* * *
• • •
THERE ARE MOMENTS when nations change course. Americans often assign names to these turning points: “the Boston Tea Party,” “Pearl Harbor,” “9/11.” The year 1845 was one of these pivotal moments. Grant himself later acknowledged the epochal and costly nature of the decision the nation faced that year. The way he saw it, what started in Corpus Christi would, after horrendous loss of life in the Civil War, end at Appomattox, with the defeat of the South. Mexico, he wrote, was “of incalculable value; but it might have been obtained by other means. The Southern rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican war. Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war of modern times.” The Mexican-American War redefined the physical boundaries no less than the moral ones of a republic-turned-empire, for it would serve as a proving ground for aggressive and militant territorial expansion, grounded in a fervent conviction that it was America’s God-given right to claim (and if need be, seize) all lands from East to West Coast. The inspired name for this conviction, introduced into the national vocabulary in the summer of 1845, was “Manifest Destiny.”
For John L. O’Sullivan, the journalist who coined this term, annexing Texas was a catalyst for this new sense of national purpose: “It is now time for the opposition to the annexation of Texas to cease. . . . It is time for the common duty of patriotism to the country to succeed—or if this claim will not be recognized, it is at least time for common sense to acquiesce with decent grace in the inevitable and the irrevocable.” A cheerleader for American exceptionalism, O’Sullivan mocked those bent on “thwarting our policy and hampering our power, limiting our greatness and checking the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” O’Sullivan’s appeal to God and country and his assurance that “the boundless future will be the era of American greatness” were a winning combination.
Many abolitionists recognized the dangers of expansionism and tried to derail it. But they came across as weak and elitist. It wasn’t easy challenging the swagger of those who thought defeating both the Mexican and British military and extending American dominion to the Pacific would be accomplished with little cost or sacrifice. O’Sullivan had argued that it was pointless to look to the past: “We have no interest in the scenes of antiquity, only as lessons of avoidance of nearly all their examples.” In response, but to no avail, Shakespeare’s authority was mustered by Robert Charles Winthrop, a member of the House from Massachusetts and one of those who opposed the annexation of Texas “now and always.” He addressed his fellow congressmen in early 1845, deriding naïve warmongers who urged their fellow Americans to “muster our fleets in the Pacific, and march our armies over the Rocky Mountains, and whip Great Britain into a willingness to abandon her pretensions” to the Pacific Northwest. “I have wishes that some Philip Faulconbridge were here to reply,” he argued, “as he does in Shakespeare’s King John, to some swaggering citizen of Angiers:
——Here’s a large mouth, indeed,
That spits forth Death and mountains, rocks and seas
Talks as familiarly of roaring lions
As maids of thirteen do of puppy dogs.
What cannoneer begot this lusty blood?
He speaks plain cannon fire, and smoke and bounce. (2.1.458–63)
Winthrop knew his Shakespeare, and trenchantly paraphrases the rest of the speech: “And against whom are all these gasconading bravadoes indulged? What nation has been thus bethumpt and bastinadoed with brave words?” Yet his efforts to shame politicians (whose manhood was all talk and who let others do the fighting for them) in the end proved fruitless.
The confluence of technological and demographic changes that marked this effort to make America great in the 1840s now seems painfully familiar. The rise of the telegraph, coupled with the widespread introduction of steam engines on waterways and rails, accelerating the movement of goods and people, revolutionized traditional notions of time and space. Old and familiar ways were further upended by a changing labor landscape, marked by increasing industrialization, the loss of jobs to women (who could be paid less), and a rise in immigrant labor, as the influx of foreigners in the 1840s nearly tripled, with more than 1,700,000 new arrivals, mostly Irish and German, competing for jobs and housing.
Inherent in Manifest Destiny was a belief in manly superiority. Like a headstrong wife, Mexico had to be taught a lesson, roughed up a bit. President Polk’s negotiator in Mexico, John Slidell, wrote to the secretary of state in March 1846 that we “shall never be able to treat with her . . . until she has been taught to respect us.” A poem—“They Wait for Us”—published in the propagandistic National Songs, Ballads, and Other Patriotic Poetry Chiefly Relating to the War of 1846, offers a more personal version of such thinking, imagining a young Mexican wife longingly awaiting the arrival of the Yankee invaders, “Whose purer blood and valiant arms, / Are fit to clasp her budding charms.” The poem goes on to justify her act of cuckoldry; she needs a real man, for her Mexican husband’s once “manly mind,” long “vanquished by the subtile clime,” is now “sunk in sloth.”
In her book Manifest Destiny and the Antebellum American Empire, Amy S. Greenberg has illuminated how competing versions of manliness collided at this time in America. A restrained masculinity that embraced moderation, virtue, domesticity, and sobriety—a “manhood derived from being morally upright, reliable, and brave”—was being elbowed out by a more martial manhood, one characterized by a greater tolerance for excess, alcohol, physicality, and domination. This model had a special appeal for workingmen who felt left behind in an age of rapid economic transformation—changes that little benefited them—and so turned, in hope and frustration, to America’s frontier.
The military encampment in Corpus Christi in the autumn of 1845 offered about as extreme and concentrated a version of martial manliness as might be found anywhere. And the building of the Army Theater (and soon, a second and commercial Union Theater, in which professional actors performed) can be seen as an attempt to temper this dangerously aggressive world with a more restrained model. But what those well-meaning officers hadn’t realized was that their theatrical efforts would force them to confront the discomfort they themselves felt about manliness. It explains why, in the end, though he rehearsed the part of Desdemona, Grant was not allowed to perform it. Longstreet recalled in his unpublished interview that “Lieutenant Porter who was to play the part of Othello objected. . . . Porter said it was bad enough to play the part with a woman in the cast, and he could not pump up any sentiment with Grant dressed up as Desdemona.”
It’s unclear whether Porter’s reported use of the word “sentiment” carries a hint of the residual dictionary sense of “amatory feeling or inclination.” If we take him at his word, it sounds like Porter, something of a method actor, couldn’t muster the physical desire for Grant demanded by the role (not least of all, one imagines, in the scene in which Othello arrives in Cyprus and lovingly kisses Desdemona). But that explanation feels unsatisfying, a placeholder for something that neither Porter nor Longstreet could quite admit to.
Five years after his unpublished interview Longstreet finished his memoir, From Manassas to Appomattox (1895). He had been at the center of many of the bloodiest and most consequential battles in his nation’s history, in both the Mexican-American and Civil Wars. That he devotes attention to this anecdote about amateur theatrics a half century after these rehearsals of Othello took place, and even remembered the conversations the young officers had, suggests that what happened, though seemingly trivial, had made an indelible impression. In this memoir, Longstreet returns to the issue of “sentiment,” though this time Grant’s rather than Porter’s. And he adds a clarifying detail; in this version, he edits out how good Grant looked in a dress, and has Porter shift the blame onto
men playing women’s parts: “after rehearsal Porter protested that male heroines could not support the character nor give sentiment to the hero.”
The episode offers the rarest of glimpses into anxieties about what it meant to be a white man at this unsettled time in American history, when, as the historian Harry Watson memorably put it, “all white men would be equal, at least in theory, but no one else would be the equal of a white man.” Shakespeare helps clarify what was happening at this moment in America, for the performance of his plays forced to the surface the cultural tensions and shifts that otherwise prove so difficult to identify and might otherwise have remained submerged. In the end, Longstreet writes, a professional actress was brought in to replace Grant: “we sent over to New Orleans and secured Mrs. Hart, who was popular with the garrisons in Florida.” Gertrude Hart arrived in time to rehearse and perform the lead on opening night of The Wife. In December, Grant went on a monthlong expedition that took him to San Antonio and Austin, and it is unlikely that he would have rehearsed the part of Desdemona after Hart’s arrival.
Grant never wrote about his experiences performing at the Army Theater. Still, a future general and president saw the world, for a brief moment, through the eyes of a white woman in love with a black man. Curiously, it was around this time that the clean-shaven Grant decided at long last to grow a beard. Perhaps, on the eve of his first military campaign, his reputation for girlish looks was not something he wanted to cultivate. He wrote to his fiancée three months later, on February 7, 1846, “Julia if you could see me now you would not know me, I have allowed my beard to grow two or three inches long.” But, Longstreet recalled, Grant didn’t give over playing “the girl’s parts” in other plays; Grant would have done so as a bearded lady rather than as one easily mistaken by his fellow soldiers for a desirable woman. In early March, the Army Theater was torn down and the army broke camp and marched south to the Rio Grande. The time for theatrics was over.
* * *
• • •
ON DECEMBER 29, 1845, as the young officers in Corpus Christi were preparing to open their Army Theater, playgoers were gathering five thousand miles away at London’s Haymarket Theatre to see a much-anticipated production of Romeo and Juliet, starring a pair of American siblings in the title roles. Romeo and Juliet had been one of the most popular of Shakespeare’s plays in the late eighteenth century, staged in London roughly five hundred times from 1750 to 1800. But by 1820 the number of productions had fallen off, on both sides of the Atlantic. In New York City, for example, there are records of fifteen productions between 1754 and 1806, but only four over the next twenty years. When it was performed in the early nineteenth century, critics and playgoers were invariably disappointed. Part of the problem was Romeo’s character, which required an actor dashing enough to carry off a romantic first kiss at the Capulets’ party and engage in furious swordfights in which he kills Tybalt and then Paris. Yet the same actor had to be convincingly unmanly when he declares, “O sweet Juliet, / Thy beauty hath made me effeminate.” And he needed to be even more wrought in the scene in the friar’s cell, where he falls on the floor, weepy and self-pitying, as Friar Lawrence chastises him: “Art thou a man? Thy form cries out thou art; / Thy tears are womanish . . . Unseemly woman in a seeming man” (3.1.12–13; 3.3.110–13). Nineteenth-century British critics, desperate to protect Shakespeare’s hero from charges of effeminacy, resorted to hairsplitting: “Of all the male persons of the drama that we can think of, Romeo, without being in the least effeminate (we hope our readers will find the distinction intelligible) is the most feminine.”
From the time that Richard Burbage, the star tragedian of Shakespeare’s playing company, first thrilled Elizabethan playgoers in the role, and from the Restoration up through the late eighteenth century, one leading man after another succeeded in making the role his own. The play ought to have been a hit during the Romantic era. But as norms of manhood began to change, mirroring the split between martial manliness and effeminacy within Romeo himself, male actors found the role increasingly unplayable. The leading English tragedians of the early nineteenth century—John Philip Kemble, Samuel Phelps, Charles Kean, and William Macready—all stumbled, some badly, in the role, or only excelled in parts of it. The polite, courtly (and often aging) Romeos that reigned on both sides of the Atlantic were duds.
The performance at the Haymarket Theatre in December 1845 offered an alternative, for the part of Romeo was to be performed by a woman, Charlotte Cushman, and that of Juliet by her younger sister, Susan. And the Cushman sisters (nicknamed the “American Indians” by the British actors who filled out the cast) promised to restore much of what had long been cut. Cushman’s Romeo was an immediate sensation. The enthusiastic review in the London Times was representative:
It is enough to say that the Romeo of Miss Cushman is far superior to any Romeo that has been seen for years. The distinction is not one of degree, it is one of kind. For a long time Romeo has been a convention. Miss Cushman’s Romeo is a creative, a living, breathing, animated, ardent, human being. The memory of playgoers will call up Romeo as a collection of speeches delivered with more or less eloquence, not as an individual. Miss Cushman has given the vivifying spark, whereby the fragments are knit together. . . . To drop to more material considerations, Miss Cushman looks Romeo exceedingly well.
Cushman was not the first woman to play Romeo. Ellen Tree had done so in London in 1832, with Fanny Kemble as her Juliet. Others in England soon followed—including Caroline Rankley, Felicita Vestvali, Fanny Vining, Margaret Leighton, and Esmé Beringer. But even before Tree, American women had begun playing the part; in New York City alone Mrs. Barry played Romeo in 1827, followed by Lydia Kelly in 1829, Mrs. Hamblin in 1832, Mrs. Barnes in 1833, and Mrs. Lewis in 1836. Records of nineteenth-century performances are spotty at best—and even fewer cast lists survive—but George C. D. Odell, who combed through archives and assembled this evidence in his fifteen-volume Annals of the New York Stage, identified fourteen other women who took to the stage as Romeo after Cushman’s London debut—and that was in New York City alone, at a time when Shakespeare was performed in many towns and cities across America. In an ugly aside, Odell places the blame for what he thought was a terrible idea on Cushman herself, rather than to something larger percolating in the culture: “Miss Cushman’s homely features and lack of feminine charm drove her to masculine characters; her success in them helped to perpetuate throughout the best years of the century the very bad custom of female Romeos, Hamlets, etc.” While there were still men who played Romeo at the time, for a brief and crucial period in the mid-nineteenth century, Romeo had become a woman’s part. And no woman was as celebrated in the role as Charlotte Cushman—almost forgotten today, but in her own day a superstar, the greatest American actress of the nineteenth century.
Cushman’s early aspirations as a singer—she was reportedly a fine contralto—had foundered when, forced into soprano parts, she injured her voice. She changed careers in her late teens and her potential as an actor was recognized early on, following her debut as a strong-willed Lady Macbeth at the age of 19, in 1836. But Cushman soon saw that if she didn’t want to be a bit player—and at the outset of her career she was performing upward of forty different minor roles a year—she would have to carve out a distinctive theatrical identity. Given the parts in the repertory available to women, that would not be easy.
Even when enjoying success as Lady Macbeth, Cushman knew that she would always be subordinate to her male leads; she wasn’t particularly happy with them nor they with her, especially as her reputation grew. A fellow actor, George Vandenhoff, wrote of her assertive Lady Macbeth that “one feels that if other arguments fail with her husband, she will have recourse to blows.” Edwin Booth, no less intimidated, confessed that when playing Macbeth alongside her, he felt like crying out, “Why don’t you kill him? You are a great deal bigger than I am.” For her part, as she later told the critic William Winter, she rese
nted playing against “such little men.” She stood only five feet six inches, so this had less to do with height than with stage presence. Winter, an admirer, saw this as central to her appeal: “You might resent her dominance, and shrink from it, calling it ‘masculine’; you could not doubt her massive reality nor escape the spell of her imperial power.”
Cushman gravitated to so-called breeches parts, including Rosalind in As You Like It and Viola in Twelfth Night, comedies in which the heroines disguise themselves in men’s attire, and was soon recognized as “undoubtedly the best breeches figure in America.” Critics were struck by how completely she transformed herself into a man: she looks, one wrote, “in every inch a man; and a man she is in voice and manner also, and gesture. . . . Her mind became masculine as well as her outward semblance; and on the assumption of her manly garb she would seem to have doffed all the constraint of her sex.” But this sort of flirtation with cross-dressing was a far cry from passing as a man (and not simply playing a woman briefly disguised as one). Cushman decided to take the next step and play male leads. In the course of her long and distinguished career she would go on to play more than forty such roles, though no part she played would have the cultural impact of her Romeo.
Shakespeare in a Divided America Page 6