EDWARD L. DAVENPORT.
The several engagements of Mr. and Mrs. Davenport after this were in no way remarkable, except sadly remarkable that so great an actor should have been forced, in the greatest city of the Union, to play Hamlet to such poor houses and with such uncongenial surroundings.
On the evening of August 30, 1875, Mr. Davenport appeared as Hamlet in the Grand Opera-house, New York. On the same evening Barry Sullivan, under the management of Jarrett & Palmer, made his appearance at Booth’s Theatre in the same part. The comparison invited by the presentation of these rival Hamlets was not favorable to the Irish tragedian. He was extensively advertised, and his reception by his own countrymen was affectionate and sincere. The Irish regiment, the famous Sixty-ninth, was present on the opening night, and the house was crowded with our Irish citizens. The performance was superior to the general run of Hamlets, but it was not superlative. Mr. Sullivan had had great experience on the British stage, and was skilled in his profession, but his Hamlet was melodramatic, harsh at times, occasionally overacted, and in all respects totally different from the quiet, tender Hamlet of Mr. Davenport. Much of his business was believed to be new, and some of his novelties were effective, if not altogether according to the text of the tragedy. It was a Hamlet that appealed to the taste of the audiences of the Bowery rather than to those of the west side of the town. It is only just to say that Hamlet was not Mr. Sullivan’s strongest part in America. As Richard III., as Beverly, in The Gamester, and as Richelieu, he appeared to advantage, although his success in this country was not as great as his reputation at home would have warranted. This was his second appearance in America. His first was made at the Broadway Theatre, New York, and in the character of Hamlet, on the 22d of November, 1858.
The student of dramatic history in America must have been struck with the irregularity of the appearance of Hamlet upon our boards during the last hundred years. In Joseph Norton Ireland’s Records of the New York Stage, published in 1866-67, and the best and most complete work of its kind in this country, and perhaps in any country, there are seasons and successions of seasons in which there is to be found no hint of its production; in other seasons some domestic or imported star was seen in the tragedy, for a night or two at most, on its meteoric flight from horizon to horizon, while, on the other hand, for months together Hamlet was of weekly if not of nightly occurrence at some of the theatres of the metropolis.
JAMES STARK.
Probably at no period in the history of Hamlet, since the early days when Shakspere himself, according to tradition, played havoc with the Ghost, has any town witnessed such an epidemic of Hamlet as passed over the city of New York in the years 1857 and 1858. McKean Buchanan and Barry Sullivan appeared as Hamlet at the Broadway, James Stark and the elder Wallack at Wallack’s, Edward Eddy at the Bowery, and John Milton Hengler, a rope-dancer, played Hamlet, “for one night only,” at Burton’s, followed at that house by Charles Carroll Hicks, James E. Murdoch, Edward L. Davenport, and Edwin Booth.
The Hamlet of Edwin Booth, without doubt, is the most familiar and the most popular in America to-day. He has played the part in every important town in the Union, many hundreds of nights in New York alone, and to hundreds of thousands of persons, the warmest of his admirers and most constant attendants at his performances being men and women who are emphatically non-theatre-goers, and who never enter a play-house except to see Mr. Booth, and Mr. Booth in a Shaksperian part. He has done very much more than any other actor to educate the popular taste to a proper understanding of Hamlet, and to a proper appreciation of the beauties of the tragedy. He is the ideal Hamlet of half the people of the country who have any idea of Hamlet whatever.
In many minds Booth is Hamlet, and Hamlet is Booth; any conception of Hamlet that is not Booth’s, any picture of Hamlet which does not resemble the familiar features of Booth, any representation of Hamlet on the stage which is not an imitation of Booth’s Hamlet, is considered no Hamlet at all. If the very Hamlet of tradition himself—the Amleth of the old Danish legend from which Shakspere drew, no doubt, the facts and fancies of his play—were to return to earth and walk the boards of an American theatre, he would find no followers if he walked not, looked not, spoke not after the manner of Edwin Booth.
Mr. Booth’s Hamlet is original in many respects; it is intellectual, intelligent, carefully studied, complete to the smallest details, and greatly to be admired. Nature has given him the melancholy, romantic face, the magnetic eye, the graceful person, the stately carriage, the poetic temperament, which are in so marked a degree characteristic of Hamlet, while his genius in many scenes of the tragedy carries him far above any of the Hamlets this country has seen in many generations of plays.
EDWIN BOOTH.
He first assumed the part in New York, and under Mr. Burton’s management, at the Metropolitan Theatre, in the month of May, 1857. The engagement was short, and Hamlet was presented two or three times. Even then, however, it created no little excitement, and was considered a very remarkable and finished representation in a young man but twenty-four years of age. In Mr. Burton’s company that season were Charles Fisher, Mark Smith, Thomas Placide, Sarah Stevens, Mrs. Hughes, and Mr. Burton himself, by whom the young tragedian was ably supported.
Mr. Booth next appeared in New York on the 26th of November, 1860, at the same theatre—then called the Winter Garden—under the management of William Stuart. He opened as Hamlet, and had the support of Miss Ada Clifton as Ophelia, of Mrs. Duffield as the Queen, and of Mr. Davidge and J. H. Stoddart as the Grave-diggers. This was his first genuine metropolitan success in the part, although it was presented but five times during an engagement of four weeks. A year or two later he played Hamlet to the Ophelia of Mrs. Barrow; in 1863 he was supported by Lawrence Barrett, Humphrey Bland, “Dolly” Davenport, Vining Bowers, and Miss Clifton; and still at the Winter Garden he appeared as Hamlet from the 26th of November, 1864, until the 24th of March, 1865, one hundred consecutive nights! This was an event entirely unprecedented in the history of Hamlet in any country, and probably the longest run that any tragedy whatever had at that time enjoyed. It was before the days of Rosedale and Led Astray—before managers dared to present a single play during an entire season, when changes of bill were of weekly if not of nightly occurrence, and when Mr. Booth himself, during an engagement of fifteen or eighteen nights, had played twelve or fifteen parts. “One hundred nights” of any production is no novelty now, since Adonis and Erminie have, with such little merit, drawn such full houses for so many months; but that one man should have played but this one part, and that too in a drama so decidedly a one-man play that Hamlet with Hamlet left out has become a proverb wherever English is known, was a quarter of a century ago certainly a magnificent achievement. It moved Mr. Booth’s many friends in New York to present to him on the 22d of January, 1867, the celebrated “Hamlet Medal,” the most complimentary and well-merited testimonial that any young actor, no matter how brilliant his career, has ever received from the American public in the history of its stage. During this famous engagement he was associated with Thomas Placide as Grave-digger; with Charles Kemble Mason, an admirable Ghost; with Charles Walcot, Jr., as Horatio; with Owen Fawcett as Osric; with Mrs. James W. Wallack, Jr., as the Queen; and with Mrs. Frank Chanfrau as Ophelia—as strong a combination of talent as the tragedy has often seen.
LAWRENCE BARRETT.
It is not possible to tell here the story of Mr. Booth’s many productions of Hamlet in New York, nor to do more than barely enumerate the ladies and gentlemen who have supported him. Among his Ophelias, not mentioned above, have been Miss Effie Germon (in 1866), Mme. Scheller, Miss Blanche De Bar, Miss Bella Pateman, Miss Jeffreys-Lewis, Miss Eleanor Carey, Mrs. Alexina Fisher Baker, Miss Clara Jennings, Miss Minna Gale, and Mme. Helena Modjeska. He has snubbed and stabbed John Dyott, David C. Anderson, Charles Fisher, and George Andrews, as Polonius. His Grave-diggers have been Robert Pateman, Charles Peters, and Owen Fawcett. Newton Gothold, J. H. Taylor, David W. Waller, H. A. Weaver, Charles Barron, Charles Kemble Mason, and Lawrence Barrett have been his Ghosts, and Mrs. Marie Wilkins, Miss Mary Wells, Mrs. Fanny Morant, and Miss Ida Vernon, in their turn, have been the mothers who his father had much offended.
Lawrence Barrett, now so intimately associated with Mr. Booth throughout the United States, has played every male part in Hamlet with the exception of Polonius and the First Grave-digger. His earliest appearance in the tragedy was in Newcastle, Pennsylvania, in 1855, when he represented the leading character in a version of the play announced on the bills as “The Grave Burst; or, The Ghost’s Piteous Tale of Horror, by W. Shakspere, Esqr.” The elaborate title was supposed to be more taking with the theatre-going population of that particular town than the simple name by which it is usually known to Shaksperian students; but it is not recorded that the representation was popular, or that box receipts were in proportion to the outlay. Mr. Barrett played Laertes to the Hamlet of Miss Cushman, in Boston, some years later; he has been the Ghost to the Hamlet of Edwin Booth and Edward L. Davenport; and he has supported Barry Sullivan, Mr. Murdoch, and other leading tragedians at different seasons, taking the part of Horatio to Mr. Murdoch’s Hamlet, John McCullough’s Ghost, and Miss Clara Morris’s Queen, at the famous festival at Cincinnati a few years ago. The fact that Mr. Barrett rarely plays Hamlet in New York is much to be regretted. In other cities, where he is better known in the part, he is greatly liked, and next to his Cassius it is perhaps the best thing he does. That it is a highly intellectual performance goes without saying, but it has other merits as well. It is vigorous, consistent, and unfailingly tender.
JAMES E. MURDOCH.
Mr. Bandmann played Hamlet in German, and of course with a German company, at the Stadt Theatre in the Bowery, just at the close of the first century of Hamlet in New York. He attracted a great deal of attention among the German population of the city, and was so successful in it that it tempted him to study for the English-speaking stage. He presented considerable business that was new here, but well known in his father-land, bringing his Ghost from beneath the stage, introducing a manuscript copy of the speeches of the actors in the play scene, and turning its leaves back and forth in a restless way to hide the nervousness of Hamlet. This was subsequently noticed here in the performances of Mr. Fechter. Mr. Bandmann also drew from his pouch tablets upon which he set down the some dozen or sixteen lines to be introduced by the First Actor in the incident of the murder of Gonzago; and at the end of the scene he fell back into the arms of Horatio in a state of complete collapse. His acting throughout was effective and powerful.
The Hamlet of Salvini is powerful but not effective. It is not the Hamlet of tradition, nor does it overtop the traditional Hamlet in novelty and originality. If Salvini had played nothing but Hamlet here he never could have sustained the magnificent reputation he brought from foreign countries, and which he more than fulfilled in other parts. The man who excels as Ingomar, is superb as Samson, supreme in Othello, and, in the entirely opposite character of Sullivan (David Garrick), displays such marked comedy powers, can hardly be expected to shine as the melancholy Dane.
Rossi’s Hamlet is effective if not powerful. In his first interview with the Ghost he betrays no fear, because he sees in it only the image of a lamented and beloved father, while in the scene with the Queen, when the Ghost appears, he crouches behind his mother’s chair in abject terror, because, as he explains it, the phantom is then an embodiment of conscience, the Ghost of a father whose mandate he has disobeyed.
CHARLES FECHTER.
Unquestionably the imported Hamlet that has excited the greatest interest in New York in very many seasons is the Hamlet of Charles Fechter. The acting of no man, native or foreign, in the whole history of the American stage has been the subject of so much or of such varied criticism as his. There was no medium whatever concerning him in public opinion. Those who were his admirers were wildly enthusiastic in his praise; those who did not like him did not like him at all, and were unsparing in their condemnation and their ridicule; but no one was wholly indifferent to his acting. He came to this country endorsed by the strongest of letters from Charles Dickens, who was his friend, and weighted by the wholesale and impolitic puffery of his managers; the result was that, in the judgment of the majority of those who saw him, he did not and could not sustain the magnificent reputation claimed for him in his advance advertisements. On the other hand, while he was in a manner snubbed by New York, he was hailed in Boston as the Roscius of the nineteenth century. His Hamlet, although very uneven and unequal, was certainly a marvellous performance, and while by reason of date it does not come within the scope of the present chapter, it is too important in many ways to be omitted. It was thoroughly untraditional. He gave to the Prince of Denmark the fair Saxon face and the light flowing hair of the Danes of to-day; in his own portly form he made the too, too solid flesh of Hamlet a real rather than an ideal feature of Hamlet’s person: and much of his business, if not original with him, was at least unfamiliar to American play-goers. He was peculiarly “intense” in everything he did, while in what are called the intense scenes of the tragedy he was often more subdued and natural even than Mr. Davenport, who was remarkably free from emotional acting. His “rest, perturbèd spirit,” was excellent and effective by reason of its very quietness, and during all of the scene with the Ghost his acting was conspicuous by the absence of the conventional quivering, trembling, teeth-chattering agony which is so apt to be the result of the coming of the apparition. In the “rat-trap” and closet scenes, in which Mr. Booth is so good, so very excellent good, Mr. Fechter lacked dignity and repose; and in his advice to the players, while his reading was less distinct and intelligent than Mr. Booth’s, his facial expression was wonderful and beyond all praise. He was inferior to Booth in the soliloquies, although charmingly tender in his intercourse with Ophelia. With the Queen in “the closet scene” he was almost brutal in his conduct, seeming to forget entirely—what Mr. Booth never overlooks—that Gertrude, although sinning, is still a woman and his own mother. He stabbed poor Polonius with a ferocity that destroyed all sympathy for Hamlet. His reading, apart from the accentuations and inflections which were natural to him at all times, was peculiar; his enunciation was frequently so rapid that it became unintelligible; he hurried through some of the finest passages at a gallop, and lost some of the finest points; but his Hamlet as a whole was impressive and magnetic, the oftener seen the better liked. Mr. Fechter made his first appearance in America as Ruy Blas at Niblo’s Garden, New York, on the 10th of January, 1870, under the management of Jarrett & Palmer; and he played Hamlet for the first time on the 15th of February the same year.
HENRY E. JOHNSTONE.
Among the purely exotic Hamlets of the New York stage Salvini, Bandmann, Bogumil-Dawison, Rossi, Barnay, and Hasse have been the most prominent. But while the performance of each was excellent in its own fashion, each labored under the great disadvantage of playing a most familiar part (and in a play decidedly an English classic) in a foreign tongue.
It is not possible, of course, in the limits of a single chapter to speak at any length of all the hundreds of Hamlets who have appeared upon the New York stage between the years 1761 and 1861, or to refer to the scores of men who have played the part in other cities. The following alphabetical list of those who have been seen upon the metropolitan stage is compiled from Mr. Ireland’s Records, and from many files of old play-bills in various collections, and is felt to be fairly complete. It does not include the tragedians whose performances have been noticed elsewhere in the text of the present chapter, or those who have played Hamlet in other cities of the Union but not in New York; and the date appended is that of the player’s first recorded appearance in the part here:
William Abbott, April 9, 1836; Augustus A. Addams, November 13, 1835; J. R. Anderson, September 3, 1844; George J. Arnold, 1854; Mr. Barton, March 9, 1831; Mr. Bartow, May 26, 1815; John Wilkes Booth, March, 1861; Frederick Brown, March 9, 1819; McKean Buchanan, June 10, 1850; Samuel Butler, November 4, 1841; John H. Clarke, November 8, 1822; Mr. Clason, November 10, 1824; G. F. Cooke (not the great George Frederick), October 4, 1839; Mr. Dunbar, December, 1813; Edward Eddy, August 27, 1852; Henry I. Finn, September 12, 1820; W. C. Forbes, May 29, 1833; Richard Graham, October 29, 1850; H. P. Grattan, May 11, 1843; James H. Hackett, October 21, 1840; Charles Carroll Hicks, December 13, 1858; Henry Erskine Johnstone, December, 1837; William Horace Keppell, November 17, 1831; H. Loraine, December 23, 1856; W. Marshall, February 3, 1848; J. A. J. Neafie, 1856; John R. Oxley, August 16, 1836; William Pelby, January 6, 1827; Charles Dibdin Pitt, November 8, 1847; J. B. Roberts, May 17, 1847; John R. Scott, March, 1836; James Stark, September, 1852; John Vandenhoff, October 2, 1837; Henry Wallack, September 4, 1824; James William Wallack, Jr., July, 1844; Wilmarth Waller, June 30, 1851.
JOHN VANDENHOFF.
As the limits of space here prevent more than the enumeration of the names of many men who were excellent Hamlets during the first century of its history in New York, so does the very nature of the article preclude any mention of the excellent Hamlets who have appeared in the part since the century closed in 1862, and who may be still alive. These no doubt will receive the attention of some later historian, who will do full justice to the Hamlets of the present and the future, from Henry Irving to N. S. Wood.
When George Henry Lewes, in “An Epistle to Anthony Trollope,” made the bold assertion that “no actor has been known utterly to fail as Hamlet,” he forgot four classes of actors whom perhaps he did not consider actors at all. These are, first, the infant prodigies; second, the ladies who attempt the part; third, the men who burlesque it; and fourth, the men who fail not only as Hamlet but as everything else. Of the first, something has already been said; of the second, something is yet to be said; of the third, William Mitchell, William E. Burton, and George L. Fox knew no such word as fail; and of the fourth, George the Count Johannes, in his later days, was a brilliant example. His occasional productions of Hamlet for his own benefit, a few years ago, were the source of much silly amusement and rude horse-play upon the part of audiences not wise enough to appreciate the mental condition of the unfortunate star, or their own want of taste in encouraging his buffoonery even by their ridicule. His support, composed entirely of amateurs, was without question the worst that any Hamlet has ever known in this country; but his own performance was neither good enough to be worthy of any notice whatever, nor bad enough to be funny.
The connection of George Jones with the American stage as a professional actor dates back to the early days of the Bowery Theatre. He made his American début there as the Prince of Wales in Henry IV., on the 4th of March, 1831. He played Hamlet at the National Theatre in December, 1836, and he repeated the part (before he became too mad to portray even the mad prince) many times, not only in this country but in England. The last occasion which merits even a passing word being at the Academy of Music, New York, on the 30th of April, 1864, when he was associated with Mrs. Brougham (Robertson) as Ophelia, and Mrs. Melinda Jones as the Queen.
GEORGE JONES.
The first record of any attempt to burlesque Hamlet in New York is contained in the advertisements of the Anthony (Worth) Street Theatre, June 13, 1821, when Mr. Spiler was announced to play the Dane and Mrs. Alsop Ophelia, “in the original travestie.” Mrs. Alsop’s sudden death before the opening night postponed the performance indefinitely, and it is not known now when the travesty was produced, or if it was produced at all that season. Mr. William Mitchell presented Poole’s absurd burlesque of the tragedy at the Olympic Theatre on the 13th of February, 1840, playing Hamlet himself. This, by the graybeards who prate of the palmy days of the drama—palmy meaning anything that is past—was said to have been a finer performance than the burlesque Hamlet of George L. Fox thirty years later. At the New National Theatre—formerly the Chatham—Mr. Frank Chanfrau played Hamlet after the manner of Mr. Macready, October, 1848, in an entertainment called Mr. McGreedy. But the burlesque Hamlet which was most complete in all its parts, unquestionably, was that produced at Burton’s Theatre in the season of 1857-58, when John Brougham played Hamlet with a brogue; Burton the Ghost; Dan Setchell Laertes; Lawrence Barrett Horatio; and Mark Smith Ophelia. Brougham had played the part previously at his own Lyceum in 1851, and at the Bowery in 1856, but never with such phenomenal support.
On the long file of the bills of Hamlet upon the New York stage the name of a lady is occasionally found in the titular part. The most daring and successful of these mongrel Hamlets was unquestionably Miss Charlotte Cushman—but even the genius of a Cushman was not great enough to crown the effort with success. In the early days of her career Miss Cushman had played the Queen in the tragedy to the Hamlet of James William Wallack the younger, at the National Theatre, New York, in April, 1837, and in the autumn of the same year to the Hamlet of Forrest at the Park. There is no record of her appearance as Ophelia. She played Hamlet for the first time in New York at Brougham’s Lyceum, November 24, 1851, and she trod in the footsteps of Mrs. Bartley, who was seen as Hamlet at the Park, March 29, 1819; of Mrs. Barnes, who was seen in the same part on the same stage in June of the same year; of Mrs. Battersby, who played it May 22, 1822; and of Mrs. Shaw—whose Ghost was Mr. Hamblin—in April, 1839. Mrs. Brougham (Robertson) played Hamlet for her benefit in 1843, and so did Miss Fanny Wallack in 1849. This last lady frequently attempted the part, and at the Astor Place Opera-house, June 8, 1850, she had the support of Charles Kemble Mason as the Ghost and Miss Lizzie Weston as Ophelia. Other lady Hamlets have been Miss Marriott, Miss Clara Fisher, Mrs. Emma Waller, Miss Anna Dickinson, Mrs. Louise Pomeroy, Miss Rachel Denvil, Miss Susan Denin, Mrs. F. B. Conway, Miss Adele Belgarde, and finally Miss Julia Seaman, an English actress of fine figure, who played the Devil in the spectacle of The White Fawn at Niblo’s Garden, and who succeeded in doing as much with Hamlet at Booth’s Theatre in 1874.
AUGUSTUS A. ADDAMS.
The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited, have been in Hamlet’s train upon the New York stage since “first from England he was here arrived,” so many years ago; but so much has been said of Hamlet that even the names of his most beautiful Ophelias, his honest Ghosts, his gentle Guildensterns, his aunt-mothers, his uncle-fathers, his wretched, rash, intruding Polonii, or the absolute knaves who have digged his Ophelia’s grave—and lied in it—for a hundred years, cannot be enumerated here, except when they have played Hamlet himself, or have done as somebody else some wonderful things to Hamlet.
William Davidge related in his Footlight Flashes that during his strolling days in England, when companies were small, he had on the same evening done duty for Polonius, the Ghost, Osric, and the First Grave-digger; and Edwin Booth remembers Thomas Ward dying in sight of the audience as the Player King, and being dragged from the mimic stage by the heels to enter immediately at another wing as Polonius, with a cry of “Lights! lights! lights!” Hamlet, in a “one-night town,” swearing that he loved Ophelia better than forty thousand brothers, has watched her through an open grave packing her trunk in the place beneath, while the Ghost, her husband, waited to strap it up! There are more things in Hamlet’s existence—behind the scenes—than are dreamed of in the philosophy of all his commentators and all his critics.
One of the most notable instances of a great actor assuming a small part was on the occasion of Charles Kean’s first appearance as Hamlet in Baltimore, when at the Holiday Street Theatre, in 1831, the elder Booth, at that time at the very height of his fame and prosperity, for some reason now unknown, volunteered to play the Second Actor, the most insignificant character in the tragedy. John Duff was the Ghost; Mrs. Duff Queen Gertrude; John Sefton Osric; Thomas Flynn First Grave-digger; and William Warren, father of the William Warren for whom Boston mourns to-day, was Polonius. This was an exceedingly strong cast of the tragedy, and the Second Actor most certainly was never in better hands on any stage.
WILLIAM PELBY.
The strongest cast of Hamlet, in all its parts, ever presented in America, was that at the famous Wallack Testimonial in New York, on the 21st of May, 1888, when Lawrence Barrett played the Ghost; Frank Mayo the King; John Gilbert Polonius; Eben Plympton Laertes; John A. Lane Horatio; Joseph Wheelock the First Actor; Milnes Levick the Second Actor; Henry Edwards the Priest; Joseph Jefferson and William J. Florence the Grave-diggers; Miss Kellogg Gertrude; Miss Coghlan the Player Queen; and Madame Modjeska Ophelia to the Hamlet of Edwin Booth.
The first record of any performance of Hamlet in New York, as has been shown, was at the theatre in Chappel Street, November 26, 1761. On the 26th of November, 1861, Mr. Booth played the same part at the Winter Garden, on Broadway. The coincidence was not noticed at the time, and no doubt was purely accidental. It was a very pleasant coincidence, nevertheless, and it is certainly a happy fact that Edwin Booth should have been selected by chance to celebrate upon the New York stage the centenary of Hamlet in New York.
Curtain.
THE CAST OF CHARACTERS.