Acting in the Night: Macbeth and the Places of the Civil War
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Acting in the Night: Macbeth and the Places of the Civil War
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520947443 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2010 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 312 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
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Acting in the Night
Macbeth and the Places of the Civil War
By Alexander Nemerov
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2010 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-94744-3
CHAPTER 1
A Stone's Throw
Charlotte Cushman
CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN ARRIVED IN WASHINGTON, D.C., on the evening of Friday, October 9, 1863, to play Lady Macbeth later that month. She had returned to the United States earlier that year from Rome, where she lived, to deliver a series of benefit performances of Macbeth to aid the United States Sanitary Commission. A fiercely pro-Union native of Massachusetts, age forty-seven in 1863, Cushman had already performed in Philadelphia and Boston by the time she got to Washington, and she would go on to take the stage in Baltimore and New York. Her five-city tour resulted in a donation of more than $8,000 to the commission. With her outsized ego, Cushman knew people would pay to see her—the most famous American actress of her generation and the most famous Lady Macbeth—and she was right.
That first evening in Washington, she arrived at the Lafayette Square home of her good friend Secretary of State William Seward, making a vivid impression on Seward's eighteen-year-old daughter Fanny. "When the front door opened Anna and I ran down stairs & met Miss Cushman on her way up—Anna first," Fanny wrote in her diary, describing her reaction and that of her sister-in-law Anna Seward, wife of her brother Fred. "After kissing Anna she gave me also a warm kiss saying she was glad to see me here."
Then Cushman stepped into the parlor, and she was larger than life. "She stood talking and taking off her hat & cloak which I received," Fanny wrote, awestruck, noting all the details of the famous actress's dress. "She wore a drab travelling 'duster,' and black Neapolitan bonnet, trimmed with purple—Her dress was alpaca with white pin stripe—made in a skirt & short loose sack, the latter worn over a striped linen shirt, & showing the collar & sleeves." Fanny then gave her impressions of Cushman's prepossessing figure, big for a woman at the time—"She is very stout, but also very tall—a good deal taller than myself I believe." And she noted other details of her appearance: "Her hair, gray and inclined to wave a little, she wore drawn back from the sides of her face, but rolled forward—A black silk net at the back."
Of Cushman's face Fanny wrote, "At all times it is full of soul—and it will always seem to me, what ever others may call it, beautiful, far more beautiful than youth or regularity of features alone could be.... It possesses sublimity from intellect, it glows with benevolence, it sparkles with humor, it wins with earnest tenderness, it is cheerful, frank, natural, grand, thrilling, awful. I love the face as that of a great, true woman.... She seems to live as God intended life—filling each moment." A photograph of Cushman taken a few years earlier gives some sense of the person Fanny saw that evening (fig. 1).
In the next few days Cushman made an equally vivid impression on the rival managers of Washington's two most prestigious theaters, John Ford and Leonard Grover. Meeting with each man, she considered where and when she would stage her performance and decided later that week to play at Grover's National Theatre, swayed by Grover's willingness to offer the experienced professional actors Lester Wallack, Jr., and Edward Loomis Davenport in the roles of Macbeth and Macduff. On the night of Saturday, October 17, some twenty-five hundred people crowded into the theater, located on E Street between Thirteenth and Fourteenth streets, Northwest, to see the play. The theater had been open in a refurbished state for only eleven days. A slightly later photograph of the building, which existed only until 1873 (when it burned down), shows the venue where Cushman performed (fig. 2).
The Washington newspapers described the performance only in general terms, reporting that it gave "the utmost satisfaction," that "the audience was enthusiastic throughout the play," that Abraham Lincoln and his family were in attendance, and that at the end Cushman stood before the curtain and received "an elegant bouquet from the ladies in Mr. Seward's box"—Fanny, Anna, and Emma Crow Cushman, the actress's niece, who accompanied her to Washington and also stayed at the Seward house. Fanny disappoints the historian by describing the play in one of her two diaries simply as "very interesting." (Her other diary is silent about the performance.) The following week, when Cushman performed the same role at the Academy of Music in New York on October 22, playing alongside Edwin Booth as Macbeth, a review was equally general: "Miss Cushman's powerful rendering of Lady Macbeth was the great treat of the occasion." Even so, the many specific accounts of Cushman's acting written over the course of her long career and afterward—she first took the stage in 1836 and made her last appearance in 1875, a year before her death—make clear her stage powers that evening.
Cushman commanded space. "A wave of influence, as from a magnetic battery to a company holding hands, swept from her," swelling over and silencing "the thousands in the assembly," wrote one eulogist. A print of Cushman in the role of Lady Macbeth suggests the actress's stage presence (fig. 3). No one, recalled the critic William Winter, could "escape the spell of her imperial power," and when she acted some roles, including Lady Macbeth, her eyes "seemed to shoot forth a burning torrent of light," making him "fairly shr[i]nk away to the rear of the box, overwhelmed [and] astounded." Julia Ward Howe's daughter Maud remembered that as a little girl in the 1860s, she crawled under a piano, as though trying to escape a natural disaster, while listening tearfully to Cushman recite a tragic poem at a private gathering. Cushman, with her outsized melodramatic gestures, her booming contralto voice, her mouth like the "Arc de Triomphe," could, a eulogist said, "with one comprehensive and swift-revolving glance ... gather her audience in."
No space was too big for her. "Her magnificent presence answer[ed] to the proportions of the largest buildings, [and] her cathedral voice ... could make ... any hall a whispering-gallery." Imagining the audience response to the fictional heroine of her early short story "The Actress" (1837), Cushman described the way her own acting took hold of audiences: "As she progressed, a profound silence reigned over the spacious building." So it was on her benefit tour in 1863. Performing in Macbeth on September 26, Cushman "retained the rapt attention of all [the] great assembly" at the Boston Theatre, holding the large crowd "from the first word to the last." So it must have been that night at Grover's three weeks later, when according to Benjamin Brown French, describing the performance a day later in his diary, she "was perfect. She always is. I think her the greatest actress living. In the sleep walking scene she was great."
That sleepwalking scene was Cushman's last that night (after the famous somnambulism in act 5, scene 1, Lady Macbeth does not appear again until the curtain call), but her first appearance onstage at Grover's must have been equally powerful, not just for her audience but for Cushman herself. Her reading of Macbeth's letter in act 1, scene 3, was her first opportunity to fill the theater with her presence: to make herself large to fit the wide environs. A week earlier, touring Ford's Theater, Cushman and Fanny Seward had investigated a "star dressing room, a pretty little room conveniently furnished with bureau, wash-stand ... chairs, sofa, carpet & lights," according to Fanny. Grover, who refurbished his theater to stay apace with his rival Ford (who had reopened his own renovated theater on August 27), presumably had the same type of pretty little room for Cushman to use backstage on the night of October 17. Going from there to the green room and then out onto the stage—looking out at three gaslit ampitheatrical tiers seating those twenty-five hundred people—Cushman might then have felt an expansion, a becoming-vast, befitting her star power. "The actors on stage report that the house looks splendid from where they stand," noted a reporter after the opening of Grover's on October 6. Cushman probably filled the greatness of that auditorium with ease, with pleasure, that night in 1863.
To command an auditorium is one thing, but to convey this larger-than-life presence even outside the theater is another. No actor or actress could extend their presence that far—that is, out into the streets and even into the perimeter of the northern Virginia countryside. Even Charlotte Cushman would be constrained by what a Harper's Monthly writer called in 1862 the "pitiless limits" of the theater. Or would she?
In her egotism, Cushman wanted symbolic dominion over vast areas. "The circle" of her influence "was so large," wrote one eulogist, that "it was the right line of heaven and earth." Another said that her "deep, thrilling, pitiless tones" as Lady Macbeth "comprehend[ed] earth and air." When Cushman had a luxury house built for her overlooking the ocean in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1870–71, she explained that she must have a view of "my sea and my sunsets." When she addressed her fellow passengers shipboard en route to the United States in 1863, having heard rumors of a Confederate victory, she seemed to comprehend not just her immediate audience but the encompassing ocean when she exclaimed that she refused to believe the news. To the sculptor Harriet Hosmer, a good friend, Cushman was "one lofty peak of snow/Above grand tiers of peaks below." To William Winter, Cushman was proof that "human beings sometimes appear who are intrinsically great and admirable—just as the ocean is, or the starlit midnight sky."
On October 17 Cushman performed in an area of Washington intent on spreading messages far and wide. Grover's Theatre was around the corner from press row in Washington, which ran up and down Fourteenth Street: from there issued many telegraphic messages, bespeaking communication across great distances, and about sixty out-of-town newspapers maintained oces on the street. The theater was also a few doors down from Willard's Hotel, the hobnobbing political center of the city, where Cushman's acquaintance and rival Julia Ward Howe had written the far-reaching anthem "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" one early morning in 1861. Near Willard's and Grover's was the White House itself, where national policies were disseminated.
In partisan terms, Virginia was a political target for these messages, an area they sought to control—never more so than in that area in Washington where the benefit took place. John Bachmann's 1862 bird's-eye map shows the Fourteenth Street Bridge extending across the Potomac not far from the site of the theater (fig. 4). The Union armies marched to and fro across this bridge throughout the war on their way into and back from enemy territory. (Walt Whitman once watched as a procession of some thirty thousand Union soldiers took "four or five hours" to cross this bridge.) The map, drawn by a partisan Union cartographer, implies this patriotic command, foregrounding the bustling capital city while showing Virginia as a mostly barren land, a desolate waste, taking here and there an inchoate shape, a tentative raising to the vertical, as though it were just coming under the magnetic sway of the righteous city below it. Equally partisan, the benefit performance of Macbeth might imagine itself stretching out and giving shape to that wasteland.
On October 17 Cushman may well have been thinking of those Virginia spaces, summoning them into her imagination of what it would be like to play her role on that day and place. On October 11 she had boarded the Carrie Martin, in company with Secretary of State Seward and British ambassador Lord Lyons, among others, for a trip down the Potomac. "They were gone all day visiting (hazardous) Mount Vernon, & Fort Foote," wrote Fanny. "Pickets were thrown out 4 miles at Mt. Vernon." Cushman knew the Union general Gouverneur Kemble Warren, who on October 14 won the greatest military victory of his career at Bristoe Station, a Virginia railroad depot about thirty-five miles from Washington. News of the battle was the talk of the town on October 17. Warren, recently married to Emily Forbes Chase, daughter of one of Cushman's closest friends (was there anyone she did not know?), got word of the actress's approbation soon after the battle: "I presume Emily told you the complimentary things that Charlotte Cushman had heard about you," his brother Bill wrote him on October 27. With young Emily Chase Warren likely attending the play on October 17, Cushman knew well what had been happening in Virginia.
Symbolically Cushman would yell across that heart of the rebellion, screaming the defiance of John Greenleaf Whittier's "Massachusetts to Virginia," which she regarded as one of the great poems in the English language. An abolitionist screed about the refusal of Cushman's home state to return a fugitive slave, "Massachusetts to Virginia" is full of italicized passages and exclamation points, echoing across the great distance between the two states:
The blast from Freedom's Northern
hills, upon its Southern way,
Bears greeting to Virginia from Massachusetts
Bay....
....
The voice of Massachusetts! Of her free
sons and daughters,—
Deep calling unto deep aloud,—the
sound of many waters!
Against the burden of that voice what
tyrant power shall stand?
No fetters in the Bay State! No slave
upon her land!
Look to it well, Virginians! ...
No slave-hunt in our borders,—no pirate
on our strand!
No fetters in the Bay State,—no slave
upon our land!
Cushman's voice carried symbolically into those distant spaces, moving on tracks forged by her contemporaries' understanding of Shakespeare. The Washington Daily National Republican, praising Cushman's performance, quoted the Reverend Henry Giles, who had written about the vast dimensions of Macbeth when describing the Boston Theatre production presented three weeks earlier. Giles expounded on "the hugeness of this play," the "vastness" of Macbeth, calling it a "stupendous drama," "a gigantic drama" of such "magnitude" that no audience member could ever keep it all in mind during a performance and few actors could do it justice. However, Cushman had made a "deep impression" and overcome these obstacles, her greatness equal to the play's. Ralph Waldo Emerson described Shakespeare's mind in 1850 as "the horizon beyond which, at present, we do not see." So it was that on October 17 Cushman likely gave a performance to fill space.
She did so, moreover, in a way that emulated the far reach of the Sanitary Commission itself, the beneficiary of her performance. The commission, in its aim to supply Union troops with medical and other humanitarian supplies, impatiently overruled piecemeal local aid societies to create a national distribution network, organized via subdepots in various parts of the country and designed to overcome all local bounds and obstacles. The commission was against the influence "of local or state agencies," according to a December 1863 pamphlet, partly because this influence "tends to foster, in contributor, agent and beneficiary alike, the very spirit of sectionalism and 'state-ish-ness' to which we owe all our troubles." National scope was the key, and the commission found it just as easy "to forward cargoes of ice and anti-scorbutics to South Carolina or Texas, or to transport thousands of barrels of onions and potatoes from the distant Northwest to the Armies of General Rosecrans or General Grant, as to send a few cases of shirts and drawers, and of hospital delicacies from Washington to the Army of the Potomac," Charles J. Stillé wrote in his History of the United States Sanitary Commission (1866). "Relief on this vast scale was the ordinary regular work of the Commission," and Cushman, performing to benefit this cause, acted in concert with the organization's wide-ranging agency and unifying power.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Acting in the Night by Alexander Nemerov. Copyright © 2010 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction: A Drop That Dyes the Seas, 1,1. A Stone's Throw: Charlotte Cushman, 7,
2. The Flame of Place: Abraham Lincoln, 59,
3. The Glass Case: Interior Life in Washington, D.C., 94,
4. Acoustic Shadows: The Battle of Bristoe Station, 137,
5. Center of Echoes: Castle Murray, Fauquier County, Virginia, 161,
6. Ghosts: The Death of Colonel Thomas Ruffin, October 17, 1863, 180,
7. Sound and Fury: Nature in Virginia, 200,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, 227,
NOTES, 229,
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY, 267,
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS, 285,
INDEX, 289,
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