1809 and spent his first seven years in Kentucky before his family moved west to Indiana, where they cleared a plot of land and built a one-room log cabin in which Lincoln would live for the next fourteen years. His mother fell ill and died two years after the move, and a year after that his father remarried. Lincoln’s stepmother remembered young Abe as “diligent for knowledge,” a boy who “read all the books he could lay his hands on,” including the handful she had brought with her.

  One of these—William Scott’s popular Lessons in Elocution—was likely his first introduction to Shakespeare. In Scott’s anthology of famous speeches, Shakespeare’s plays figure largely—thirty-three passages are excerpted. Some of these don’t seem to have left much of a mark on Lincoln, including the “Queen Mab” speech from Romeo and Juliet, the “Seven Ages of Man” from As You Like It, and four long excerpts from Julius Caesar. And he didn’t much care for the martial rhetoric of Henry V at Agincourt. But what caught his imagination stuck. While he loved Henry IV, he hated the arrogant rebel Hotspur, and decades later was still complaining that Hotspur’s “dying speech” (which Lincoln encountered in Scott) was “an unnatural and unworthy thing” in privileging honor above self-knowledge. Lincoln had little patience for heroic figures who, dying by the sword, pontificate, and near the end of his life he confessed that he had “only one reproach to make of Shakespeare’s heroes—that they make long speeches when they are killed.”

  Lincoln preferred poetry to prose, old writing to new, and only slightly exaggerated when he told a White House visitor, “I never read an entire novel in my life. . . . I once commenced Ivanhoe, but never finished it.” In his most revealing comments about his interest in Shakespeare, in a letter to the actor James Hackett, Lincoln wrote, “Some of Shakespeare’s plays I have never read, while others I have gone over perhaps as frequently as any unprofessional reader.” He goes on to list the plays he kept returning to: “Lear, Richard III, Henry VIII, Hamlet and especially Macbeth.” Lincoln had encountered all of them (except Macbeth) in Scott’s anthology. And while he undoubtedly read the plays from beginning to end, his interest tended to be narrowly focused on a few key speeches, a habit no doubt shaped by Lessons in Elocution. Some of the passages he first read in Scott’s collection almost seem tattooed inside his skull, and would remain at the center of his imaginative and emotional worlds.

  Hamlet offers a case in point. Lessons in Elocution printed on facing pages the most famous soliloquy in the langu
age—Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” (3.1.57)—and the one spoken later in the play by Claudius, tortured by guilt over having killed his brother and seized his wife and crown. Defying convention, Lincoln thought Claudius’s speech was far superior and wasn’t afraid to say so. It was a topic Lincoln warmed to in March 1864 right before going to see Edwin Booth’s Hamlet. He spoke about Shakespeare that day with Francis Carpenter, a portrait painter who shadowed him for four months in the White House, telling Carpenter that Claudius’s soliloquy had always struck him “as one of the finest touches of nature in the world.” To underscore the point, Lincoln threw “himself into the very spirit of the scene,” and began reciting “Oh, my offence is rank! It smells to heaven. / It hath the primal eldest curse upon’t, / A brother’s murder” (3.3.36–38). Claudius’s self-recrimination continues for another thirty-eight lines, and Lincoln, Carpenter reports, “repeated this entire passage from memory, with a feeling and appreciation unsurpassed by anything I ever witnessed upon the stage.”