Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [607]
43
Co-op City
On May 7, 1849, William Charles Macready, the famous British actor, opened in Macbeth at the Astor Opera House. Macready did not go over well with many in the audience, who greeted him with wild hissing and a hail of rotten eggs. He did, to be sure, have his supporters, who cried, “Shame, shame!” cheered, and waved handkerchiefs. But Macready’s opponents responded relentlessly with loud groans, cries of “Down with the codfish aristocracy!” and a barrage of potatoes, apples, lemons, and copper coins. The remainder of the first act and all of the second proceeded in “dumb show,” the actors pantomiming their lines rather than trying to make themselves heard over the din. But then the crowd escalated. They howled and stomped on the newly installed red plush chairs, then hurled one from the second tier into the orchestra, whose occupants promptly fled. That did it for Macready. Escaping out the back door, he promptly and indignantly announced his intention to take the next steamship back to England and civilization.
Theater riots were commonplace in New York, and Bennett’s Herald was not alone in dismissing the affair as innocent and customary; an attorney would later note that “the right of hissing an actor has been exercised from time immemorial.” In the theater, consumers were sovereigns, their riotous displeasure attended to instantly. The May 7 affair was unusual, and about to get a good deal more so.
The objections to Macready went far beyond his acting style, though that was part of it. Macready had adopted a subdued, scholarly, genteel approach to his art, particularly in Shakespearean performances. He disdained vulgarity and wanted to elevate acting to the status of refined profession. Edwin Forrest, the great American tragedian worshiped by New York’s working-class theatergoers, had a very different method. His was a muscular, histrionic style that matched the demands of Bowery melodrama. Forrest specialized, moreover, in playing superpatriotic yeoman heroes who fought tyrants (domestic and foreign) and rescued helpless women. Like Mose, he incarnated b’hoydom’s self-image.
These contesting styles soon blossomed into personal animosity. Macready had let it be known that he thought Forrest lacked “taste.” Forrest, during a tour of Britain in 1846, had loudly hissed Macready in midperformance. The ensuing feud had been eagerly followed by the penny press, which showcased the combatants as it did pugilists and politicians. When Macready came to the states again, Forrest inflamed the rivalry by playing in competing productions during his tour, which culminated in New York City.
The contest had more serious overtones. The actors, in the popular imagination, were stand-ins for larger and more explosive issues. Macready was strongly identified with England and its aristocracy, at just the moment when New York’s Irish were at the height of their rage over the famine and Britain’s suppression of Young Ireland’s rebellion. When Forrest, at his own May 7 performance of Macbeth at the Broadway Theater, spoke Macbeth’s line “What rhubarb, senna or what purgative drug will scour these English hence?” the entire audience rose and cheered for many minutes.
Boweryites were even more furious about the theater chosen for Macready’s performance, the recently erected Astor Opera House. Its founders’ intention of creating an exclusive atmosphere—the dress code stipulated “freshly shaven faces, evening dress, fresh waistcoats, and kid gloves”—were well known and vehemently objected to by Boweryites. As a minstrel songwriter put it in 1849: “De Astor Opera is anoder nice place; / If you go thar, jest wash your face! / put on your ‘kids,’ and fix up neat, / For dis am de spot of de eliteet!”
“De spot” itself was provocative. During the recent metropolitan expansion, two parallel avenues had been driving north, constituting