Shakespeare in a Divided America

by James Shapiro

  In the late 1840s it was comforting to think of the rapidly changing city as it had been, not as it was fast becoming. In a lithograph by Theodore Muller from 1849, Manhattan looks remarkably peaceful. The image also shows that while extending northward, the city was not yet—except for church spires—soaring upward. There weren’t many green spaces for relief from those crowded streets: that large patch of green in the middle of the lithograph is the area around City Hall, what we now think of as downtown. Central Park did not yet exist and the densely inhabited part of the city tapers off north of Fourteenth Street, where the two great thoroughfares, Bowery and Broadway, intersect (now Union Square, so named because when the grid was laid out that was where they met). You could say that in the 1840s and 1850s those two streets, one grounded in the notorious Five Points, the other in the financial district—embodying the different classes and aspirations of the city—had been on a collision course, as the metropolis, and its theaters, extended northward along these arteries. They would soon collide, explosively, at Astor Place.

  Income inequality had also increased dramatically. Nowadays, we speak of the “One Percent” who command more than their fair share of the nation’s wealth; in 1849, their equivalent was called the “Upper Ten Thousand” or the “codfish aristocracy” (so named for the vast sums made in the fishing industry). In 1842, the Sun began publishing alphabetical lists of New Yorkers with a net worth greater than $100,000—including more than a dozen millionaires. Even as the rich were getting richer, the poor, especially the just off the boat, were truly impoverished. Street gangs of working-class immigrants were on the rise, their muscle exploited by unscrupulous politicians. The city was deeply divided over abolition. Nativism, in reaction to the unending stream of immigrants, was on the rise. Class divisions had grown sharper too, with unionization and better labor conditions (like a ten-hour workday) as yet a dream. The city’s police department was too small and poorly organized to deal with a crisis, and firefighters were still volunteers. The strains went largely unacknowledged.

  They only became obvious when rioting broke out. The history of New York City in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was punctuated by violent riots, among these the Negro Riots of 1712 and 1741, the Stamp Act Riot of 1765, the Doctors’ Riot of 1788, the African Grove Riot of 1823 (in which a black theater was destroyed by a white mob), the Spring Election Riot of 1834, the Abolition Riots of 1834–1835, and the Flour Riots of 1837. More often than not, the rioting originated at a theater: between 1816 and 1834 alone there were twenty-nine theater-related riots in New York City. The last of these was the Farren Riot at the Bowery Theatre, a dress rehearsal for what would happen fifteen years later at Astor Place. In early December 1833, Forrest was to star again in Metamora. The other actors had to learn their parts quickly, and the stage manager, George Farren, backed up by a fellow Englishman, Thomas Hamblin, who ran the theater, posted a notice warning that any actor who wasn’t off book by the final rehearsal would be fined a night’s wages. A popular American actor, D. D. McKinney, was unprepared and read from his script. When he was docked a symbolic dollar (he was earning $15 a week), he angrily refused to accept his wages, declaring that “he cared not for the laws of the theatre.” Hamblin fired him. McKinney went to the press and accused Hamblin of acting in a way that was “tyrannical and arbitrary in the extreme, and not to be tolerated by an American public.” Hamblin refused to back down. The stakes were further raised when a local butcher accused Farren of having “cursed the Yankees” and “called them jackasses.”

  The slow-lit fuse ignited rioting seven months later, on July 9, when Farren was to profit from a benefit performance. That same night, a crowd gathered at the Chatham Street Chapel to disrupt an American Anti-Slavery Society meeting. Disappointed to find no abolitionists there, the crowd, swollen to four thousand or so, and stirred up by handbills recounting Farren’s insulting words about Americans, decided to head instead to the nearby Bowery Theatre, where they “took possession of every part of the house, committed every species of outrage,” and attacked Hamblin, who tried to protect himself from assault by waving an American flag. The angry crowd wasn’t easily assuaged, even after they were assured that Farren would be fired. Their hero, Edwin Forrest, who was playing the lead that evening, spoke to them, and the blackface performer George Washington Dixon tried pacifying them by singing the patriotic “Yankee Doodle Dandy” as well as the racist “Zip Coon.” They didn’t disperse, however, until a large contingent of watchmen arrived, whereupon they turned their rage once again against the abolitionists, charging down to Rose Street, where they trashed the home of a leading abolitionist, Lewis Tappan, and for the next week ran amok against other antislavery campaigners and attacked African American homes and churches. The theater, not for the last time, found itself at the center of a riot, one fueled by a heady mixture of racism, nationalism (spurred by anti-British sentiment), hostility toward abolition, and economic anxiety.

  As the story of the Farren Riot suggests, there were many reasons why theaters in antebellum New York figured so centrally in fomenting civil disobedience. Riots require crowds, and theaters, located in densely populated parts of town, could hold thousands of spectators. And because there were many British actors working in New York’s theaters, they were a convenient place to stir up nationalist sentiment. But a more significant reason was that theaters were imagined to be worlds unto themselves and therefore less subject to outside authority. It was a view reiterated in 1849 by an anonymous commentator: “The public and magistrates have been accustomed to look upon theatrical disturbances, rows, and riots, as different in their character from all others . . . and magistrates, looking upon it as a matter between the actors and the audience, have generally refused to interfere, unless there was a prospect of a violent breach of the peace.” Theaters were imagined as more contentious versions of town hall meetings, democratic spaces where all could speak their minds; to challenge these unspoken rules was un-American and a provocation.

  One of those who recognized the extent to which America’s theaters exposed rifts between social classes was a foreigner, Alexis de Tocqueville. In his Democracy in America (1835) he notes that the American theater is one of the few places where rich and poor meet, and “there alone do the former consent to listen to the opinion of the latter, or at least to allow them to give an opinion at all.” Tocqueville saw that this commingling inevitably favored the disenfranchised: “The pit has frequently made laws for the boxes.” The American stage, then, was a potential threat to a nation’s financial and cultural elite: “If it be difficult for an aristocracy to prevent the people from getting the upper hand in the theater, it will readily be understood that the people will be supreme there when democratic principles have crept into the laws and manners—when ranks are intermixed—when minds, as well as fortunes, are brought more nearly together.”

  New York’s upper crust responded to such threats by building a new theater in which it could retain its authority. The Astor Place Opera House, built in 1847, financed by the subscriptions of 150 wealthy citizens, deliberately broke with long-standing traditions. The site had been chosen with care, just north of the nine sumptuous townhouses of Colonnade Row, an enclave occupied by some of the city’s wealthiest citizens (including, before his death, the fabulously rich John Jacob Astor, after whom the new building was named). The Spirit of the Times captures with unintended irony the aspirations of the new theater: “There is a feeling of repose, of security from rude and impertinent interruption, a languor of voluptuous enjoyment.” A popular minstrel song mockingly offers much the same sentiment, but does so from the perspective of the excluded, and in a markedly different dialect:

  De Astor Opera is anoder nice place;

  If you go thar, jest wash your face!

  Put on your ‘kids,’ and fix up neat,

  For dis am de spot of de eliteet!

  New York’s Home Journal described the new building
in luscious detail, from the exterior—“the dark chocolate-colored stone that soon imparts an air of age to edifices constructed of it”—to its lavish interior, where the “facades of the three tiers within” are “all aglitter with gold and silver gildings,” a “glorious chandelier . . . hangs from the center of the ceiling,” and underfoot, “thick-pictured carpets line the floors with a layer of absorbing silence.” It was “the kind of house Titania would have ordered for Bottom to see a play in”—though designed to keep out rude mechanicals like him.

  The Opera House could hold 1,800 spectators, half the capacity of competitors. It introduced fixed and numbered seats in the pit (renamed the parquette, what we now call the stalls or orchestra seats), which were covered in red damask; the benches that filled the pit in other theaters were now relocated to a small “cockloft” with an obstructed view, accessible only through a narrow stairway, segregating these spectators from the wealthier subscribers below. And there would be no space set aside for prostitutes; unaccompanied women were not welcome. The message was clear. As the New York Herald put it, this was to be “the first authentic organization of the upper classes, congregated under a splendid dome in a respectable quarter of the city.” On top of all this, a dress code was instituted—including white or “kid” gloves for men—intended to keep out working-class riffraff.

  That dress code rankled. A pseudonymous “American Citizen” complained that “to say to the laboring man you must appear in the Opera House in a black dress coat, white vest, white cravat, and white kid, would be equivalent to telling him he should not enter it at all.” The new rules were seen as fundamentally undemocratic: “The Opera House in this city was intended for the exclusive use of those only who could afford to pay high prices for admission, and dress in a peculiar style. But it will be asked: have not people a perfect right to establish a theatre and fix such a rate of prices as they see fit, and require persons to dress in a certain fashion? We answer emphatically, no. In this country to do so would be an outrage on the feelings and rights of a vast majority of the people.” Others also saw that the changes instituted at the new playhouse crossed a threshold and threatened “the spontaneous cohesion of interest and sympathy which alone binds a republic.”

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  THE FAREWELL PERFORMANCES at the exclusive Opera House by an actor viewed by many as a stand-in for British elitism could not have been worse timed. In addition to ongoing Anglo-American tensions, exacerbated by Britain’s callous response to the Irish Famine (which had produced an exodus to America), reports of revolutionary violence that had been sweeping European capitals since February 1848 (including the use of military force to suppress civilian protesters) were discomforting to some and emboldening to others.

  In local politics, the Whigs—the party of the rule of law, bankrolled by the same clientele that frequented the Opera House—had recently defeated the splintered Democrats in New York’s mayoral election. In response, antebellum Democrats were doubling down in their populist base, blending “lower-class racism and anti-abolitionism, class and ethnic resentments, and nationalist jingo,” as the historian Sean Wilentz puts it, to build an “anti-nativist, red-blooded party of the patriotic workingmen, the eternal foe of the aristocratic, Tory, ‘Federal Whig Coon Party.’” That meant relying heavily on the strong-arm tactics of Tammany Hall go-betweens like Isaiah Rynders, who would be a ringleader in the ensuing rioting.

  Rynders was a thug and a nativist with a violent past. He thought that mob violence was justified if it reflected the will of the people, and believed “that freedom of speech was a privilege, not a right, especially if such speech insulted Americans or threatened their values or prerogative.” Shakespeare was as much a part of his life as fisticuffs. As a young dockhand, Rynders had purchased a copy of the plays and he trained himself to “recite entire scenes from memory.” Shakespeare also came in handy when stirring up a crowd; a “singular feature” of Rynders’s “campaign addresses when he entered the political fray” was “a mixture of terrible profanity with liberal quotations from the Scriptures and Shakespeare.”

  In anticipation of Macready’s opening night, unusual coalitions were forming. On one side, bankers and leading cultural figures found common ground in championing the British Shakespearean. On the other, nativists opposing the foreigner Macready joined forces with their sometime foes, the immigrant Irish Catholics. Their mutual hatred of the British overrode their differences, and their shared racist views cemented their union. Macready’s appearance at Astor Place offered a perfect occasion for a showdown; both sides were confident they would prevail in any confrontation. Rynders’s lieutenant, Ned Buntline, wrote in his newsletter, Ned Buntline’s Own, “If they mean to have a war, let it begin here!”

  Forrest, who was playing to packed houses at the Broadway Theatre, decided to shadow Macready once again, and declared that he too would play Macbeth that evening. Thomas Hamblin at the Bowery did the same, hoping to cash in on the controversy. All three actors played to full and appreciative houses that evening, and Forrest got a huge cheer when he recited Macbeth’s timely words “what purgative drug / Would scour these English hence?” (5.3.57–58). Nearly 10,000 New Yorkers would see one of these three productions of Macbeth that night. To put that in perspective, in the past thirty years there have only been three productions of Macbeth in all on Broadway. In mid-nineteenth-century America, Shakespeare’s appeal remained near universal, his works embraced as avidly by the Bowery crowd as they were at Astor Place—if anything, more so. Since the previous May, playgoers at the Bowery could have seen Macbeth, Coriolanus, Hamlet, Othello, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, King John, and Henry VIII, while the Broadway offered Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, The Merchant of Venice, The Comedy of Errors, and Henry IV, Part 1. Before Macready’s scheduled one-month run, the only Shakespeare in the past year at Astor Place had been a benefit starring Edwin Forrest as Macbeth; his supporters didn’t hold that against him. Elsewhere, Chanfrau’s was offering Richard III as well as Othello in a double bill with the blackface parody Otello. There had even been a pair of burlesque skits greeting Macready on his arrival in America: Mr. Macgreedy, or A Star at the Opera House at Chanfrau’s and Who’s Got Macready, or A Race to Boston at the Olympic.

  At stake were competing notions of what sort of behavior was acceptable in a theater, as well as diverging American and British approaches to Shakespeare. Macbeth that May 7 highlighted these differences. It’s a mistake to think of Macready’s and Forrest’s performances as a showdown between highbrow purist and lowbrow crowd-pleaser: both performers today would seem wildly over the top. Shakespeare’s Macbeth is bold yet contemplative, committed to a brutal path to power yet tortured by the consequences of that choice, leaving actors considerable leeway in how to approach the role. Yet the play didn’t offer an opportunity—as, say, Julius Caesar or Coriolanus did—to explore competing political views; the differences between British and American styles would turn on issues of character. Forrest, in keeping with how he approached most roles, emphasized Macbeth’s boldness and played him as “the ferocious chief of a barbarous tribe,” a warrior who furiously hurls a goblet over the head of Banquo’s ghost and nearly strangles a messenger who brings bad tidings. Forrest showed little interest in exploring Macbeth’s reflective side or his guilty conscience. To that end, for example, he altered the punctuation of the soliloquy in Act 1 that begins “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well / It were done quickly” (1.7.1–2), turning self-doubt into confident assertion: “If it were done, when ’tis done, then ’twere well.” He had an intuitive grasp of what values his fellow countrymen identified with, and gave them a Macbeth, as one admirer put it, who was “a man there to do his three hours’ work; brawlingly it may be, sturdily, and with great outlay of muscular power, but there’s a big heart thrown in.”

  Macbeth was Macready’s favorite role. He offered playgoers
a more thoughtful and tormented hero. Central to his interpretation was how much Macbeth’s character is altered after killing Duncan. His “crouching form and stealthy, felon-like step of the self-abased murderer” in this scene was, for many, unforgettable. So too was “the terrible agony of his cry—‘Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou couldst!’” (2.2.78) as he averted his face and stretched out his arms “as it were, to the irrecoverable past.” And when confronted by Banquo’s ghost, Macready “brought out the gnawing of conscience and the insecurity of ill-gotten power,” his haggard features and restless movements making it seem “as if the curse ‘Macbeth shall sleep no more’ had taken visible effect.” Some found in this approach too much intellect and too little heart. Others were annoyed by his interminable pauses, through which he conveyed to the audience a character steeped in thought (a prompter in Bristol nearly drove Macready mad by feeding him the next line at every long pause, assuming that he was having trouble remembering the part). Macready, anticipating method acting by many decades, was probably the first to have said that “I cannot act Macbeth without being Macbeth.”

  Shakespeare leaves unclear whether, at play’s end, when Macbeth tells Macduff “I will not fight with thee” (5.8.22), he utters those words either cravenly or scornfully. Macready spoke them fearfully, and dies falling upon Macduff’s sword, “in yielding weakness.” In contrast, Forrest’s manly Macbeth fights to his last breath. Even after Macduff disarms him and delivers a fatal blow, he manages to draw a dagger, and, dying, “drives its point into the stage, where it remains, quivering, by his side, as the curtain falls”—and the remainder of the play is cut. In this, perhaps more than in any other Shakespearean role, each man was understood as cultivating, and ultimately defining, his national character: Forrest the brash American, Macready the sensitive Englishman.