On May 10th, 1849, a rivalry between two Shakespearean actors erupted into an honest-to-goodness riot outside the Astor Place Opera House in New York City—a riot that left more than 20 people dead, and some 50 wounded. The crux of the matter? Who played the better Macbeth: the American (Edwin Forrest) or the Englishman (William Macready).
“The saga began several years earlier, in 1845, when the volatile Philadelphia-born star Edwin Forrest was on tour to the UK,” writes Andrew Dickson.
Stung by a poor reviews in London (the Spectator yawned that his Othello was “affected” and said his “killing of Desdemona was a cold-blooded butchery”), Forrest became paranoid that his great rival, the eminent English actor William Charles Macready, was orchestrating a campaign against him. The following March, Forrest bought a ticket for Macready’s Hamlet in Edinburgh; just as the play-within-the-play scene began, Forrest hissed, loudly and publicly. The affair became a scandal, particularly when Forrest sent a letter to the London Times pouring scorn on Macready’s “fancy dance” of a Dane. Back in the US, Forrest—narcissistic even by the standards of most actors—exulted that he had struck a blow against anti-American prejudice.
Macready, an altogether quieter and more uptight character, was shocked, but had little sense how things would escalate. On his own return tour to the US in the fall of 1848, he was astonished to discover that many American reviewers—who had praised him to the rafters on previous visits—had mysteriously turned against him. When he reached Forrest’s hometown of Philadelphia, he was dismayed to find that his enemy had arranged to perform many of the same dates in direct opposition. One night, Macready’s Macbeth was interrupted when the audience began fighting amongst itself. As the curtain came down, Macready protested, only to find when he opened the paper the next day that Forrest had printed a furious take-down of his “narrow, envious” rival. The dispute simmered: in Cincinnati a few months later, half a sheep was thrown at Macready’s feet.
Things only got more heated from there, until the fateful evening of May 10th, when a mob formed outside Macready’s final performance. “Swelled by ranks of criminal gangs of ‘b’hoys’ from the Bronx, they tried to storm the theatre, but, finding the doors locked, pulled up paving stones from the streets with their bare hands and began to throw them through the windows,” Dickson writes.
On stage, Macready soldiered on through the final act, ‘in the very spirit of resistance [flinging] my whole soul into every word I uttered.’
He was unaware that by then a detachment of cavalry had arrived in Astor Place and were attempting to disperse the mob, which had only increased. Panicking that they were losing control, the soldiers fired—at first into the air, then into the crowd. In the theatre, the audience thought the noise was firecrackers going off. In the confusion and smoke outside, some 50 soldiers were wounded, and more than twenty people left dead or dying. Among the deceased were an Irish laborer, a butcher, and a Wall Street broker. Macready was rushed away from the building in disguise, and would never act in America again.
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