“If a philosopher wishes to observe the ultimate product of civilization, and has strong nerves, and senses not over-delicate, he may do well to take a seat in the pit of the Bowery,” wrote one contemporary observer. Fights broke out frequently, and the audience even sometimes climbed onstage to intervene in stage battles if they thought it wasn’t a fair fight. From the stage, an actor could see “apple-munching urchins” and women in the pit nursing babies and men on the infamous “third tier” having sex with prostitutes. Hamblin had drilled peepholes for police to watch the spectacle from a private room. He made his special effects greater and greater to capture the audience’s attention, using so much gunpowder in one battle scene the audience had to run to the windows and throw them open to breathe. Once when an actor playing a king pretended to fall asleep, some of the audience got onstage and took turns trying on his crown.
Despite their troublemaking, the Bowery audience was engaged in the show and passionate about Shakespeare. It was the best school a young actress could get. When the Gallery Gods in the top tier got bored, for example, the actors knew it. They “amused themselves by throwing pennies and silver pieces on the stage, which occasioned an immense scramble among the boys” who jumped onstage to gather up the coins. A serious flub might occasion “a rain of vegetable glory.”
“Throw not the pearl of Shakespeare’s wit before the swine of the Bowery pit,” went one popular saying. And yet it was the working-class Bowery audience that kept Shakespeare on the stage in New York night after night. The slums in which the Bowery “b’hoys” and “g’hals” lived were densely populated, dangerous, and crowded with half-starving children. Abandoned by parents too poor, infirm, or addicted to care for them, some of the children who survived formed themselves into gangs with names like “the Dead Rabbits.” The theatre was their one amusement. Though many were illiterate, they knew most of Shakespeare by heart.
William Shakespeare intentionally wrote for both working-class and wealthy audiences. His heroes are often royalty made powerless in some way. His villains are frequently comic, turning aside to share a bawdy joke with the audience. Shakespeare had to be a master equivocator to survive in paranoid Elizabethan England, where a playwright could be “racked” and tortured for seeming to support the wrong political or religious party. Rather than pick sides, his plays move fluently between spectacle, drama, and poetry, between high and low culture.
“Theatre is divided into three and sometimes four classes,” explained Charlotte’s friend, the actor Joseph Jefferson. Each class of people had different ideas for what made a great night of entertainment, and the actor’s challenge was to appeal to them all. Jefferson’s solution was to act as broadly as possible. In his eyes, each “suggestion should be unmistakable; it should be hurled at the whole audience, and reach with unerring aim the boys in the gallery and the statesmen in the stalls.” It was an artificial style that flattened the characters until they seemed like shadows flickering on a screen. As audiences tired of this style, special effects became all-important. But many longed to be swept up in the drama, to feel with the character and see their own lives reflected even in the kings and queens onstage.
After a very brief period of rehearsal Charlotte prepared to make her New York debut as Lady Macbeth opposite Hamblin’s Macbeth. But just before opening night she fell dangerously ill with rheumatic fever. She lay in bed shivering, then burning, in excruciating pain. Rheumatic fever, wrote one contemporary physician, “licks the joints, but bites the heart.” On September 12, still weak and feverish, she was finally able to take the stage.
The Bowery audience immediately embraced Charlotte as one of their own. As she performed, they burst out in spontaneous applause, interrupting her speeches. She understood the character and made Lady Macbeth seem horribly real. Although one critic complained “she had no charmes of person, for she was ugly beyond average ugliness”—he admitted her “homely” face could come alive with a light that was “transcendently beautiful.” Her “ungraceful form” could “quiver with a passion that was electrical,” and her “wiry voice” became “tremulously sweet,” as though intoxicated by love, and then “gutturally savage with the demoniac rage of intense, venomous hatred.” Rare for American actors, it was said that Charlotte enunciated beautifully and with sensible line readings showed she had carefully studied the part. She was declared “the star of the Bowery.”
On her first day off, a week later, Charlotte took a coach to Harlem and went for a long walk in the woods. By the time she got home, however, her fever and chills had returned. She could not act for weeks. While convalescing, Charlotte left her costumes at the theatre, feeling they were not yet hers since Hamblin had paid for them. But while Charlotte was at home recovering, one of Hamblin’s special effects went out of control. The Bowery Theatre caught fire and burned to the ground. The sets, props, and all of Charlotte’s costumes were inside. With no theatre to run, Hamblin canceled all the actors’ contracts. The timing couldn’t have been worse. Charlotte’s mother, Mary Eliza, had just sold the boardinghouse and come to live with her in New York. At twenty years old, Charlotte prepared to start over—for the third time.
chapter five American Genius
You must exercise your Genius in some form that is essential to life.
—Ralph
