Shakespeare in a Divided America

by James Shapiro

  On Cushman’s status as an American actor, see Charles H. Shattuck, Shakespeare on the American Stage; see too, Lisa Merrill, When Romeo Was a Woman. On her Romeo as a “dangerous young man,” see J. M. W. [Jessie Meriton White?], “First Impressions of Miss Cushman’s Romeo,” People’s Journal, vol. 2, ed. John Saunders (London: People’s Journal Office, 1847). And for Cushman’s own recollections of the role, see La Salle Corbell Pickett, Across My Path: Memories of People I Have Known (New York: Brentano’s, 1916). I am indebted to Olivia Ball’s MA Columbia University essay, “‘I am the man’: Charlotte Cushman, America’s Shakespearean Actress” (2017). See as well Gay Smith, Lady Macbeth in America: From the Stage to the White House (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 95–104. And on gender and cross-dressing in nineteenth-century theater more generally, see Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992); and Kippola, Acts of Manhood.

  CHAPTER 3: 1849

  The Astor Place riots have attracted a great deal of commentary, including a pair of fine books: Nigel Cliff, The Shakespeare Riots: Revenge, Drama, and Death in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Random House, 2007), and Richard Moody, The Astor Place Riot (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1958). For the best contemporary description of the riots, see the anonymous Account of the Terrific and Fatal Riot at the New-York Astor Place Opera House (New York: H. M. Ranney, 1849), rpt. in my Shakespeare in America, pp. 62–104, from which I quote on the laxness with which authorities treated theatrical rioting, as well as on the riots being about the rich versus the poor.

  The riots (and the precipitating controversies) were extensively covered in the local, national, and international press. Many important articles have helpfully been collected in an online site: “Edwin Forrest, William Macready, and the Astor Place Riot in contemporary newspapers,” http://www.merrycoz.org/voices/astor/articles.xhtml#62. For those wishing to follow up on a particular citation, use a phrase search and consult (as I have) the Library of Congress’s free and invaluable website Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, as well as “American Historical Newspapers,” part of Readex’s Archive of Americana database. For the quotation about what “began in madness ended in blood,” see the New Orleans Daily Crescent, May 21, 1849; and for the local report of how “Our city has been intensely agitated,” see the New-York Semi-Weekly Tribune, May 16, 1849. For the events of May 7, I draw heavily on the Weekly Herald, May 12, 1849, and the Boston Daily Atlas, May 9, 1849. And for the events of May 11, including the language of the posters, I draw a great deal from the account in the Herald as well as (for rumors) the Hartford Daily Courant, May 14, 1849, and for the threatened call for police reform, the Evening Post, May 10, 1849. And for a pair of contemporary (if highly partisan) collections of material on the background of the theatrical controversy, see The Replies from England, etc., to Certain Statements Circulated in This Country Respecting Mr. Macready (New York: Stringer and Townsend, 1849), and An American Citizen, A Rejoinder to the Replies from England, Etc. (New York: Stringer and Townsend, 1849), esp. pp. 110–11, from which I quote.

  The Astor Place riots have also generated some first-rate historical analysis, and I have found the following especially helpful: Leo Hershkowitz, “An Anatomy of a Riot: Astor Place Opera House, 1849,” New York History 87 (Summer 2006), pp. 277–311 (especially for suggestions about the consequences of the riots), and Peter Buckley’s no less deeply researched “To the Opera House: Culture and Society in New York City, 1820–1860” (PhD diss., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1984), including his insights into how Astor Place was located where Broadway and the Bowery collided. Valuable chapters or articles on the riots can be found in Karl Kippola, Acts of Manhood; Gretchen Sween, “Rituals, Riots, Rules, and Rights: The Astor Place Theater Riot of 1849 and the Evolving Limits of Free Speech,” Texas Law Review 81 (December 2002), pp. 679–713, including on the fallout of the riots; David Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled: American Theatre and Culture, 1800–1850 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968; rpt. 1987); Sean McEvoy, Theatrical Unrest: Ten Riots in the History of the Stage, 1601–2004 (New York: Routledge, 2016); and Lawrence W. Levine’s seminal, “William Shakespeare and the American People: A Study in Cultural Transformation,” American Historical Review, vol. 89, (February 1984), pp. 34–66, reprinted in his Highbrow/Lowbrow. I have also found useful Elizabeth Williamson, “Fireboys and Burning Theatres: Performing the Astor Place Riot,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre 25 (Winter 2013), pp. 5–26; Jerrey Ullom, “Critiquing the ‘Huzza’: The Historiography of the Astor Place Riot,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre 11 (Fall 1999), pp. 16–29; and Heather Nathans, “‘Blood Will Have Blood’: Violence, Slavery, and Macbeth in the Antebellum Literary Imagination,” in Weyward Macbeth: Intersections of Race and Performance, eds. Scott L. Newstok and Ayanna Thompson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 35–44.

  For the careers and adversarial relationship of William Macready and Edwin Forrest, see, for Macready: William Charles Macready, The Journal of William Charles Macready, 1832–1851, abridged and edited by J. C. Trewin (London: Longmans, 1967); The Diaries of William Charles Macready, 1833–1851, ed. William Toynbee (London: Chapman and Hall, 1912); Alan S. Downer, The Eminent Tragedian: William Charles Macready (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966); J. C. Trewin, Mr Macready (London: George G. Harrap and Co., 1955); and Richard Foulkes’s entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. For Forrest, see James Rees, The Life of Edwin Forrest, with Reminiscences and Personal Recollections (Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson and Brothers, 1874); William Rounseville Alger, Life of Edwin Forrest, the American Tragedian (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1877); Lawrence Barrett, Edwin Forrest (Boston: J. R. Osgood, 1881); Richard Moody, Edwin Forrest, First Star of the American Stage (New York: Knopf, 1960); and Montrose Moses, The Fabulous Forrest: The Record of an American Actor (Boston: Little, Brown, 1929). For how each performed Macbeth, I have drawn on many reviews readily available in historical newspapers, including The Musical World, September 4, 1845, and the Theatrical Examiner, October 4, 1835, from which I quote. Downer’s study of Macready is also very helpful on this (esp. pp. 71–78), as are Lawrence Barrett’s and Noah Ludlow’s recollections. For Forrest’s death, see the Manchester Guardian, January 14, 1873, and for Forrest’s patriotic remarks in Kentucky, see the Louisville Morning Courier, October 13, 1846. For the recommendation to see Macready’s farewell tour, see the Albion: A Journal of News, Politics and Literature, May 5, 1849, p. 212. For Hamlet running mad, see Anthony Scoloker, Daiphantus (London, 1604), sig. A2r, as well as Eastward Ho! (1605) where a character says, “Sfoot, Hamlet, Are you mad? Whither run you now?” (3.2.8).

  For rioting in antebellum New York City, see Joel Tyler Headley, The Great Riots of New York, 1712–1873 (New York: E. B. Treat, 1873), esp. p. 114, from which I quote; Paul A. Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763–1834 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), from which I draw on the number of riots between 1816 and 1834; and David Grimsted, “Rioting in Its Jacksonian Setting,” American Historical Review 77 (April 1972), pp. 361–97. On the Farren Riot, I have drawn on Theodore Shank, “The Bowery Theatre, 1826–1836” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 1956), pp. 378–84; Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy; Bruce A. McConachie, “‘The Theatre of the Mob’: Apocalyptic Melodrama and Preindustrial Riots in Antebellum New York,” in Bruce A. McConachie and Daniel Friedman, eds., Theatre for the Working-Class Audiences in the United States, 1830–1980 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1985), pp. 17–46; Linda K. Kerber, “Abolitionists and Amalgamators: The New York City Race Riots of 1834,” New York History 48 (January 1967), pp. 28–39; Herbert Asbury, “That Was New York: The Abolition Riots of 1834,” New Yorker, November 5, 1932; and Evening Star, January 18, 1834. For Rynders, see Tyler Anbinder, “Isaiah Rynders and the Ironies of Popular Democracy in Antebellum New York,” in Contested Democracy:
Freedom, Race, and Power in American History, eds. Manisha Sinha and Penny Von Eschen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), pp. 31–53. See too his obituary in the New York Times, January 14, 1885. For Ned Buntline, see Jay Monaghan, The Great Rascal: The Life and Adventures of Ned Buntline (Boston: Little, Brown, 1952), from which I quote from Ned Buntline’s Own (p. 172). And for nineteenth-century interpretations of Hamlet (and what “idle” meant), see H. H. Furness, Hamlet, A New Variorum edition of Shakespeare, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1877).

  For the social and economic history of New York City at this time, see, for contemporary perspectives: Edmund M. Blunt, Stranger’s Guide to the City of New-York (New York, J. Seymour, 1817); Ezekiel Porter Belden, New-York, Past, Present, and Future: Comprising a History of the City of New-York (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1849); and Seth Low, New York in 1850 and 1890 (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1892). See too the History of Wages in the United States from Colonial Times to 1928. Revision of Bulletin No. 499 with Supplement, 1929–1933 (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1934); and Luc Sante, Low-Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991). I have found Sean Wilentz’s Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984) exceptionally helpful, and I quote from p. 327.

  On theater culture in antebellum New York, see Thomas Allston Brown, A History of the New York Stage from the First Performance in 1732 to 1901, 3 vols. (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1903); Don B. Wilmeth and C. W. E. Bigsby, The Cambridge History of American Theatre: Beginnings to 1870 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Rosemary K. Bank, Theatre Culture in America, 1825–1860 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Bruce A. McConachie, Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820–1870 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992); Robert G. Allen, Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Barry Witham, Theatre in the United States: 1750–1915 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). For a useful account of the various theaters, see Mary C. Henderson, The City and the Theatre: The History of New York Playhouses: A 250 Year Journey from Bowling Green to Times Square, foreword by Gerald Schoenfeld, rev. and expanded ed. (New York: Back Stage Books, 2004). I have relied heavily on volume 5 of George C. D. Odell’s invaluable Annals of the New York Stage. See too William Winter, Shakespeare on the Stage, 2nd series. And for Alexis de Tocqueville, see Democracy in America, vol. 3, chapter 19, “Some Observations on the Drama Amongst Democratic Nations,” pp. 163–73.

  On the Opera House and its environs, see Spirit of the Times, February 6, 1847; Home Journal, November 13, 1847; New York Herald, November 23, 1847; Squints Through an Opera Glass, by a Young Gent. Who Hadn’t Anything Else to Do, 2nd ed. (New York: Merchants’ Day-Book, 1850); George G. Foster, New York Naked (New York: De Witt and Davenport, 1851); Edmund T. Delaney, New York’s Greenwich Village: A Retrospective View of Things Past with an Appreciation of the Good and Vital in the Village Today (Barre, MA: Barre Publishers, 1968), pp. 82–87; and Terry Miller, Greenwich Village and How It Got That Way (New York: Crown, 1990). And for the lyrics on the upscale Opera House, see “Pompey’s Rambles,” in White’s New Book of Plantation Melodies (n.d.), pp. 15–16, quoted by Lott, Love and Theft, p. 65.

  For the buildings in and around Astor Place, see Luther S. Harris, Around Washington Square: An Illustrated History of Greenwich Village (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Edwin G. Burrow and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); John R. G. Hassard, “The New York Mercantile Library,” Scribner’s Monthly (February 1871), pp. 353–67; Alex Madsen, John Jacob Astor: America’s First Multimillionaire (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2001); Tyler Anbinder, Five Points: The Nineteenth Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum (New York: Free Press, 2001); and Eric Homberger, Mrs. Astor’s New York: Money and Social Power in a Gilded Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). For Central Park, see Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar, The Park and the People: A History of Central Park (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 18.

  Thousands of New Yorkers witnessed the riots and quite a few recorded their recollections of them. Those I have found especially useful include: William Knight Northall, Before and Behind the Curtain, or Fifteen Years’ Observations Among the Theatres of New York (New York: W. F. Burgess, 1851), including remarks on how aristocrats tried to cover up their involvement; Noah Ludlow, Dramatic Life as I Found It (St. Louis: G. I. Jones and Co., 1880); George Templeton Strong, Diary of George Templeton Strong, eds. Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas (New York: Macmillan, 1952); George W. Walling, Recollections of a New York Chief of Police (New York: Caxton Book Concern, Ltd. 1887); Philip Hone, The Diary of Philip Hone, 1828–1851, ed. Bayard Tuckerman (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1889), which I quote for details of the Farren Riot; John Coleman, Fifty Years of an Actor’s Life; Thomas Addis Emmett, Incidents of My Life (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1911); and Alvin Harlow, Old Bowery Days (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1931). For a contemporary sermon on the rioting, see Henry W. Bellows, A Sermon Occasioned by the Late Riot in New York, Preached in the Church of the Divine Unity, on Sunday Morning, May 13, 1849 (New York: C. S. Francis, 1849).

  For Melville and the Astor Place riots, see Dennis Berthold, “Class Acts: The Astor Place Riots and Melville’s ‘The Two Temples,’” American Literature 71 (1999), pp. 429–61 (one of a number of critics who discuss the slurs on Frederick Douglass and Pete Williams); John Evelev, Tolerable Entertainment: Herman Melville and Professionalism in Antebellum New York (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006); and Harry Brinton Henderson III, “Young America and the Astor Place Riot” (MA thesis, Columbia University, 1963). On a future American Shakespeare, see too Melville’s review, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” Literary World, August 17 and 24, 1850.

  For citations on the aftermath and afterlife of Astor Place, see Buckley; the Alexandria Gazette, May 15, 1849; the Philadelphia Public Ledger, May 16, 1849; and the New York Courier and Enquirer, May 15, 1849. Nathaniel Parker Willis’s “After-Lesson of the Astor-Place Riot” was published in Home Journal, May 26, 1849, which he edited; I also quote from it earlier, regarding “the spontaneous cohesion of interest and sympathy which alone binds a republic.” Henry James’s reflections are quoted from a review of “Macready’s Reminiscences” in the Nation 20 (1875), pp. 297–98. I rely on online sources for the recent history of Astor Place and rioting there: “The Ghosts of Clinton Hall: Riots, Fire, and Scandal on Astor Place,” Kate Drew, http://bedfordandbowery.com/2015/12/the-ghosts-of-clinton-hall-riots-fire-and-scandal-on-astor-place, December 23, 2015; for Kushner, https://ny.curbed.com/2011/1/14/10487002/ivanka-trumps-hubby-puts-astor-place-pad-on-the-market; and for the recent riot, https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20120415/greenwich-village-soho/anarchists-attack-cops-starbucks-noho-police-say.

  CHAPTER 4: 1865

  The literature on Booth and Lincoln (and their relationship to Shakespeare) is enormous. I have relied heavily on four superb studies of Booth: Arthur F. Loux, John Wilkes Booth: Day by Day (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., Inc., 2014); Deirdre L. Kincaid’s exhaustively researched account of his theatrical career, “‘Rough Magic’: The Theatrical Life of John Wilkes Booth” (PhD diss., University of Hull, 2000); for Booth’s own words, John Wilkes Booth, Right or Wrong, God Judge Me: The Writings of John Wilkes Booth, eds. John Rhodehamel and Louise Taper (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997); and the recent and definitive biography: Terry Alford, Fortune’s Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). BoothieBarn.com is also an invaluable resource. Alford al
so edited and introduced the rich mine of information about Booth’s life provided by his sister, Asia Booth Clarke, John Wilkes Booth: A Sister’s Memoir (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996). I have also consulted its posthumously published original, The Unlocked Book: A Memoir of John Wilkes Booth by His Sister Asia Booth Clarke (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1938). Asia had no plans to publish it in her lifetime and kept the manuscript from her husband, who would surely have destroyed it. She gave it for safekeeping to an English friend, B. L. Farjeon, whose daughter Eleanor finally published it in 1938. See too Asia Booth, Passages, Incidents, and Anecdotes in the Life of Junius Brutus Booth (The Elder) by His Daughter (New York: Henry L. Hinton, 1870). Other important studies are: John F. Andrews, “Was the Bard Behind It? Old Light on the Lincoln Assassination,” Atlantic (October 1990); John Andrews and Dwight Pitcaithley, “Cry Havoc,” New York Times, February 19, 2011; Nora Titone, My Thoughts Be Bloody: The Bitter Rivalry Between Edwin and John Wilkes Booth That Led to an American Tragedy (New York: Free Press, 2010); Stephen M. Archer, Junius Brutus Booth: Theatrical Prometheus (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2010); Michael W. Kauffman, American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies (New York: Random House, 2004); Gene Smith, American Gothic: The Story of America’s Legendary Theatrical Family—Junius, Edwin, and John Wilkes Booth (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992); Stanley Kimmel, The Mad Booths of Maryland (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1940); Edwina Booth Grossman, Edwin Booth: Recollections of His Daughter (New York: Century Co., 1902); Eleanor Ruggles, Prince of Players: Edwin Booth (New York: W. W. Norton, 1953); and Coppélia Kahn, “Junius Brutus Booth,” in A New Literary History of America, eds. Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). For the assassination, I have also relied on Frank J. Williams and Michael Burkhimer, eds., The Lincoln Assassination Riddle: Revisiting the Crime of the Nineteenth Century (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2016); Thomas A. Bogar, Backstage at the Lincoln Assassination: The Untold Story of the Actors and Stagehands at Ford’s Theatre (Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2013); and Edward Steers Jr., Lincoln’s Assassination (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2014). For Charles Wyndham on John Wilkes’s Hamlet, see Gordon Samples, Lust for Fame: The Stage Career of John Wilkes Booth (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 1982), p. 113.