Worlds Elsewhere (26 page)

By that time America had been pushing west for the best part of fifty years. Late in the eighteenth century, settlers had begun to stake out territory in Kentucky, Tennessee and elsewhere, but the decisive moment arrived in 1803, when Jefferson completed the purchase of the Louisiana Territory, 828 million square miles of it, from Tocqueville's countrymen, the French. At the stroke of a pen, the size of the United States more than doubled, stretching from the Atlantic seaboard to the Rockies in the west, and from the Gulf of Mexico right up to the Canadian border.

It was into this busily expansionist United States that Tocqueville
and his friend and colleague Gustave de Beaumont arrived in May 1831. They disembarked at Newport, Rhode Island, visited New York City, spent Independence Day in Albany, zigzagged north to Canada then made a grand counterclockwise loop through Cincinnati, Nashville, Memphis, New Orleans and back up through the South – a thorough frontier tour lasting some nine months. En route they quaffed Madeira wine with President Andrew Jackson at the White House (‘not a man of genius'), for whom the westward expansion of the United States was, in the phrase, Manifest Destiny. A year earlier Jackson had pushed through the Indian Removal Act, which authorised the government to force out Native Americans living east of the Mississippi. By 1837, the US Army had cleared some 25 million acres (39,000 square miles). In 1845, Texas, a Mexican territory, was annexed as the 28th state of the Union. In 1846, after a strident series of US victories, the war that followed with Mexico ended in the seizure of yet another western territory: California.

It wasn't just French aristocrats exploring America's new boundaries. Actors had been touring the frontier almost since professional drama had arrived on the continent. After running into difficulties with the Quakers in Philadelphia, Lewis Hallam's London Comedians had decamped for Jamaica in 1755. After their refounding as the American Company, the actors toured the north-east, even making it into the Puritan stronghold of Rhode Island in 1761. (To ingratiate themselves they cunningly advertised
Othello
as a ‘Moral Dialogue in five parts' and announced that the performance would finish by 10.30 p.m., ‘in order that every spectator may go home at a sober hour, and reflect upon what he has seen'.)

Charleston in South Carolina was an important calling-point on the touring route, as were theatres in Annapolis, Baltimore, New York City, Philadelphia and Williamsburg. According to one count, plays by Shakespeare were acted professionally 180 times between 1750 and 1776, covering perhaps half the canon. Audience numbers began steadily to increase, and numbered Native Americans as well as colonialists; as early as 1752, a Cherokee chief and his wife and son were among the earliest ticket-buyers for the Hallams, watching the company perform
Othello
in Williamsburg, and in 1767 nine Cherokee dignitaries watched a command performance of
Richard III
in New York City.

America may have had its suspicions when it came to literature, but the swaggering new nation grew to adore drama. Tocqueville devoted a chapter to the subject, arguing that democracy and popular theatre
went hand in glove (‘love of the theatre being of all literary tastes the most natural to democratic peoples'). In the decades following independence, theatres sprang up in Pittsburgh, Mobile, Cincinnati, St Louis. By the mid-1790s, five cities – New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, Providence and Boston – boasted permanent companies. The rest were served by a dense network of touring troupes. As well as American performers, these groups were fed by a steady supply of actors from England, drawn by tales of wild profits and even more wildly enthusiastic audiences.

George Frederick Cooke, who had thrilled London audiences as a ferocious Richard III, was tempted across in 1810. In New York, an audience of 2,200 mobbed him; in Boston he was acclaimed as ‘the finest actor England can produce'. Cooke went on to tour in Philadelphia, Baltimore and Providence (and, even more remarkably, managed to control his prodigious drinking).

Edmund Kean – the brooding Romantic actor whose electrifying performances had been compared by Samuel Taylor Coleridge to ‘reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning' – was another star who crossed the Atlantic. Back in Britain, Kean had been a contentious figure, rejoicing in his rake-hell reputation, which extended from his stupendous appetites for alcohol and women to his habit of keeping a pet lion. When he arrived in America in 1820, the East Coast press was hostile, though Kean silenced them with a barnstorming debut as Richard III, who had now become America's favourite antihero. (
The New York Post
gushed that he was ‘the most complete actor … that ever appeared on our boards'.) Kean followed it with mesmeric turns as Othello, Hamlet, Shylock, Lear and Macbeth, becoming the highest paid performer the United States had yet seen.

Five years later, this time hounded out of England after being sued for adultery, Kean returned to America, hoping to make a new start. In Boston, however, he came unstuck. Still smarting from a previous encounter – underwhelmed by the size of the audience, Kean had refused to play Richard III in the city – the crowd greeted him with a ‘powerful and unexpected burst of catcalls and a series of hisses'. Objects began to be hurled, at first oranges but then chunks of metal; Kean escaped to the green room, then ran for his life. The crowd turned their wrath upon the building and succeeded in almost demolishing it. Theatre riots were far from unusual in London – back in 1809, a hike in ticket prices at Covent Garden had sparked disturbances that went on
for three months – but it was the first time the American theatre had seen anything on this scale.

Notoriously, it would not be the last. In this proudly independent nation, insults by Kean and his ilk rankled. The United States and the United Kingdom had technically been at peace since the last British-American war of 1812–14, but rivalries smouldered on. Frances Trollope's acidulous
Domestic Manners of the Americans
(1832) denounced everything from the quality of Americans' singing to the poisonous dullness of East Coast dinner parties. The snide observations of Charles Dickens in
American Notes
(1842) cemented the sense that Brits liked nothing more than sneering at their rude, expectorating, poorly washed, slave-owning country cousins.

The theatre, so crucial to American self-identity, became the stage on which these transatlantic rivalries were played out. In 1827, two years after Kean was hounded off in Boston, the actor James Henry Hackett (1800–71), a native of New York City who became renowned for his Falstaff, travelled across to London and stunned Covent Garden audiences by proving himself the equal of any British-born actor: the first American ever to do so. With palpable surprise, the
Athenaeum
commented, ‘his is the best Falstaff that has been seen for many a day'.

But in every sense the greatest American star of the age was the strapping Edwin Forrest. Born in a working-class neighbourhood in Philadelphia in 1806, Forrest honed his acting skills on the frontier circuit (he was rumoured to have trained with the Native American warrior Push-ma-ta-ha) and made his New York debut in 1826. Billed as the ‘Native Tragedian', Forrest excelled in muscular roles, usually contemporary and always full-bloodedly American. Writing in 1842, one critic compared him to Niagara Falls, suggesting that his voice, ‘in its tremendous down-sweeping cadence … was a whirlwind, a tornado, a cataract of illimitable rage!' Steamboats and racehorses were named after him.

But Forrest had a competitor: the Englishman William Charles Macready. Thirteen years older and a dignified veteran of the London stage, Macready had toured successfully to New York as early as 1826, and had returned in 1843, winning acclaim for his pensive, painterly approach to roles such as Macbeth, Othello and Hamlet.

Though the actors themselves began as friends (at least in public), their competing fans regarded them as cut-throat rivals, Macready's scrupulously intellectual acting contrasting starkly with Forrest's
gung-ho bravura. When Macready decided to make one final tour to the US in 1848, it was seen as a showdown between the ‘Eminent Tragedian' (as Macready was nicknamed) and his ‘Native' counterpart.

The best historian of the episode, Nigel Cliff, dates the rivalry to two years earlier, when Forrest – stung by poor reviews on his own tour to London – had hissed Macready's Hamlet. When Macready arrived in New York in October 1848 to play Macbeth, the Englishman unwisely thanked the audience for being on his side against his ‘unknown accuser'. Hot-headedly interpreting this as an insult, Forrest decided to chase Macready to every city he visited, playing many of the same roles in direct competition. Hostilities escalated: one night in Cincinnati, half a sheep was thrown at Macready's feet.

Far worse was to come in New York City the following spring. Both actors had brought productions of
Macbeth
to town; both were drawing capacity crowds. On 7 May 1849, at the Broadway theatre, Forrest scored a huge laugh for his line, ‘What rhubarb, senna, or what purgative drug | Would scour these
English
hence?'

Macready, appearing at the Astor Place Opera House a few blocks away on the very same night, was having a much tougher time. A catcalling audience threw such a quantity of objects – including, eventually, chairs – that the performance was halted. Macready nearly took the next boat home, but a letter of support signed by such luminaries as Washington Irving and Herman Melville persuaded him to stay. He would do
Macbeth
one last time, on 10 May, with police protection.

Even allowing for the history of this unluckiest of plays, it was not a wise decision. Several people tried to disrupt the show and were arrested. But this only increased the ire of the mob outside, swelled by criminal gangs and incensed by handbills demanding,
SHALL AMERICANS OR ENGLISH RULE THIS CITY?
Paving stones began to plummet through the windows into the lobby. Macready valiantly fought through
Macbeth
's final act before fleeing the building in disguise. Struggling to control a riot already out of hand, soldiers fired into a crowd 15,000 strong. At least twenty-two people died, and many more were injured, mostly bystanders. To this day, the Astor Place Riot is one of the bloodiest episodes in New York's history.

Clearly there was a great deal more going on during those mad days in May 1849 than a dispute over
Macbeth.
The feud between America and Britain had simmered for years; class tensions in New York itself
were at boiling point. It was only a couple of years after the Birthplace affair, when the British press had been aghast at the rumour that P. T. Barnum was on the point of buying the house where Shakespeare was born. The theatre of the early and mid-nineteenth century was a rough-and-tumble environment, audiences used to showing their feelings with voices and fists. In that, of course, it was not unlike the theatre of Shakespeare's own day, regarded as so boisterous that the authorities continually attempted to do away with it altogether.

Still, I found it striking – and, despite the gruesome toll of the Astor Place Riot, somehow impressive – that Shakespeare was so revered in nineteenth-century America that the acting of him was regarded as of such titanic importance. These days, it is hard to imagine a debate over who played the better Macbeth grazing the letters page of the
New York Times.
You could bet your hat no one would have died.

IN THE HARD, CLEAR LIGHT OF MORNING,
San Francisco looked chintzy and beaten-up, like a film set left to bleach in the sun. My hotel was in the Mission district, sandwiched between a liquidation store and a tattered line of nineteenth-century rowhouses. I felt vaguely pleased that I had found one area of the city that had so far resisted tech-industry gentrification. Above a tyre repair shop, there was a sign:
WE LEAP INTO DEBT BUT CRAWL OUT.
I liked its gimcrack philosophising. Welcome to California.

By the time Edwin Forrest and William Macready were having their violent showdown regarding the Scottish Play, something else had happened to the United States, more profound than even this turbulent affair. On 24 January 1848, a carpenter named James W. Marshall employed by the settler John Sutter discovered flakes of gold in a stream bed beneath the Sierra Nevada mountains. Within weeks the news had leaked, and the Gold Rush was on. Thousands of wagons began rumbling west, through what are now Nebraska, Wyoming, Idaho and Nevada. Ships began to throng San Francisco, depositing clerks, dry-goods merchants, doctors, farmers.

All had thrown off their existing lives to recast themselves as ‘argonauts', paying tribute to the accomplices of Jason, the Greek mythological character who journeyed in search of the Golden Fleece.
Perhaps 100,000 came in the first few years, and not just East Coasters. Many travelled up from Mexico, or came from Australia, Germany, Chile, Hawaii and – most especially – China, from where immigration was huge. Soon the argonauts acquired another name, the ‘Forty-Niners', symbolically reborn in the Golden Year.