Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [397]
Of all the remarkable stage actors in this golden time, none surpassed Edwin Booth, son of the celebrated tragedian Junius Booth and elder brother to Lincoln’s future assassin, John Wilkes Booth. “Edwin Booth has done more for the stage in America than any other man,” wrote a drama critic in the 1860s. The soulful young actor captivated audiences everywhere with the naturalness of his performances and his conversational tone, which stood in contrast to the bombastic, stylized performances of the older generation.
In late February and early March 1864, Edwin Booth came to Grover’s Theatre for a three-week engagement, delivering one masterly performance after another. Lincoln and Seward attended the theater night after night. They saw Booth in the title roles of Hamlet and Richard III. They applauded his performance as Brutus in Julius Caesar and as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice.
On Friday evening, March 11, Booth came to dinner at the Sewards’. Twenty-year-old Fanny Seward could barely contain her excitement. She had seen every one of his performances and had been transfixed by his “magnificent dark eyes.” At dinner, Seward presumed to ask Booth if he might advise the thespian how “his acting might be improved.” According to Fanny, Booth “accepted Father’s criticisms very gracefully—often saying he had felt those defects himself.” Seward focused particularly on Booth’s performance in Bulwer-Lytton’s Richelieu, where he thought he had made the crafty cardinal “too old and infirm.” Long identified as the power behind the throne himself, Seward perhaps wanted a younger, more vibrant characterization for Richelieu. When Seward told Booth he thought his performance as Shylock was perfect, Booth disagreed, saying he “had a painful sense of something wanting—could compare it to nothing else but the want of body in wine.”
Detained at the White House, Lincoln missed the enjoyable interchange with Booth. A few days earlier, anticipating Booth’s Hamlet, Lincoln had talked about the play with Francis Carpenter, the young artist who was at work on his picture depicting the first reading of the Emancipation Proclamation. In the course of the conversation, Lincoln recited from memory his favorite passage, the king’s soliloquy after the murder of Hamlet’s father, “with a feeling and appreciation unsurpassed by anything I ever witnessed upon the stage.”
What struck Carpenter most forcefully was Lincoln’s ability to appreciate tragedy and comedy with equal intensity. He could, in one sitting, bring tears to a visitor’s eyes with a sensitive rendering from Richard III and moments later induce riotous laughter with a comic tall tale. His “laugh,” Carpenter observed, “stood by itself. The ‘neigh’ of a wild horse on his native prairie is not more undisguised and hearty.” Lincoln’s ability to commingle joy with sorrow seemed to Carpenter a trait the president shared with his favorite playwright. “It has been well said,” Carpenter noted, “that ‘the spirit which held the woe of “Lear,” and the tragedy of “Hamlet,” would have broken, had it not also had the humor of the “Merry Wives of Windsor,” and the merriment of “Midsummer Night’s Dream.” ’”
No other cabinet member went to the theater as regularly as Lincoln and Seward. Chase and Bates considered it a foolish waste of time, perhaps even a “Satanic diversion,” while Stanton came only once to Grover’s playhouse, with the sole intention of buttonholing Lincoln about some pressing matter. Seated with Lincoln in his box, Grover had been startled when Stanton arrived a half hour late, sidled up to Lincoln, and engaged him in a long conversation. Lincoln listened attentively but kept his eyes on the stage. Frustrated, Stanton “grasped Mr. Lincoln by the lapel of his coat, slowly pulled him round face to face, and continued