The Shakespeare Riots Revenge Drama and Death in NineteenthCentury America (Audible Audio Edition) Nigel Cliff Nick Sullivan Audible Studios Books
Download As PDF : The Shakespeare Riots Revenge Drama and Death in NineteenthCentury America (Audible Audio Edition) Nigel Cliff Nick Sullivan Audible Studios Books
One of the bloodiest incidents in New York's history, the so-called Astor Place Riot of May 10, 1849, was ignited by a long-simmering grudge match between the two leading Shakespearean actors of the age. Despite its unlikely origins, though, there was nothing remotely quaint about this pivotal moment in history - the unprecedented shooting by American soldiers of dozens of their fellow citizens, leading directly to the arming of American police forces.
The Shakespeare Riots recounts the story of this momentous night, its two larger-than-life protagonists, and the myriad political and cultural currents that fueled the violence. In an engrossing narrative that moves at a breakneck pace from the American frontier to the Mississippi River, to the posh theaters of London, to the hangouts of the most notorious street gangs of the day, Nigel Cliff weaves a spellbinding saga of soaring passions, huge egos, and venal corruption.
Cliff charts the course of this tragedy from its beginnings as a somewhat comical contretemps between Englishman William Charles Macready, the haughty lion of the London stage, and Edwin Forrest, the first great American star and a popular hero to millions. Equally celebrated, and equally self-centered, the two were once friends, then adversaries. Exploiting this rivalry, "nativist" agitators organized mobs of bullyboys to flex their muscle by striking a blow against the foppish Macready and the Old World's cultural hegemony that he represented.
The moment Macready took the stage in New York, his adversaries sprang into action, first by throwing insults, then rotten eggs, then chairs. When he dared show his face again, an estimated twenty thousand packed the streets around the theater. As cobblestones from outside rained down on the audience, National Guard troops were called in to quell the riot. Finding themselves outmatched, the Guardsmen discharged their weapons at the crowd, with horrific results. When the smoke cleared, as many as thirty people lay dead, with scores more wounded.
The Shakespeare Riots is social and cultural history of the highest order. In this wondrous saga Nigel Cliff immerses readers in the bustle of mid-nineteenth-century New York, re-creating the celebrity demimonde of the day and capturing all the high drama of a violent night that robbed a nation of its innocence.
The Shakespeare Riots Revenge Drama and Death in NineteenthCentury America (Audible Audio Edition) Nigel Cliff Nick Sullivan Audible Studios Books
Thoroughly researched, highly readable account of a largely overlooked phase of American history. I had heard of the Shakespeare riot, when citizens of New York had a violent riot about which was the better actor. I was curious as to what forces may have driven this bizarre episode. The author does an outstanding job of bringing light to dark subjects.Product details
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The Shakespeare Riots Revenge Drama and Death in NineteenthCentury America (Audible Audio Edition) Nigel Cliff Nick Sullivan Audible Studios Books Reviews
Not long ago we had movies of Shakespeare's _Hamlet_ starring Mel Gibson in the first and Kenneth Branaugh in the second. Imagine that Hollywood blundered and released both at the same time for premieres in New York City to compete with each other. Now imagine that this made fans of Gibson and fans of Branaugh so furious that there was a clash between thousands of them, throwing stones and lighting fires, and that when the police and militia were called in, more than twenty people died. If your imagination can't pull all that off, you can stop trying. It all really happened, only it happened in 1849, in New York City outside the Astor Place Opera House, where respective fans of an American Shakespearean actor and an English Shakespearean actor caused what is known as the Astor Place Riot. If it still seems improbable, the precedents for the battle are comprehensively set up in _The Shakespeare Riots Revenge, Drama, and Death in Nineteenth-Century America_ (Random House) by Nigel Cliff. This brilliant and entertaining book looks back at early nineteenth century acting traditions, the importance of Shakespeare to Americans, the culture wars between England and Britain, and the class conflicts within New York City, so that the riot itself occupies only the last quarter of the book. The riot may still seem an implausible historical episode, but Cliff has so thoroughly plumbed its many roots that in the book's final chapters, the riot seems like a sad inevitability.
For us, Shakespeare represents a lofty realm of academic reverence, but it is surprising that frontiersmen wanted not melodrama or farce, but the Bard. Shakespeare's plays were fully a quarter of all the plays put on in America, and on the frontier there was no more popular playwright. And so when America produced its first theatrical star, it was Shakespeare that was his platform. Edwin Forrest was "a poster child for Jacksonian America," and his working-class or frontier audiences responded to his down-home brawny presence. The leading actor in England at the time was William Charles Macready, who was a quieter performer than Forrest, and audiences in both America and England got to sample the performances of both men. The two of them were able, initially, to enjoy each other's work, and were friends, with a friendly rivalry. There were tensions at the time that brought America and England as close to war as they had been since their battles of 1812, so that part of being pro-America at the time was being anti-British. It might have been inevitable, but the friendly rivalry between him and Forrest became unfriendly, and then bitter.
The clash between countries manifested in New York City, where the new Astor Place Opera House had been built as a temple to propriety to be frequented by the upper classes, but which was located close enough to annoy their inferiors. "The theatres had always been the great democratic gathering places," Cliff writes, "the only arenas where the people's voice was louder than the elite's, where the poor could sit in judgment on the wealthy folk below." That the Astor wanted to police itself of the Irish and any other gangs by instituting a strict dress code was bad enough, but that it booked Macready to play his brand of British-style _Macbeth_ made the crowds angry. On the night of the riot, Macready was able to get through the play with only some catcalls, but outside, a mob of 15,000 people surrounded the building, bombarding it with paving stones, and eventually enduring the rifle fire from the militia. Macready was able to elude the mob; it was his last American performance. Cliff points out that this was "the first time that two classes of Americans had failed to resolve their conflicting rights without resorting to muskets and brickbats," and it was the worst of riots until those protesting the draft in 1863. The riot also lead to police being issued their first lethal weapons, heavy clubs to be used, of course, in self defense. It was one reason that Americans changed the way they enjoyed Shakespeare; the riot promoted segregation of classes and depopularized the Bard, with scholastic veneration taking place of popular enthusiasm. An astonishing story full of period detail, _The Shakespeare Riots_ is a grand history of a forgotten episode that was surprisingly influential in American theater, class structure, and nationalism.
Nigel Cliff's The Shakespeare Riots hearkens back with delight to an era when dinner parties lasted for hours and included toasts and speeches, when every poor frontiersman had a copy of King Lear or Macbeth in his log cabin, when traveling drama troupes performed for audiences of loggers and fur trappers and silver prospectors who knew every line as well (or better) than the actors. Being a thespian in those days was only barely a notch above being a gambler or a prostitute, and the occupation was populated with the desperate and the destitute.
Shakespeare was considered the voice of the common man in young America. People in the United States saw in his plays the brave struggle of the underdog against authority. The heroes were strong, honest and brave in the face of a hostile and pretentious world. It resonated perfectly in this brash upstart country.
The relationship between the United States and Great Britain has always been complex and conflicted. Never was this more obvious than in the theaters of the 1840s, where a strangely passionate battle was taking place a cultural war over who really owned the Bard, and what his work really meant. This peculiar clash finally boiled down to two men Yankee Edwin Forrest (1806-1872) and Englishman William Macready (1793-1873), whose friendship devolved into a deeply personal rivalry and eventually exploded into a proxy campaign between the working class and the wealthy, the Americans and the British, the common man and the privileged, in the bloody Astor Place Riot that occurred on May 10, 1849 at the Astor Opera House in Manhattan, which no longer exists. This entire book leads up to that moment.
After the riot, two great shifts occurred first, Shakespeare was plucked away from the common man and appropriated by High Culture; it became something that inhabited the realm of English lit classrooms, endlessly analyzed and dissected by teachers. In short, it became boring. It became dull. It became something people had to seek, to discover on their own. It was no longer part of everyone's shared experience. Second, a great pivot in governmental philosophy took place, swinging away from freedom of expression and towards the protection of property. For a long time, periodic street riots were considered a normal part of the "letting-off-steam" social dynamic. After 1849, however, police trained in military-style tactics and equipped with military-style weapons became common in America, ready and able to quell civil unrest.
The Shakespeare Riots is a wonderful exploration of America's strange and dissonant relationship with Shakespeare in particular and the theater in general. It is also a marvelous overview of Nineteenth-Century American culture from an outside perspective.
The book can be neatly summarized by this passage from chapter 12, page 248, which ascribes blame for the violence
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It was the fault of Macready's father, for educating his son as a gentleman and going bankrupt. It was the fault of the English writers, for stomping over American self-esteem. It was the fault of several American states, for causing Americans to be reviled as debt-dodgers.* It was the fault of journalists, for whipping up partisanship to sell papers. It was the fault of the British government, for is disastrous Irish policy.** It was the fault of Jacksonian politics, for pandering to gang leaders. It was the fault of the Upper Ten***, for building an opera house in a provocative location. It was the fault of the new mayor, unversed in crowd control. It was the fault of the irresistible flows of capital and population that had carved out a resentful and often violent underclass. And yes, it was the fault of Forrest, for bullying his way to self-vindication, and of Macready, for defending his respectability to the bitter end.
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*America was a debtor nation in the 1840s, and some state legislatures had suggested that rather than raise taxes to meet our obligations, we simply ignore them and default. This, as you can imagine, made the U.S. extremely unpopular abroad.
**Which led to mass immigration to the U.S., many of which (as everyone knows) remained in New York.
***I.e., New York City's "Upper Ten Thousand," what we could call today "The 1%."
Oxford-educated, Nigel Cliff is a former film and drama critic who really knows his stuff. I highly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in American history and/or the history of theater.
I do have two quibbles, and I sincerely hope that Mr. Cliff will forgive me. The first is the writing style, which can, at times, frankly, be a bit sludgy. The Shakespeare Riots sometimes reads like a Master's thesis or Doctoral dissertation. The material is fascinating, but the reader must sometimes plow through sentences such as this (from chapter 6, page 120, in which Cliff explains how American authors had trouble getting anything published because they lacked credibility)
- - - - -
Instead, they read English taunts that they had no talent for literature, art, or philosophy, that sitting around drinking mint juleps and chewing tobacco, talking up the glories of independence, and swearing that they were very graceful and agreeable people would not make them scholars any more than gentlemen, and nothing stung more.
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My only other complaint (again, a minor one) is that Cliff often (and sometimes slightly) changes the subject in mid-thought and occasionally rambles from the story of one person or event to the story of another person or event and then back again without clear transitions.
In chapter 9, on pages 178-179, for instance, Cliff discusses the life of Catherine "Kate" Forrest, Edwin's wife
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Kate was what was then pejoratively known as a bluestocking or an advanced woman. She was highly intelligent, a progressive thinker, and, in private, a subtle and powerful advocate for women's rights; the sepulchral ideal of middle-class American wifehood must have struck her cold. Fanny Trollope captured the routine with scalpel precision. Trollope's exemplary woman is college educated, marries early, and immediately vanishes into domestic insignificance...
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The paragraph then continues at length, but do you see what happened in the third sentence? Cliff changed the subject from Kate Forrest to Fanny Trollope (English novelist 1779-1863). Not that it isn't relevant, but the transition is extremely sudden and unannounced, and unless you are paying very close attention it can be distracting or disorienting.
Aside from those two extremely small complaints, I found The Shakespeare Riots both entertaining and informative. I recommend it to anyone with an interest in drama or history, and highly recommend it to anyone with an interest in both.
This is a fascinating book for anyone interested in the history of Shakespearean theater in America and how it was influenced by national and local politics of the time. Mr. Cliff ties his well documented story together with surprising insights into the resentments that swirled through British and American societies after the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812.
Thin, but padded at the same time.
While I think the author spent too much time fleshing out the varied and obscure disputes between the two actors featured in his book, it is still quite good. It is strongest when describing the significant social changes occurring as America evolved in the mid-19th century. The early theatre provides a nice platform for the talented Mr. Cliff to describe in lively terms such things as the movement West, the striking influx of immigrants to New York City, the emerging divisions between the upper and lower urban classes, and the rise of an American way of looking at Shakespeare.
With this successful effort at understanding early America, I suggest this friend of our country from England, Nigel Cliff, now turn his attention and skills to writing a book on the influence of William Shakespeare on our greatest president, Abraham Lincoln.
Thoroughly researched, highly readable account of a largely overlooked phase of American history. I had heard of the Shakespeare riot, when citizens of New York had a violent riot about which was the better actor. I was curious as to what forces may have driven this bizarre episode. The author does an outstanding job of bringing light to dark subjects.
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