Shakespeare in a Divided America

by James Shapiro

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  BY THIS TIME the Mexican-American War was over. The troops that marched south from Corpus Christi in March 1846 soon engaged Mexican forces, and Congress declared war on Mexico on May 13. By then, Theodoric Porter, who had so recently played Othello, was dead, killed in a skirmish, his body never recovered. By war’s end in 1848, roughly a sixth of the more than 100,000 American soldiers who fought in the victorious campaign were dead, the highest rate of fatalities of any American war. Now that America had won, the state of Texas got a lot larger, and parts or all of Nevada, Utah, California, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Wyoming would soon be ceded by Mexico to the United States. The military campaign was so successful that some wanted to push on farther south into Central America—but the thought of even larger-scale amalgamation checked that impulse. In the Northwest, despite nationalist cries of “Fifty-Four Forty or Fight!”—alluding to the northern boundary of Oregon, with its latitude line of 54 degrees, 40 minutes, and so a catchphrase for the effort to extend the border as far as Alaska—the Senate approved in June 1846 the Oregon Treaty with Great Britain. The British gave America most of what it demanded, setting the border at the forty-ninth parallel (ceding what is now Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and parts of Montana and Wyoming). But the huge territorial expansion came at a terrible price. As Ulysses S. Grant foresaw, the “wicked war” that began in Texas led inexorably to the Civil War killing fields of Antietam, Gettysburg, Bull Run, and the Wilderness. By 1865, the fires that fueled Manifest Destiny were extinguished, along with the lives of more than 700,000 Confederate and Union soldiers. Martial manliness was, many now saw, a hollow and dangerous thing.

  This also marked the end of the age of female Romeos. After the war, a couple of women gave readings from the part, but only one is recorded as having acted it on the New York stage—Miss Marriot, in 1868. Before the war, the New York Times could declare that “there is in the delicacy of Romeo’s character something that requires a woman to represent it,” and the character’s “luscious language . . . seems strange on the lips of a man.” After the war, such sentiments disappeared from print. A less manly acting style—exemplified by the “poetic” Hamlet of Edwin Booth, “his heart too tender, and his will too weak for the circumstances of human life” (as his admirer William Winter put it) was now in vogue. Once men could comfortably play a Romeo who could at times appear effeminate, they reclaimed the role.

  In 1874, New Yorkers lined Fifth Avenue to honor Charlotte Cushman’s retirement from the stage, and she was similarly celebrated across the land. A contemporary, writing after Cushman’s death in 1876, recounts that her loss “was regarded in America almost as a national catastrophe.” Cushman is now all but forgotten; the story Americans like to tell of their past cannot easily accommodate her. Near the end of her acting career, on March 1, 1873, Cushman performed in Washington, DC. President Ulysses S. Grant, three days before his second inauguration, came to see her perform, and wanted to meet her afterward. But Cushman didn’t care to talk to him, explaining why in a letter to a friend a few days later: President Grant was “at the theater on Friday. I did not see him—for I had no curiosity.” Had she known that a cross-dressed Grant had once rehearsed the part of Desdemona she might have been more curious.

  Great Riot at the Astor Place Opera House, New York, on Thursday evening, May 10th, 1849.

  CHAPTER 3

  1849: Class Warfare

  A fatal shot tore through the neck of Asa Collins, a 45-year-old real estate agent, as he stepped off a Harlem Railroad car in lower Manhattan. A few blocks away, Bridget Fagan, a 30-year-old housekeeper out shopping, was felled by a shot that struck her below the right knee; amputation failed to save her life. George W. Gedney, a 34-year-old Wall Street broker, caught a shot that shattered his skull. An African American woman, whose name nobody thought to record, was shot and badly wounded at the corner of Lafayette Place. They were all innocent bystanders. Most of those who died on the evening of May 10, 1849, were shot deliberately while taking part in a violent riot outside the Astor Place Opera House. More than a score were killed and a hundred or so wounded. Newspapers reported that the bloodshed was unprecedented: the “massacre on Thursday night in front of the Opera House was, in the number and character of its victims, the most sanguinary and cruel that has ever occurred in this country,” a “wholesale slaughter.”

  The New York State militia had been mustered to suppress the riot at Astor Place, where a huge crowd, estimated at somewhere between 10,000 and 24,000, gathered to protest a performance of Macbeth by the British actor William Macready. The more hotheaded among the crowd, unable to force their way into the theater, attacked the majestic building itself. The militia’s presence did little to deter them, nor did a warning volley fired over their heads. As the increasingly emboldened rioters hemmed in the police and militia, pelting them with cobblestones, the order was given to fire directly at the crowd. Successive volleys rang out until the rioters, realizing at last that the soldiers weren’t firing blanks, retreated. Some, calling for revenge, promised to return in force the following day.

  The story went national, the New Orleans Daily Crescent reporting that what “began in madness ended in blood.” That “madness” was so widely known that it didn’t need to be repeated: a feud between Shakespeare actors. As one local paper put it: “Our city has been intensely agitated, a riot of a most outrageous and disgraceful character has taken place, the military has been called out, property destroyed, blood shed, and, for the last thirty-six hours, New York has worn the aspect of a civil war, all because two actors had quarreled.” It would be more accurate to say that while the Astor Place riots had their origins in a theatrical controversy, this proved to be less a cause than a complex means of channeling long-simmering anger over a host of divisive social issues, many of them amplified by their Shakespeare connection.

  Press accounts traced the source of the violence to an earlier Shakespeare performance. William Macready was touring Scotland in March 1846, and opened his engagement at the Edinburgh Theatre with Hamlet. He played to a full house, though, as the hypersensitive star complained in his diary, they “gave less applause to the first soliloquy than I am in the habit of receiving.” That the audience was initially cool may in part be explained by the 53-year-old Macready’s odd appearance: he wore a sort of dress whose waist reached to his armpits, oversize gloves, and a satin undershirt that looked dirty. A fellow actor described the effect as “positively grotesque.” Yet all went well enough until the moment in Act 3 when Hamlet tells Horatio, “I must be idle” (3.2.89), just before The Mousetrap is staged.

  Scholars, then as now, are divided over what Hamlet means by this. For some, it’s an indication that he must appear indifferent. That’s what the actor James Hackett thought at the time: Hamlet must appear “listless and unoccupied, in order that his guilty uncle, the king, might disregard his presence.” Not everyone agreed, including nineteenth-century editors convinced that because Hamlet intends to feign madness, acting idly here “signifies the aimless going hither and thither which marks an idiot.” Macready preferred this interpretation, and while he didn’t exactly move “hither and thither” aimlessly as the Danish court is seated, he came pretty close (and, as it happens, his movement recalls Anthony Scoloker’s description in 1604 of how the first actor to play Hamlet, Richard Burbage, would “run mad”). Hackett, who had seen him play Hamlet, describes how Macready “assumed the manner of a silly youth, tossed his head right and left, and skipped back and forth across the stage five or six times before the footlights, at the same time switching his handkerchief, held by a corner, over his right and left shoulder alternately.”

  At just this moment in Macready’s Edinburgh performance, he was loudly hissed. A young John Coleman, from his vantage point onstage as Horatio, remembered it vividly years later as “a hiss like that of a steam engine.” Macready, upon hearing it, was stopped in his
tracks and “became livid and absolutely hysterical with rage.” Badly derailed, Macready sat down onstage and struggled to collect himself. Coleman looked up into the box seats and spotted the perpetrator, the American actor Edwin Forrest: “I can see him now. The square brow, the majestic head, the dark eyes flashing forth defiance.” The house went quiet and the other actors stood around waiting. The audience too was silent, until a voice rang out from the gallery: “Throw him out.” Forrest rose and slipped out of the playhouse, while Macready, Coleman writes, “like a man possessed, leaped into the breach, apparently inspired by the ordeal through which he had passed.”

  It’s not obvious what drove Forrest to hiss so vehemently and why in turn it so upset Macready. This sort of theatrical disruption was pretty minor by contemporary standards, and the practice of hissing goes back at least as far as Elizabethan days (Shakespeare even jokes about it, having Puck in the epilogue to A Midsummer Night’s Dream speak of how he and his fellow actors hope to escape the hissing sound of “the serpent’s tongue”). Forrest too was on tour in Scotland, playing in Aberdeen, and had detoured 180 miles out of his way to see Macready perform. He had recently been stung by the mockery of London’s critics, some of them friends of Macready’s, in this, his second extended tour of Britain. He was quicker to blame his rival for working against him behind the scenes than to admit that the English had grown weary of his blustering style. But it’s hard not to conclude that watching Macready prance back and forth across the stage, waving his handkerchief daintily in the air, the obsessively masculine Forrest couldn’t resist hissing in disapproval of what struck him as his rival’s effeminate manner.

  Macready’s reaction in the days that followed, as the encounter was written up in national newspapers, underscores how wounded he felt and how reflexively he saw the growing quarrel as rooted less in personal animosity (since before this the two actors had gotten along well enough) than in national character: “No Englishman would have done a thing so base. . . . I do not think that such an action has its parallel in all theatrical history! The low-minded ruffian!” Forrest remained defiant. He fiercely defended his right to hiss and explained what had provoked his response: “Mr. Macready thought fit to introduce a fancy dance into his performance of Hamlet, which I thought, and still think, a desecration of that scene.” Forrest returned to the United States and ramped up his own nationalist rhetoric, telling a crowd in Kentucky of his commitment “to bring the American stage within the influence of a progressive movement—[cheers]—to call forth and encourage American dramatic letters—[applause]—and last, not least, to advance to just claims of our own meritorious and deserving actors [applause].” Critics and audiences on both sides of the Atlantic took sides, and the controversy remained a sore point between two of the most famous entertainers of the day.

  A couple of years later, in the autumn of 1848, it was Macready’s turn to perform on his rival’s turf. He had decided to sail to America for a farewell tour. When Forrest learned that Macready would appear at the Arch Street Theatre in Philadelphia for eleven performances, he signed on for a parallel run at the Walnut Street Theatre, a short stroll away. He would go head-to-head with the Englishman. If Macready opened with Macbeth on October 19, so would he. And the same held true for Othello on October 22, Lear on October 27, and Hamlet on closing night. And on those nights of the run when Macready was performing non-Shakespearean roles, Forrest responded with a pair of nationalist melodramas he had commissioned in a contest to promote American dramatists, playing to his strengths and to his Jacksonian principles. So on November 21 and 28, when Macready staged an adaptation of a German play, The Stranger, Forrest appeared in Metamora, in which he played a noble Native American driven to violence (who dies cursing the English), and then in The Gladiator as Spartacus, who heroically leads the fight against oppressive Roman masters. And if the political counterpoint was not obvious enough, when Macready took the stage as King Henry VIII on November 30, Forrest played the brash hero in Jack Cade, a commissioned American play about the doomed leader of a popular uprising made famous by Shakespeare in Henry VI, Part 2. It didn’t much matter that both actors were by now quite wealthy (earning as much as fifty dollars or more for every performance) or that Macready chafed against the British class system and was considering settling in America; Macready was now positioned, by Forrest and his vocal American supporters (and by his own words), as the embodiment of British elitism.

  Their feud might have simply exhausted itself at the box office, with the actor who drew the larger crowds declared the victor. The two men crossed paths on the street in Philadelphia and had a chance to clear the air, but neither said a word to the other. While Forrest seethed, Macready was increasingly unnerved by the threat of having his performances disrupted. Before opening night, he was told to expect protesters. Only a few showed up. A penny was thrown at him, then a rotten egg; both missed. The dispute could have ended there, but Macready seized upon a curtain call, rare in those days, to deliver a speech in which he admonished that unnamed “American actor” who had so rudely hissed in Edinburgh. It was a costly decision. That was sufficient provocation for Forrest, who retaliated by publishing a letter in the Public Ledger mocking Macready for not having the courage to name him, and dismissed his rival as a “superannuated driveller.”

  Macready changed his mind about settling in the United States (“Let me once get from this country and give me a dungeon or a hovel in any other”). He published a letter of his own threatening legal action and overreacted in advance of his performance of Othello, asking for “at least ten police behind the scenes” at the theater. His fears for his safety were unfounded, and that performance, along with the rest of the run, passed without further escalation. But if Macready thought that he had put the controversy behind him as he continued his American tour, which would culminate in New York City, he was wrong. In Cincinnati, a playgoer tossed half a sheep’s carcass onstage during his “fancy dance” in Hamlet—a gesture, Macready thought, of “malevolent barbarism.” The quarrel would soon escalate.

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  MACREADY HAD FIRST TOURED America in 1826 when he was in his mid-thirties, already an established star. He made his New York debut at the Park Theatre, near City Hall, which had opened in 1798 and had stood for more than a quarter century as the metropolis’s premier theater. Over time it began to face competition. In 1823 the Chatham Garden Theatre was built, followed two years later by the conversion of the Lafayette Circus into a playhouse. Macready’s tour coincided with the opening of what was soon the Park’s main competitor, the Bowery Theatre, which could seat 3,500 playgoers.

  Theodore Muller, New York and Brooklyn, c. 1849.

  The growth of New York City between Macready’s first visit to New York and his return in 1848 was extraordinary. In 1820 New York was a relatively small, homogenous city: its population was 123,000, only 5,000 of whom were immigrants. By 1850 the population had quadrupled to more than a half million, nearly half—235,000—now foreign born, mostly from Germany and Ireland. The city had become overwhelmingly white; the 1845 census noted that 12,000 or so—3 percent of the city’s population—were “colored”; a century earlier, when slavery was still practiced there, a fifth of the city had been African American. The city had extended as far north as Greenwich Village in the 1820s, and by the year of the Astor Place riots would encompass all of lower Manhattan up to Twenty-Sixth Street. The remaining grid of Manhattan, plotted in 1811, was rapidly filling in.

  By 1849 there were many more theaters, and they were playing an increasingly visible role in the city’s cultural life. While the Park had burned down, the Bowery was thriving, as were the Broadway, Burton’s, the Olympic, Christy’s Minstrels, and Chanfrau’s, as well as the recently built Astor Place Opera House (which, despite its name, staged plays too in order to turn a profit, just as other theaters put on operas). A move toward branding—with each theater catering to a sp
ecific clientele, offering alternative kinds of entertainment—was beginning, but only just beginning. Playgoers could still find a range of offerings, including Shakespeare, staged at almost every venue, and an avid playgoer might go to the Bowery one night and the Park the next.

  Some theaters provided access to the pit through a side entrance, others through the main one. Some had slightly higher entry fees than others. But all of New York’s theaters—at least until the Astor Place Opera House was built—admitted anyone who could pay for a ticket. A cheap seat cost as little as a quarter (or even half that), which meant that almost everyone, at a time when a day laborer earned roughly a dollar a day and a skilled worker twice that, could afford to see a play. There were no dress codes. No seat (except for boxes) could be reserved in advance. The theater was one of the few places in town where classes and races and sexes, if they did not exactly mingle, at least shared a common space. This meant, in practice, that the inexpensive benches in the pit were filled mostly by the working class, the pricier boxes and galleries were occupied by wealthier patrons, and in the tiers above, space was reserved for African Americans and prostitutes. All knew their place, or were taught to. Macready recalled what happened at the Park Theatre when a “black woman . . . by some mistake had got into the pit,” where she was “roughly” handled “amidst shouts of laughter from the white spectators.”