Strange and Obscure Stories of New York City by Tim Rowland

Author:Tim Rowland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2016-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

A Deadly Battle of Shakespearean Actors

Born in Philadelphia in 1806, Edwin Forrest was one of America’s first home-grown global superstars. A Shakespearean actor, he amassed fame and fortune that today might be associated with the likes of George Clooney or Tiger Woods. Without all the electronic diversions of today, live theater in the nineteenth century equated not only to modern cinema, but to sporting events, rock concerts, and video games. Even countrified ruffians from unheard of backwaters could walk around quoting Shakespeare, just as twenty-first-century geeks parrot Monty Python.

Theater was also relatively new as an accepted form of entertainment, at least in the Northeast, where those colonies that hadn’t already banned stage productions were urged to do so by no less an authority than the Continental Congress. If that wasn’t good enough, there were holier opponents. “The man who sees the final issue of the matter, must be mad indeed, if for the momentary carnal enjoyment of a visionary illusion, he consent to lose his soul,” thundered Timothy Dwight IV, president of Yale at the turn of the nineteenth century. Calling theater “naked and filthy,” he seemed appalled that there could even be another side to the issue.

As the theaters began to proliferate (occasionally under the ruse of calling themselves a “Music Academy” or some such), they also took on a political air. There were theaters for the masses and theaters for the aristocrats, and correspondingly there were actors who inspired those in either high or low places.

Edwin Forrest was a hero to Americans and he was a hero to working class Americans all the more. He was, according to an account by contemporary H. M. Ranney, “born into a humble life and worked his way from poverty and obscurity to wealth and fame, by the power of genius.” And his style was quintessentially American. When playing a Shakespearean character on stage he would jettison the boring lines and focus on action. It was, says University of Maryland Associate Professor Heather S. Nathans, “action packed, moving along like a summer blockbuster from explosion to explosion.”

By contrast, the English actor William Macready—a chief rival of Forrest’s, in Forrest’s eyes, at least—was intellectual and detail oriented, his disposition more in tune with gentler, introspective roles. Even so, he was well received in tours of the United States, a circumstance that may have somewhat provoked Forrest, despite the American’s assertion that the two were on generally good terms.

If that were the case, it ended on a night in Edinburgh in the spring of 1846, where Macready was on stage and Forrest was in the audience. Macready was performing Hamlet and at some point decided the sad prince might benefit from a little song and dance number. There wasn’t anything terribly odd about this—critics today who shudder it the idea of changing a single word of the bard’s work would faint dead away at early-1800s productions where ad lib was the rule.

Even so, Forrest thought this was a pirouette too far, and let loose with the hiss heard ’round the world.

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