Viewing page 93 of 123

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

The Bard in America 
[[image - caption: The Cushman sisters, Charlotte and Susan, in Romeo and Juliet]]

1730-1964 by Louis Marder

From the amateur Romeo and Juliet production announced in the New York Gazette on March 23, 1730 to the three productions of Hamlet that will be seen in New York City in 1964, there is a span of 234 years, but as dramatic history goes, the time is not long at all. A panoramic view can be encompassed in about ten lines. Lewis Hallam's company to Williamsburg, Virginia in 1752. One of Hallam's associates brought Thomas A. Cooper to American in 1796. He influenced Edwin Booth who, before he died in 1893, influenced John Drew who died in 1927. Still within living memory are Drew's nephew, John Barrymore, who continued the tradition to his death in 1942, and his elder contemporary Walter Hampden who died but nine years ago.

For more than forty years the Hallam family acted along the Eastern seaboard after their American debut in The Merchant of Venice at Williamsburg on September 15, 1752. The 100th anniversary of that event was celebrated by a performance of the same play at Castle Garden in New York in 1852. The Hallams built a theatre on Nassau Street in 1753, but in other places the moral objections to plays frequently forced them to exhibit their Shakespeare programs as "moral lectures."

Although John Howard Payne, composer of "Home Sweet Home" achieved fame as the first American-born Hamlet in 1827, it was the British actors who brought distinction to the U.S. stage in the early 1800's. Some, like the Thomas Cooper already mentioned, became citizens. Others such [[italicized note separate from main text - Louis Marder, a recognized authority on The Bard, is Editor of the Shakespeare Newsletter published at Kent tate University in Ohio where he teaches.]] [[end page]] [[start page]] as George F. Cooke came for money. When it was announced that President James Madison was coming to a Cooke performance in Baltimore, Cooke refused to act saying that he who had performed before George III would never act before "your Yankee president."

To Edwin Forrest (1806-72) goes the distinction of becoming the first great American Shakespearean actor. His fine voice, imposing figure, and outstanding Shakespearean roles invited comparison with Charles Macready, greatest of the English actors. So intense was their rivalry that when both were scheduled to open in New York on the same night of May 7, 1849, a riot occurred which was fatal to thirty-one of the 20,000 persons who had been aroused by their patriotism to demonstrate outside the Astor Place Opera House that their American Forrest was better than the English Macready. Forrest's Macbeth at the Broadway Theatre in 1853 ran for twenty nights, the U.S. record for a Shakespeare play up to that time. 

With Edwin Booth, son of the noted tragedian Junius Brutus Booth, and brother of the deranged John Wilkes and J.B. Booth, Jr., the 19th century American Shakespearean tradition reached its zenith. The New York Herald wrote that "the audience was fairly carried by storm" when the three famous brothers appeared on the stage on November 24, 1864, in a performance of Julius Caesar for the benefit of erecting the Shakespeare statue which now stands in Central Park. The next night was even greater, for then Edwin opened as Hamlet in a production which ran for 100 performances, a record unbroken until John Barrymore's performance in 1923. The Tribune on November 27 said Booth's portrait of a "reflective, sensitive, gentle . . . tormented" prince was "one of the noblest pieces of dramatic art" ever seen. 

Though Forrest and Booth affected the elaborate and realistic setting of the English Kemble-Kean tradition, it was Augustin Daly whose spectacles and actors made his theatre the most famous in American in the last quarter of the century. With the beautiful, ruddy-haired Ada Rehan as Katharina, John Drew as Petruchio, and sets modelled after the great paintings of Paul Veronese, the 1885-86 production of The Taming of the Shrew ran 121 performances, an all time record up to 

[[image - caption: Edwin Forrest as Macbeth]]

that time. His Midsummer Night's Dream, despite critical attacks from the reviewers, was so spectacular that it ran for eighty-eight performances. 

The 19th century was an age, too, in which Charlotte Cushman, the first great American actress, could rise to fame as Romeo to her sister Susan's Juliet, and Susan herself could become famous for her role as Hamlet. It was an age of great actors and managers, but the text of Shakespeare suffered to make room for spectacles and favorites.