It’s impossible to know whether performing in Julius Caesar for the first and only time in his life fueled John Wilkes Booth’s violent intentions. Perhaps his identification with Brutus grew stronger after that or perhaps he recognized that likening himself to Brutus was useful in justifying his actions. Before shooting the president, Booth wrote a long letter defending his actions, one that he expected to have published in the National Intelligencer. On the day of the assassination, he gave that letter to a fellow actor, John Matthews, and asked him to deliver it. But Matthews, terrified of being punished as an accomplice after hearing that Booth had shot Lincoln, burned it after reading it through a few times. Many years later, his reconstructed version of it was published. In it, Booth appeals to the precedent of Shakespeare’s Brutus: “When Caesar had conquered the enemies of Rome and the power that was his menaced the liberties of the people, Brutus arose and slew him. The stroke of his dagger was guided by his love of Rome. It was the spirit and ambition of Caesar that Brutus struck at.” Booth ends the letter quoting from Shakespeare’s play: “Oh, that we could come by Caesar’s spirit / And not dismember Caesar! But, alas! / Caesar must bleed for it” (2.1.170–72).
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THOUGH JOHN WILKES BOOTH tried to portray himself as an American Brutus, the role suited him—as Shakespeare put it in Macbeth—“like a giant’s robe / Upon a dwarfish thief.” In the course of his career, Booth performed a surprisingly narrow range of Shakespearean roles, even for a touring star dependent on the repertory of resident companies in cities and towns across the land. He seems to have identified fully with the character he played. He told a friend, Louise Wooster, that while performing “he forgot his own identity completely and for a time would feel that he was really the character.” Rather than playing introspective or noble parts (as his father and brother Edwin had), the only roles in which he distinguished himself were dark and often villainous heroes, men of action who die fighting. If a character wasn’t scripted that way, he didn’t hesitate to exaggerate these traits.
He may have greatly admired King Lear, but Booth never acted in it, nor did he ever attempt to play Coriolanus, Richard II, Henry V, Orlando, Falstaff, Benedick, Orsino, Prospero, or Leontes. And he gave Shakespeare’s romantic comedies a wide berth. Though he acted the parts of Romeo, Shylock, and Othello twenty or so times each in his years as a touring star, the three Shakespeare roles that secured his reputation were Richard III, Macbeth, and Hamlet. Even here, though, he avoided introspection: his Macbeth was a man of action and his Hamlet was less a melancholy prince than a maddened avenger with blood on his hands, more soldier than scholar. His tragic heroes were more alike than different: athletic, combative, intent on a memorable death. And in the two modern tragedies that fleshed out his mostly Shakespearean repertory, Booth played to these familiar strengths—as Pescara, the vengeful and scheming villain stabbed to death at the end of Richard Shiel’s The Apostate, and as Raphael, the spurned lover who dies at the end of Charles Selby’s The Marble Heart—shallow and flashy roles that registered more with the eye than with the mind.
In his few short years as a star, Booth played the title role in Richard III more than a hundred times—not counting the three occasions in which he performed only the final Act, so that audiences could see what they had come for, his ferocious fight to the death against Richmond. A reviewer for the New York Clipper offers a glimpse of what it was like to watch Booth’s Richard confront his end: he “appears, ‘seeking for Richmond in the throat of death,’ and looks like a butcher just come from the slaughter house. . . . His face is covered in blood,” and he “actually seems ‘eager for the fray.’” Booth’s next-most celebrated Shakespeare role was Macbeth, in which he played the lead more than thirty times (and again, on a couple of occasions, staged only the final scenes and fight to the death). He clearly enjoyed displaying his physical prowess. A close friend of Edwin’s, Adam Badeau, remembered Booth leaping from rocks in his first entrance. And John T. Ford recalled how he would repeat this daring leap later in the play: upon entering “the den of the witches, Booth . . . had a ledge of rocks some ten or twelve feet high erected in their stead, down which he sprang upon the stage.” It was a stage trick that Booth would employ one last time when he made his escape after shooting Lincoln.
Booth could not replicate his brother Edwin’s success as Hamlet, though he himself starred in the part nearly fifty times. Charles Wyndham, who acted alongside John Wilkes, helpfully distinguished between the brothers’ different approaches to the part: “As John Wilkes played it the Danish prince was unmistakably mad throughout. Edwin’s conception of the part was that of uneven and unbalanced genius. . . . But John Wilkes leaned toward the other view of the character, as was in keeping with his own bent of mind. His Hamlet was insane, and his interpretation was fiery, convincing, and artistic.” William R. Taylor’s groundbreaking study, Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (1961), includes a chapter, “From Hotspur to Hamlet,” that explores how the ideal of the white gentleman in the antebellum South gravitated to these polar Shakespearean models. The Southern Hotspurs came “to symbolize honorable failure and the lost cause,” while the Southern Hamlets lacked the “vitality and masculinity” needed to act: they are “the consciousness and the conscience of the South” who “are paralyzed by their knowledge.” John Wilkes Booth shared the racial and social values of the Confederacy. In turning Hamlet into Hotspur—a mad, masculine, fiery rebel—he managed to combine these two popular types, recasting the Danish prince as yet another one of Shakespeare’s heroic but doomed Lost Cause types who dies by the sword and pleads at the end for Horatio to tell his story right.
Historians trace the origins of the Confederacy’s Lost Cause back to Edward A. Pollard’s The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates, published in 1866. Pollard never names Booth, and writes of “the tragical death of President Lincoln, in a public theatre, at the hands of one of the most indefensible but courageous assassins that history had ever produced.” The final pages of Pollard’s book neatly encapsulate his message: “The war did not decide negro equality; it did not decide negro suffrage . . . it did not decide the right of a people to show dignity in misfortune, and to maintain self-respect in the face of adversity. And these things which the war did not decide, the Southern people will still cling to, still claim, and still assert in them their rights and views.” The Lost Cause movement tapped into the desire to recover past greatness even as it stoked Southern anxieties about black equality, and it took root in the rich soil tilled by Southern writers, including those who found support for their convictions in Shakespeare.
As early as 1863, with the opening of the New Theatre in Richmond, Virginia (As You Like It was the first play staged there), Shakespeare had been mobilized in such an effort. Henry Timrod, the “poet laureate of the South,” wrote a poem for that occasion, reprinted in newspapers throughout the Confederacy. The poem, written “Amid the night of war and death,” conjures up a visitation of Shakespearean characters, culminating in a doomed Hamlet whose words “cut so deep / Into the core of life!” For Timrod, the “charms of Art” go hand in hand with “the dear rights for which we fight and pray.” And, in the end, in life, as in drama, “all at last shall vindicate the right.”
The defense of the South made its way into Shakespeare criticism, still in its infancy in America. One of the most remarkable books on Shakespeare written in nineteenth-century America was by a woman with Confederate sympathies, Mary Preston, whose Studies in Shakspeare was published in 1869. Little is known about Preston, almost all of it from the pages of her book, where we learn that she lived at a home named “Oaklands” in Bel Air, Maryland—a few miles from where John Wilkes Booth was born and raised. It would strain belief that someone so invested in Shakespeare would not have known that the most famous Shakespeare family in America lived nearby. Preston wrote on occasion for the loca
l newspaper, the Aegis and Intelligencer, and her views of slavery, the Confederacy, and the Lost Cause were close to Booth’s own, perhaps even her unshakable conviction that “Othello was a white man!” (a “dogmatical assertion” that the reviewer of her book in the Aegis and Intelligencer was “pleased to accept”). Most of Preston’s chapters on major Shakespeare plays were likely written during the war and repeatedly connect those plays to current events. Preston’s ambivalent reflections on Julius Caesar are among the most fascinating in her book. She reserves some sympathy for Brutus’s misguided patriotism and might as well be speaking of John Wilkes Booth when she concludes that such men are capable “of persuading themselves, when they desire to do so, that wrong is right, though they still retain a lingering suspicion that they are deceiving themselves.”
By the time that Union troops from the 16th Regiment New York Voluntary Cavalry trapped him in a barn on April 26, 1865, Booth had spent years rehearsing what would be his final scene. He understood exits as well as anyone, and desperately wanted to make one befitting a tragic and heroic figure. To his chagrin, the soldiers had no desire to play along. The dialogue from his final hours was later reconstructed. Lieutenant Luther Byron Baker, part of the force that cornered Booth in the barn on the property of John Garrett, called in to Booth demanding that he come out and surrender—“You are surrounded by fifty armed men. We know who you are. If you don’t come out in five minutes, we will set the barn on fire.” Booth replied, “Be fair and give me a show . . . Draw your men back a hundred yards and I will fight you all. Give me a fair fight.” But the troops had no interest in such a scenario, and Booth was given two minutes to surrender. Booth once again begged of them a chance to die fighting, as he had so often as Macbeth and Richard III: “Give me a chance for my life, and I will come out and fight you.” When told that his time was up, and they were setting fire to the barn, Booth said: “Well my brave boys, you can prepare a stretcher for me. One more stain upon the old banner.” One of the soldiers, Sergeant Boston Corbett, without orders, fired into the barn and hit Booth, severing his spinal cord and paralyzing him from the neck down. Booth was denied the chance to die heroically. His final words, after realizing that he could not even raise his hands, were: “Useless, useless.”
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LINCOLN SPENT APRIL 9, 1865—five days before he was assassinated—aboard the steamboat River Queen, sailing back to Washington after a risky visit to the front, including a tour of the now liberated capital of the Confederacy, Richmond, where fires were still burning. Lightly guarded and accompanied by his son Tad as he entered Richmond, Lincoln was mobbed by newly freed slaves. Lincoln then proceeded to the “Confederate White House” and sat in the office of Jefferson Davis, who had fled the city. It was a gesture that sat poorly with those embittered by its symbolism; John Wilkes Booth was maddened by it, having heard rumors that Lincoln had spat tobacco juice while lounging on Davis’s chair. After leaving Richmond, Lincoln made his way to City Point, Virginia, where, awaiting news from General Grant, he visited wounded Union soldiers for five hours, shaking hands with thousands of them. Though Lincoln did not yet know it, as he was sailing back to Washington, Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox, all but bringing the war to an end.
One of those who journeyed home with him on the River Queen was Senator Charles Sumner, who recalled how Lincoln’s thoughts at this moment turned to Shakespeare, and to Macbeth in particular, as the president pulled out a handsome quarto of the play that he had brought with him and twice read aloud “the tribute to the murdered Duncan.” Sumner was accompanied by a young Frenchman, the Marquis de Chambrun, whose diary entry for that day offers a fuller account of what took place: “Mr. Lincoln read to us for several hours passages taken from Shakespeare. Most of these were from Macbeth, and in particular the verses which follow Duncan’s assassination. I cannot recall this reading without being awed at the remembrance, when Macbeth became king after the murder of Duncan, he falls a prey to the most horrible torments of mind.” In his usual way, “Lincoln paused here while reading and began to explain to us how true a description of the murderer that one was, when, the dark deed achieved, its tortured perpetrator came to envy the sleep of his victim; and he read over again the same scene”:
Methought I heard a voice cry “Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep,” the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care,
The death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast— (2.2.39–44)
A more arrogant leader might have quoted Malcolm’s victorious lines at play’s end, having triumphed on the battlefield: “and what needful else / That calls upon us, by the grace of Grace / We will perform in measure, time, and place” (5.8.72–74). But Lincoln chose instead to dwell upon how perfectly Shakespeare had captured the unrelieved guilt of the “tortured perpetrator.”
It’s not surprising that Lincoln had brought along a copy of Macbeth. He had told Charlotte Cushman that it was his “favorite play,” and in his letter to James Hackett wrote that “I think nothing equals Macbeth; I think it is wonderful.” Lincoln seems to have found comfort reciting from this dark tragedy. That at least was the impression of John W. Forney, editor of the Philadelphia Press, and, during the war years, secretary of the senate, in which capacity he met with Lincoln regularly. Forney writes that “Lincoln had his periods of depression” and that “one evening I found him in such a mood. He was ghastly pale, the dark rings were round his caverned eyes, his hair was brushed back from his temples, and he was reading Shakespeare as I came in. ‘Let me read you this from Macbeth’ . . . :
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. (5.5.19–28)
“I cannot read it like Forrest,” Lincoln added, “but it comes to me tonight like a consolation.” If any American reader of Shakespeare has truly felt—through meditating on the tormented words of guilt-ridden characters like Macbeth and Claudius—the deep connection between the nation’s own primal sin, slavery, and the terrible cost, both collective and personal, exacted by it, it was Lincoln.
There was another reason he might have been brooding about Macbeth on that trip to Richmond. Lincoln’s friend and self-appointed bodyguard, Ward Hill Lamon, recalled that “a few days” before he was assassinated an unusually somber Lincoln had told a small group (that included his wife and Lamon) about a nightmare he had had ten days earlier, while awaiting “important dispatches from the front.” It was a dream, Lincoln said, that had “haunted” him “ever since.” Lincoln was loath to mention this disturbing premonition to his wife, but the compulsion to share it was too great. Likening himself to a Macbeth rattled by visions, Lincoln said that “somehow the thing has got possession of me, and, like Banquo’s ghost, it will not down.” In his dream, Lincoln recalled how “I thought I left my bed and wandered downstairs.” Calling to mind the sleepwalking Lady Macbeth, Lincoln saw himself entering the East Room of the White House, where he was met with “a sickening surprise”: a corpse guarded by soldiers and surrounded by a throng of mourners, some “weeping pitifully.” When he asked, “Who is dead in the White House?” a soldier replied, “The President.” He “was killed by an assassin.” A “loud burst of grief” from the mourners woke Lincoln from his nightmare. The experience was so unnerving that for the rest of the night, Lin
coln said, “he slept no more.” Lamon (who writes that he jotted down at the time what Lincoln said “as nearly in his own words” as he could recall), adds that Lincoln was “profoundly disturbed” by this nightmare, and continued to dwell on it: in “conversations with me he referred to it afterward, closing with this quotation from Hamlet: ‘To sleep, perchance to dream! Ay, there’s the rub,’ with a strong accent on the last three words.”
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LINCOLN’S ASSASSINATION marked a beginning as much as an end—of Reconstruction, of the Lost Cause, of a battle for equality for the freed slaves and their descendants, and of the struggle to define the legacies of both Lincoln and Booth, in which Shakespeare, unsurprisingly, figured. Taking the hint from Booth himself, his few and scattered supporters defended the assassination on the grounds that, like Brutus, Booth had killed a tyrant. An editorial that ran in the Warsaw, Kentucky, Sign of the Times, praised him as a “lover of liberty, the great American Brutus . . . whose name will go down to future generations as the American Liberator—as the man who had the daring courage to destroy the first American tyrant.” The Texas Republican similarly maintained that Booth slew Lincoln “as a tyrant, and the enemy of his country.” The poem “Our Brutus” (likely written in 1866 but which didn’t appear in print until 1913, in the Confederate Veteran Magazine) offers another example of how Booth was celebrated by his admirers as an American Brutus: “It was Liberty slain / That so maddened his brain.” It was easier to claim this heroic status for Booth, to hide behind the conspirators’ cry that “Tyranny is dead” (3.1.79) than to admit that Booth, a white supremacist, did what he did out of hatred for Lincoln and a deep-seated loathing of emancipation and racial equality.
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