Shakespeare in a Divided America

by James Shapiro

  Lincoln’s insistence on the superiority of Claudius’s soliloquy was a hobbyhorse, one for which he was ridiculed after Hackett leaked Lincoln’s letter, in which Lincoln also spoke of this, to the press. It says something about America in the 1860s that it was unremarkable that a self-educated president would have such strong opinions about what he liked or disliked in Shakespeare—or even that he read him so attentively. Were Lincoln less revered, we would probably call him a bore for asking friends, family, government employees, and relative strangers to listen to him recite, sometimes for hours on end—and then discuss—the same few passages from Shakespeare again and again. But that’s what he liked to do, and at times of great emotional strain needed to do.

  From an early age Lincoln’s hunger for Shakespeare was extraordinary. We have William Herndon to thank for most of what we know about what young Lincoln read. Herndon was Lincoln’s junior partner in his Springfield, Illinois, law firm, and shortly after the assassination began contacting those who had known the president in his youth—testimony vital to Herndon’s planned biography of Lincoln. Decades-old recollections of what a young man was like are untrustworthy, especially when, in Lincoln’s case, they were reported after his murder, when the deification of the fallen president was well under way. Yet there is a remarkable degree of uniformity in what friends, kin, and neighbors independently reported to Herndon. Lincoln’s friend William H. Greene reported that Lincoln “nearly knew Shakespeare by heart.” His cousin Dennis Hanks also remembered that Lincoln read Shakespeare, as did James Matheny and Caleb Carmin (“His conversation very often was about books—such as Shakespeare and other histories”). Carmin mentions a shadowy figure in Lincoln’s life named John Kelso, who apparently nurtured his love of Shakespeare. Kelso, Carmin recalled, “loved Shakespeare and fishing above all other things. Abe loved Shakespeare but not fishing—still Kelso would draw Abe: they used to sit on the bank of the river and quote Shakespeare—criticize one another.” That skillful recitation was an essential part of Lincoln’s attraction to Shakespeare is clear from others who corresponded with Herndon. Frances Todd Wallace, mingling recollections of hearing Lincoln recite Shakespeare with a glimpse of the melancholy that seems to have possessed him from an early age, remembered how Lincoln “would read generally aloud,” and “with great warmth all funny things—humorous things, etc.: read Shakespeare that way: he was a sad man.”

  When Lincoln started practicing law, he could finally afford his own copies of the plays. A hint of how he purchased them appeared in the New York Herald in 1861, when Lincoln arrived at the Astor Hotel in New York City the month before his inauguration, was introduced to a number of admirers, and “mistook one old gentleman for a person who formerly used to call on him at Springfield to sell illustrated copies of Shakespeare, but was set right by some person present.” The story dovetails with the description of Lincoln in his late twenties offered by the young lawyer’s mentor and partner, John Todd Stuart: “Mr. Lincoln commenced carrying around with him on the circuit—to the various courts, books such as Shakespeare.”

  In May 1862, when the war was going badly for the North and Lincoln was mourning the recent death of his beloved son Willie, he traveled to Fort Monroe with his secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, and General Egbert L. Viele, to consult with his commanders. Several accounts of the trip survive. Viele was impressed with Lincoln’s ability to “repeat, almost word for word, whatever he had read,” and recalled how the president “would sit for hours during the trip repeating the finest passages of Shakespeare’s best plays.” Once at Fort Monroe, Lincoln again found himself needing to read Shakespeare, for distraction and comfort. One of the officers there, Le Grand B. Cannon, recounted this many years later to Herndon. During the visit, Lincoln borrowed a copy of Shakespeare’s works from him, read it for hours, and then asked if Cannon wouldn’t mind if he recited aloud. Lincoln proceeded to “read from Macbeth, Lear, and finally King John”—the passage beginning “Grief fills the room up of my absent child, / Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me” (3.4.93–94), in which “Constance bewails the loss of her child.” Cannon was struck by how “deeply moved” the president was:

  His voice trembled. Laying the book on the table, he said, “Did you ever dream of a lost friend and feel that you were having a direct communion with that friend, and yet a consciousness that it was not a reality?” My reply was, “Yes, I think all may have had such an experience.” He replied, “So do I dream of my boy Willie.” He was totally overcome. His great frame shook, and bowing down on the table he wept as only such a man in the breaking down of great sorrow could weep.

  In the histories and tragedies that Lincoln found so absorbing, Shakespeare put his protagonists, most of them leaders, under unbearable pressure. Among the most powerful moments in these plays are the speeches in which characters confront moral dilemmas and give voice to the guilt and grief that crushes them. That these characters were often evil—Richard III, Macbeth, Claudius—mattered little to Lincoln; what did was their degree of self-awareness, how fully they understood the difficult choices they faced.

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  JOHN WILKES BOOTH’S early exposure to Shakespeare could not have been more different. His father was Junius Brutus Booth, one of England’s leading Shakespeare actors by the age of 21. A few years later, accompanied by a lover, Mary Ann Holmes, he sailed for America, where he quickly established himself as a touring star. Soon after his arrival he purchased a farm with a modest house and 150 acres in rural Harford County, Maryland, near Bel Air. He and Mary Ann had ten children out of wedlock, six of whom survived. The second youngest was John Wilkes Booth, born in 1838.

  Junius Brutus Booth, in addition to being an unforgettable and tireless actor, was also an alcoholic who had brushes with insanity. He was also remarkably tolerant, a vegetarian who wouldn’t allow animals to be slaughtered on his farm or allow trees to be felled. He was curious about other religions and read the Talmud and Koran. His own father, who joined him in Bel Air, described the secluded farm as “Robinson Crusoe’s Island.” It would be more accurate to call it “Prospero’s Island,” for the home was filled with books, including Shakespeare editions and plays in several languages, as well as promptbooks and theatrical costumes and props. Family life on the farm was rich in contradictions. Junius Brutus Booth wouldn’t own slaves, though he rented them from a neighbor. A world-class actor, he discouraged his children from entering his grueling profession, “as if he feared,” his daughter Asia recalled, “to throw that glamour over its reality which might delude the senses.” While he frowned upon their seeing plays, he allowed his children access to his play scripts, and they entertained themselves and neighbors with dramatic performances. For a learned man, able to read many languages, Junius Brutus Booth did not press much formal education on his children.

  John Wilkes attended a number of nearby schools but was never a great student. Like his older brothers Junius and Edwin, he began performing Shakespeare at an early age. His sister Asia, with whom he was especially close, and who wrote a warm recollection of him, is the source for most of what we know about his childhood. As a boy, she recalls, he “put on my long-trained dress and walked before the long glass, declaring that he would succeed as Lady Macbeth in the sleep-walking scene.” It’s an unusual role and a surprising choice of scene for a child—even a precocious one—to aspire to master. His model for a Shakespearean heroine may have been Charlotte Cushman, for Asia goes on to describe how, in another bit of cross-dressing, John Wilkes “secretly ‘got himself up’ after Charlotte Cushman as Meg Merrilees”—a gypsy in Guy Mannering—and of how, in Asia’s words, his performance “terrified me and all the darkies.” From an early age, then, Booth seems to have been keen on entertaining others—including his sister and the children of the slaves who worked on the farm. His older brother Edwin remembered him as a “rattle-pated fellow, filled with Quixotic notions. While at the farm in Marylan
d, he would charge on horseback through the woods, ‘spouting’ heroic speeches with a lance in his hand, a relic of the Mexican war, given to my father.” The image of that young man, racing his horse through the countryside, bearing that souvenir of a war fought to extend the reach of slavery while reciting heroic speeches, is as indelible as Asia’s recollection of him as a guilt-ridden Lady Macbeth, trying but failing to scrub away the blood she has spilled. Looking back, both his brother and sister saw the child as father to the man; John Wilkes’s identity seems to have been fixed at a young age and, as Asia put it, he “did not change much as he matured only his opinions and principles became more riveted.”

  Asia’s first recollection of his performing publicly was at a picnic in Cockeysville, where he thrilled a crowd with one of Shylock’s speeches. After their father’s death (when John Wilkes was 14) and their grief-stricken mother’s withdrawal, Asia and John Wilkes drew even closer, and spent summers on the farm reading aloud. She recalled how he “would recite poems and much of the play of Julius Caesar, and some other tragedies,” while she “held the book,” serving as a prompter. His choices might have been inspired by a performance that Edwin and John Sleeper Clarke (Asia’s future husband) had given in nearby Bel Air, in August 1850, when John Wilkes would have been 12. The two young actors (Edwin was only 16) even printed up a playbill for the event, which culminated in “the great Quarrel scene from Julius Caesar,” in which Edwin played Brutus and John was Cassius.

  By his teenage years John Wilkes was already convinced that whites were superior to blacks, and bosses to their employees. Asia recalled the “first evidence of an undemocratic feeling in Wilkes was shown when we were expected to sit down with our hired workmen. It was the custom for members of the family to dine and sup with the white men who did the harvesting.” But John Wilkes had trouble with this equality. Even as a teenager, he had, as she put it, that “Southern reservation which jealously kept the white laborer from free association with his employer or his superior.” As a result, “we were not,” she concludes, “a popular family with our white laborers.” And these views were reinforced at clandestine “Know-Nothing” meetings that the teenage John Wilkes attended a few miles from their home, secret gatherings that stoked anti-immigrant hatred and promoted conspiracy theories about the dangers that Catholics posed to America. Booth also came to loathe Northern Irish Catholics. During the Civil War, Asia writes, “Nothing grated this fierce Southern partisan so sorely as beholding the easy enlistment of Irishmen who were wild to free the ‘nagur’ before they had even looked upon a black face.”

  Perhaps the most telling of Asia’s recollections involved John Wilkes chastising her for failing to forgive a neighbor. Alluding to Shylock, John Wilkes teasingly suggested that she must have “a tinge of Jewish blood.” He then added: “Much of the evil of us boys and girls, some of the good as well, must have been engendered by power of those furious plays our father enacts. The Shylock, and Pescara, mad-seeming Hamlet, and love-sick Romeo, et cetera, et cetera.” It’s an extraordinary thing to say. John Wilkes acknowledges the powerful moral influence that the plays had on forming their character, especially their propensity for evil.

  John Wilkes’s immersion in Shakespeare deepened considerably once it was clear that the farm, which he had tried to run after his father’s death, was failing, and he would have to make a living as an actor. But unlike his older brothers, he didn’t see his future out West or up North: according to Asia, he worked “to make himself essentially a Southern actor.” To that end, he “applied himself studiously to Shakespeare,” and she would listen to him recite the “parts over and over again.” Shakespeare was now work, a skill to be mastered, and John Wilkes committed himself to it. John Wilkes was a perfectionist, and “would not allow a word or syllable to go wrong, and Julius Caesar, that test part for the theatrical scholar, was so constantly repeated that even the little darkies, whose privilege was to sit and loll about in the corners of whatever rooms we occupied, were caught repeating after him.” She also remembered a time when a young slave girl recited the lines more accurately than he, which provoked John Wilkes to say, “Hark to that thick-skulled darky! She has sharper wits than I.”

  John Wilkes’s gift for reciting Shakespeare—and Julius Caesar in particular—is confirmed by Edward M. Alfriend, a friend the 21-year-old Booth met in Richmond when he was acting there. When Booth, though a civilian, joined Alfriend and other soldiers from the First Virginia Regiment to oversee the execution of the abolitionist John Brown in December 1859, he would, Alfriend writes, “entertain us with dramatic recitations from different plays. He was very fond of reciting, which he did in such a fiery, intense, vigorous, brilliant way as to forecast that great genius he subsequently showed on the stage.” Alfriend never forgot Booth’s “recitation of Brutus’ speech in Julius Caesar in defense of his share in the assassination and with what force he rolled out the line ‘My ancestor that did from the streets of Rome the Tarquin drive’” (2.1.53–54).

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  GIVEN HIS IMMERSION in Shakespeare, it is surprising that Lincoln never littered his speeches and letters with quotations from the plays. Despite the best efforts of admirers to find echoes of Shakespeare in his most magnificent speeches—the Gettysburg Address, or his first or second inaugural addresses—they are almost nonexistent. Lincoln kept a firewall between Shakespeare’s words and his own, avoiding the casual quotation of Shakespearean phrases that marked the writing of so many at the time—including that found in the letters home of many soldiers, both Union and Confederate, or in John Wilkes Booth’s self-aggrandizing diary.

  Lincoln’s compulsion to recite Shakespeare never slackened. One of those who frequently heard him recite was his young secretary, John Hay. Hay had met the future president while working next door to Lincoln’s law practice in 1858 in Springfield. He was devoted to Lincoln and something of a surrogate son, especially after Willie’s death. In the humid summer months, Hay would accompany Lincoln to the more comfortable surroundings of the Soldiers’ Home, a presidential retreat three miles north of the White House, where they would work. One evening there, he recalled, Lincoln “read Shakespeare to me, the end of Henry VI and the beginning of Richard III . . . till my heavy eye-lids caught his considerate notice and he sent me to bed.” Hay helpfully recorded Lincoln’s favorites: “The plays he most affected were Hamlet, Macbeth, and the series of Histories; among the latter, he never tired of Richard the Second,” including the deposed Richard’s speech on the “hollow crown” and the unhappy fate of rulers:

  For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground

  And tell sad stories of the death of kings—

  How some have been deposed, some slain in war,

  Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed,

  Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping killed,

  All murdered. For within the hollow crown

  That rounds the mortal temples of a king,

  Keeps Death his court. (3.2.155–62)

  Hay notes that he had heard Lincoln recite these words “at Springfield, at the White House and the Soldiers’ Home.” How often Lincoln returned to these poignant words and how their meaning may have deepened for him over the years is lost to us.

  Francis Carpenter records similar experiences, including a long sitting when he sketched the president in which the conversation turned to the opening of Richard III—“Now is the winter of our discontent” (1.1.1). Lincoln complained that modern-day actors “often entirely misapprehended” the speech, delivering it in a “sophomoric style.” Lincoln believed he had a better understanding of Richard’s “repressed hate and jealousy,” and to demonstrate this, “unconsciously assuming the character,” he recited it “with a degree of force and power that made it seem like a new creation.” Carpenter shared his experience with the journalist Samuel Sinclair, who had sat through a similar performance, and who ag
reed that “he never heard these choice passages of Shakespeare rendered with more effect by the most famous of modern actors.”

  Lincoln relied on a few dependable listeners, including the young men who worked in the War Department’s telegraph office, which he visited on a daily basis to keep up with news from the front and convey instructions to his generals. While awaiting news, Lincoln recited Shakespeare from copies of the plays he brought with him. David Homer Bates, who worked there for the duration of the war, remembered a time in late 1863 (after Lincoln saw James Hackett play Falstaff), when the president carried with him “a well-worn copy in small compass of Macbeth, and one of The Merry Wives of Windsor, selections from both of which he read aloud to us in the telegraph office.” Bates remembered one visit in particular, when “I was his only auditor, and he recited several passages to me with as much interest apparently as if there had been a full house.”

  So far as we know, until the last two years of his life, Lincoln had never seen Shakespeare staged. In his youth he hadn’t had many opportunities to see productions, and during his first two years in office he had avoided the theater because of the demands of the wartime presidency, concern with the optics of a president frequenting a place many Americans still associated with sinfulness (especially when so many were fighting and dying), and perhaps because of an extended mourning period for his son Willie. But from March 1863, when he first saw Hackett’s Falstaff, until the night he was shot in April 1865 during a performance of an English farce, Our American Cousin, where Booth knew where to find him, Lincoln became a devoted playgoer, witnessing many of his favorite Shakespeare plays, along with other works, performed by the greatest stars of the day, whose company and conversation he sought out. As Carpenter’s and Hay’s accounts confirm, his trips to the theater in the last two years of his life didn’t replace his readings; if anything, they intensified them, as Lincoln measured his own performance and interpretation against those of leading actors.