heard: he was drowned out in a barrage of hisses and hurled objects. When chairs began to be thrown down from the gallery, almost hitting the actress playing Lady Macbeth, he stopped the play. He decided to leave the city, but a number of fellow artists, including Washington Irving, Herman Melville, and Jacksonian editor and playwright Mordecai Noah, urged him not to back down, and he gave another performance two nights later.
Forrest’s partisans were waiting. They had papered the city with rabid diatribes in the press and on posted signs: “WORKING MEN, shall AMERICANS OR ENGLISH RULE in this city?” asked one, making the actors’ dispute into a referendum on national autonomy. Much of the effort was orchestrated by an “American Committee” headed by E.Z.C. Judson (a.k.a. dime novelist Ned Buntline), who gathered a collection of Bowery B’hoys and planned to disrupt Macready’s second show. But audience support for the actor—he was greeted with a fifteen-minute standing ovation—and arrests of troublemakers inside the theater stymied this effort, and Macready was able to finish his performance and safely leave the theater by hiding in the audience, which exited through a police cordon.
The situation was much more tense outside the opera house. There, police efforts to quiet the crowd only inflamed it. Rocks began to fly, and the officers called on the help of the local militia, which had been put on standby in case of trouble. When Macready left the opera house, the militia fired over the heads of the crowd. Believing that soldiers were shooting blanks, the crowd surged forward. The next round of firing revealed their miscalculation. Moreover, when the militia tried to avoid further confrontation by again firing over the crowd, they ended up hitting some of the bystanders. In the end, at least twenty-two people died and over 150 were wounded. Eighty-six were arrested, including butchers, carpenters, machinists, bakers, and clerks—a cross-section of the working class of New York. Attempted unrest the next night was held firmly in check by police and soldiers.
There was a good deal of commentary in the New York press in the aftermath of the riot, predictably divided between those who condemned the hooliganism of the rioters and those who condemned the deadly response of the police. Virtually everyone, though, saw class tensions and values as the underlying issue. “There is now in our country, in New York City, what every good patriot has hitherto considered it his duty to deny—a high class and a low class,” a writer for the Philadelphia Ledger noted. In the first stages of the attacks on Macready, the New York Tribune, edited by future presidential candidate Horace Greeley, condemned the “miscreants,” but after the riots it concluded that a series of reforms was called for, including greater government action to curb inequities of wealth. Even Lydia Maria Child, appalled by the “blind rage of the mob” she saw as she tried to pass by the disturbance, acknowledged the justice of its grievances. “There are instants, when the sight of rags and starvation make me almost ready to smash thro’ the plate-glass of the rich and seize their treasures of silver and gold,” the pacifist writer later wrote in a letter to some friends.
The behavior of Forrest, the Bowery B’hoys, and the more irresponsible elements of the New York press suggest they share some of the blame for the Astor Place riot. It is hard to ignore the chauvinism that accompanied so much of the search for, and celebration of, a home-grown artistic tradition in the first half of the nineteenth century. Not that Macready was miscast as a snob: as early as 1826, he wrote that Forrest showed promise as an actor—if he stopped performing for Americans, whom he would repeatedly describe in later years as “vulgar,” “coarse,” “underbred,” and “disagreeable.” Nevertheless, he was repeatedly rebuffed in his efforts to resolve his dispute with Forrest and his Yankee enthusiasts, who thirsted for confrontation.
Riots never occur in a vacuum. The Forrest-Macready conflict reflected a growing awareness of the class divisions that the United States prided itself on having avoided. Equality of opportunity was increasingly rare for both white and black workers; the relatively large ranks of artisans (like Greeley himself) who managed to launch enterprises before the Civil War would not find much success after it. The United States was becoming afflicted by injustices that would create a clearly defined, self-conscious working class by the second half of the century.
This emerging polarization was reflected in the world of entertainment. In the 1820s and 1830s, theaters were a microcosm of the larger society, populated by men and women, rich and poor, white and black. By the 1840s and 1850s, performing halls like the Astor Place Opera House evidenced a segregation by wealth and race that would become a gulf by the end of the century. At the same time, the raucous audience participation that was a major aspect of the performing arts early in the century was gradually being replaced by an expectation of passivity. The Astor Place riot reflected, and intensified, movement in this direction.
In its wake, new entertainment forms would emerge and new ideological possibilities would be created. But a moment of considerable excitement, and fluidity, was now past.
Whatever political or cultural differences they may have had with England, American theatergoers embraced William Shakespeare as one of their own. Fully one-fourth of all the plays mounted in Philadelphia between 1810 and 1812 were written by the Bard, and twenty-one of his thirty-seven plays were performed there between 1800 and 1835. Nor was Shakespeare’s appeal solely Eastern: Chicago had only 4,000 people in 1837 when Richard III played. The Mississippi towns of Vicksburg and Natchez mounted at least 150 Shakespeare plays between 1814 and 1861, and by the 1830s, Shakespearean plays were being performed on riverboats in the North American interior.29
In the twentieth century, Shakespeare became the supreme symbol of high culture, the subject of intensive scholarly exegeses, textual reverence, and highbrow performance on stage and public television. Americans of the nineteenth century, though, knew Shakespeare on a much more chummy basis—and were not afraid to “improve” him for their own purposes. Juliet, for example, was typically older than she was in the seventeenth century, and did not kiss Romeo at their first meeting. Richard III became even more of a villain than originally written. And King Lear ended up a happy man. In general, the moral prescriptions of Shakespeare’s plays were more heavily underlined, the characters more dichotomized. This made the plays more simplistic, in keeping with the popular romanticism of the time. Yet in its own way, this moralistic stance was more sophisticated than the pieties of Enlightenment drama, where characters were evil because they didn’t know any better and where happy endings were simply a matter of applying the infallible logic of reason.30
Shakespeare aside, however, a call for plays by and about Americans was heard very early in the young republic and became ever more insistent over the course of the nineteenth century. The first major play to fulfill this prescription was Royall Tyler’s The Contrast (1787). The title referred to the difference between sturdy American republicans and effete British degenerates, embodied in the difference between the play’s protagonist, Revolutionary War hero Colonel Manly, and the duplicitous Billy Dimple, heir of a Hudson River estate. A secondary contrast was suggested through Dimple’s valet Jessamy and Manly’s waiter Jonathon. A simple, assertive, yet likeable yeoman, Jonathon was clearly intended to be Manly’s social and intellectual inferior. But he evoked the archetypal “Brother Jonathan” who emerged in this period and reappeared in numerous reincarnations in later plays (e.g., Zachariah Dickerwell, Jediah Homebred, and Solomon Swap, made famous by U.S. actor James Hackett). For the next thirty years, the representative American was a sparsely educated but quick-witted farmer who drove a hard bargain but had a soft heart.
By the 1830s and 1840s, Brother Jonathan had become less a national figure and more one associated with New England. New archetypes emerged, among them the rustic backwoodsman Davy Crockett, the riverboat pilot Mike Fink, and Mose the fireman. In their evocation of the Southerner, Westerner, and working-class city dweller, such archetypes represented the elaboration of a sectional, as well as national, identity whose accents gave U.S. actors an advantage over their British counterparts. Not only were their voices distinctive, but a full appreciation of their foibles depended on an immersion in the American milieu.31
It
