Ever since the deaths of Mary Ann and Elizabeth, Rosalie has believed that her job was to care for Mother. Perhaps she’s been waiting all those years to hear just this, that Mother is caring for her. Now the tears come and this is not because she’s unhappy over the move, which she is, but because Mother is there, with a face full of love, combing out Rosalie’s hair as if she were just a little girl.
xi
Eleven years after Edwin first made the offer, John has finally agreed to be Henry, Earl of Richmond, to Edwin’s Richard III. They appear together, one night only, at Baltimore’s Holliday Street Theatre, recently bought by John T. Ford. Mother, Rosalie, and Asia are all in attendance. Joe makes a show of demanding their tickets.
A box has been reserved for them, with three rocking chairs threaded with ribbons and a good view down to the stage. They’ve dressed in their best—Asia in a violet silk and Rosalie in dove gray. Mother is sticking to her widow’s black, but has dabbed her wrists and neck. The powdery scent of Héliotrope Blanc, a gift from Edwin, floats through the air along with the hum of the audience settling into their seats.
All three are determined to love both performances in absolutely equal measure, but this is complicated by the fact that they must wait so long for John to arrive onstage while Edwin is everywhere, and playing Father’s old role. The more he deviates from Father’s delivery, the more Mother whispers that she can’t help but feel that he’s doing it wrong. She just knows Father’s version so well. She could do it herself. Pause here. Sweeping hand gesture.
Edwin falls to his knees. “？‘Take up the sword again, or take up me.’？”
Rosalie hears Asia whispering the answer along with Lady Anne. “？‘No! Though I wish thy death, I will not be thy executioner.’ I did that scene in school once,” Asia says, “after the first time I ever saw Father perform. I got a spanking. At home, not at school.”
“I remember,” Mother says.
Rosalie wishes they would stop talking. Edwin’s voice is so intense. “？‘Then bid me kill myself, and I will do it.’？” It’s romantic, or it would be if Mother and Asia would be quiet, if Richard weren’t so evil and Edwin not her little brother.
Finally, finally John appears. “？‘Thrice is he armed that has his quarrel just; And he but naked, though locked up in steel, Whose conscience with injustice is corrupted: The very weight of Gloster’s guilt shall crush him . . .’？”
Rosalie hears Mother catching her breath. She thinks she knows why. “He looks so much like Father,” Rosalie whispers. The resemblance is so strong as to be startling.
But Mother says no, he looks like Edwin. So very much like Edwin.
This isn’t true. John is taller. John is handsomer. The handsomest man in America, some are saying. A woman in the audience compares him to a new-blown rose, its petals still beaded with the morning dew.
* * *
—
In future, it will be a rare review that doesn’t make these comparisons: Edwin to Father, John to Father and Edwin. Few argue for the sons over the legend of the father, but between the brothers things fall out more evenly—Edwin the better elocutionist, John with more fire. Edwin with more poetry, John with more passion.
Of course, Edwin is working under the handicap of so often performing drunk.
* * *
—
On this particular night, J. H. Stoddart, the actor playing Buckingham, declares both performances splendid. “I shall never forget the fight between Richard and Richmond in the last act, an encounter which was terrible in its savage realism,” he says.
That fight ran so long and was rendered with such ferocity that certain members of the audience feared they were about to witness actual and serious injury. Certain members like Rosalie.
Edwin
xii
Edwin’s career benefits from a lucky advantage with regard to timing. Back in 1853, only a year after Father’s death, the legendary tragedian Edwin Forrest retired from the stage. Forrest had gained early notice through his popular Indian roles, particularly the last of the Wampanoags; shot to notoriety by rudely hissing William Macready as he played Macbeth, a feud that later culminated in the deadly Astor Opera House riot; responded to the exposure of his own infidelities by accusing his wife of the same （she claimed he had mistaken a phrenology examination for love-making）; brutally whipped one of the men he held responsible for the destruction of his marriage, a man in such ill health he was utterly unable to defend himself; sued his wife for divorce in a six-week trial the public followed avidly and which he eventually lost; and then lost a later suit for the assault. He was tired.
His absence left an opening Edwin was able to exploit—the old greats dead or gone—and only Edwin at the gate. If this opening was mere luck, the use Edwin made of it was the product of hard work and careful planning, not all of it his own. Two other people—Adam Badeau and Mary Devlin—devoted themselves to Edwin’s advancement.
Adam Badeau:
Since that encouraging review back in his first New York run, Edwin and Badeau have grown close. Adam refers to them as Romeo and Vagabond, Edwin calls them Ned and Ad. Adam is older than Edwin by only two years, but he’s better educated, more sophisticated, better connected, and smarter. He’s a short man, as is Edwin, but stout and ruddy where Edwin is thin and pale. He wears glasses. His clothes show the kind of subdued taste that only money can buy. His offer to mentor Edwin is eagerly accepted. Soon Edwin is studying French and Latin for elocution, history and philosophy for interpretation.
“You know he’s in love with you,” Uncle Ben tells Edwin and Edwin does know this. Adam often complains of Edwin’s emotional distance, his coldness, as if Adam has a right to something different. Sometimes this makes Edwin uncomfortable. Sometimes he loves Adam right back.
The two spend hours discussing the state of the theater. The old ranting, referred to now as the Bowery style, remains popular in the cheap seats, but the upper classes want subtlety. “No acting is great which pleases only a single class,” Adam tells Edwin. “The gods of the gallery are as good critics as the blues of the boxes.” Still, the professionals, including Badeau, are working to transform the popular taste. Sometimes people have to be taught to want what they should want.
The war will intensify the growing preference for suppressed over expressed emotion, especially when the suppression comes with evident （though delicately played） struggle.
Badeau admires innovation. He longs to see something new. This desire is, in and of itself, innovative. For years, actors have been applauded for imitation. Every part, however old now, had once debuted with the author there to provide guidance. The less things change over the generations, the closer a performance comes to the wellspring, the true quill. Shakespeare as directed by Shakespeare.
As rewritten by Cibber. Adam and Edwin begin to put more of Shakespeare’s own lines back into his plays. This, too, is innovative.
Adam takes Edwin to libraries and museums to research costumes. They read plays together, stopping to analyze who the character is at each moment, how he develops over the course of the play, and how a quiet line might be read to convey this.
In the old style, actors were evaluated on their delivery of the big speeches, the ones the audience knew and were waiting for. This was called making the points. Reviewing Edwin’s Hamlet, a later critic will write, “From first to last, he not only does not make points where points are usually made, but he does not make a point at all.”