There is one point on which Edwin is quite mistaken. He believes that his father died a wealthy man. Years will pass before anyone tells him otherwise.
It seems to Edwin that the casting-out, which began on the night Mother first told him he’d be traveling with Father, is now complete. They will bury Father without him. They will live on the farm without him. He feels certain that under similar circumstances, Johnny would have been told to come straight home.
But maybe Johnny wouldn’t have failed the family so disastrously. Mostly what Edwin finds in this letter is more evidence of his despicable selfishness. His own mother can’t bear to look at him. Hamlet was less guilty.
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A few months before Father’s departure, Edwin had promised him to play Hamlet someday. Father thought he looked the part and that, a few years further into his career, with work and diligence, he might creditably carry it. June is certain that Edwin isn’t ready.
But keeping that promise is now the only thing Edwin can still do for his father. He nags and begs and barters until June gives in. On April 25th, 1853, he plays for the first time the role that will come to define him. He wears the somber costume, the dark tights, the short, black cloak. The somber demeanor comes easy. Old Spudge is there to cheer him on in the role of Polonius.
Whenever Edwin remembers, he throws in a gesture. Don’t just mouth your lines. Do something! Mostly he forgets. June is unimpressed with his performance and won’t allow a repeat.
But a young critic, Ferdinand Cartwright Ewer, leaves the San Francisco theater in a fever of excitement and goes to his newspaper offices to write a long review. Edwin Booth, he writes, has made Hamlet “the easy, undulating, flexible thing” Shakespeare intended.
Tastes were changing. Edwin’s Hamlet, as it developed over the years, was subtle where his father had been theatrical, contained where his father had been expansive, and natural where his father had declaimed. As Edwin aged, his Hamlet would become less agonized and more stoic—the embodiment of a good man enduring. This was a Hamlet who knew how his story would end, but moved forward anyway with courage and dignity. June may not have liked it, but Ewer says, in that very first review of Edwin’s very first Hamlet, that, in concept if not in polish, Edwin has already surpassed his father.
Lincoln and Clay
Having been led to allude to domestic slavery so frequently already, I am unwilling to close without referring more particularly to Mr. Clay’s views and conduct in regard to it. He ever was on principle and in feeling, opposed to slavery. The very earliest, and one of the latest public efforts of his life, separated by a period of more than fifty years, were both made in favor of gradual emancipation of the slaves in Kentucky. He did not perceive, that on a question of human right, the negroes were to be excepted from the human race. And yet Mr. Clay was the owner of slaves. Cast into life where slavery was already widely spread and deeply seated, he did not perceive, as I think no wise man has perceived, how it could be at once eradicated, without producing a greater evil, even to the cause of human liberty itself.
—Abraham Lincoln, 1852
Junius Brutus Booth is not the only luminary to die in 1852. The Great Compromiser, Henry Clay, Speaker of the House, Secretary of State, lawyer to Aaron Burr, and fierce critic of Andrew Jackson, a man whose shadow stretched from the presidency of Thomas Jefferson to that of Millard Fillmore, also dies. Lincoln, who has been out of office now for three years, is given the honor of eulogizing him at the Illinois state capitol. Henry Clay is Lincoln’s ideal politician, a person who seeks common ground, a person who brokers peace.
To that end, Henry Clay was the architect of multiple compromises that both limited and sustained slavery, most recently the Compromise of 1850, a complicated legal elaboration triggered by California’s desire to join the Union as a free state and dealing with the territories annexed from Mexico by Polk’s war. Four years later, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, also authored by Stephen Douglas, will bring Lincoln roaring back to politics. Until then, he is riding the judicial circuit, making a name for himself as a stump speechifier, and retiring in the evenings to read his beloved Burns, his Byron, his Emerson.
Meanwhile, at home:
One morning, the neighbors are treated to the sight of Mary chasing him, half-dressed, from the house with a broom. A housemaid whispers over the back fence that Mary once hit him over the head with a wooden board as he was reading the paper, blackening an eye and swelling his nose. That she both strikes and underpays the servants so that the only ones they can keep are the ones Lincoln secretly bribes to stay. That she cries continuously.
In spite of this, he misses her when he travels. He can see how unhappy she is and that’s a condition with which he has considerable experience and endless sympathy.
BOOK THREE
For such as we are made of, such we be.
—W. Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
The Booth family is gratified by the depth and breadth of national mourning for Junius Brutus Booth. Every American paper reports Booth’s death and most include long eulogies. But one response is memorable for its brevity. Rufus Choate, a storied trial lawyer turned Whig congressman, a man famous for his soaring and sustained bouts of oratory, says simply, “There are no more actors.”
If Father’s legacy once seemed tainted by drink and madness, it no longer appears so. Death has burned everything else away and only genius remains. Wires and letters for Mother pour in from everywhere. Some come from people Mother knows, but far more from people she doesn’t, people once touched by a chance encounter or a long-ago performance. For the children, there’s a comfort in the sheer number of these letters, in seeing their father recognized as a great man. The further comfort is to see Mother recognized as his wife, themselves as his children. Father has died without leaving a will and the courts are not so settled on the matter. Richard Booth, now a married man with four children, sues on the grounds that he is Father’s sole legitimate heir. The entire estate amounts to $4,728.99.
He even claims Father’s costumes, but, since she made them all herself, the court awards these to Mother. A few years later, Mother will give them to Johnny. A few years after that, Edwin will destroy them, one by one, in the furnace beneath his theater. It will take Edwin more than three hours to burn them all.
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