Labor saved me,” Charlotte later wrote to a friend about the weeks following Augustus’s death. She did not want to be crushed by grief, so she conquered it by working herself into exhaustion. Her plan was to “suffer bodily to cure my heart-bleed,” to “strew ashes over the loss of my child-brother.” So she took a job where she knew she could flagellate herself with “all the mortifications in my profession”: the Park Theatre.
When she first returned to New York City in May of 1837, Charlotte went to work at the National Theatre in New York as a “walking lady,” taking any part they would give her. But she also wrote to Edmund Simpson, the manager of the Park Theatre, hoping to get a contract there. Meanwhile, the National put her to work immediately in Guy Mannering, a musical adaptation of Sir Walter Scott’s novel. Guy Mannering is an adventure story that follows a band of gypsies and their queen, Meg Merrilies. Meg adopts an orphaned boy who is secretly a nobleman’s son and raises him lovingly as her own. When the boy grows to be a man, his true identity is revealed and bandits immediately kidnap him for ransom. Meg ultimately sacrifices her own life to save her boy. Charlotte was cast not in a starring role but as a “singing gypsy.” A comedown from her triumphs as Lady Macbeth and Romeo, but she wasn’t in Albany anymore. “Albanians” had appreciated her talent but the goodwill she’d earned there had a poor exchange rate. She would have to prove herself all over again.
She had to be satisfied with small roles, for now. But she was in the center of American theatre, a paid actor with a contract at a good theatre. It was spring. The dogwoods were blooming, and the city was shaking itself off and putting forth new life.
Then, in early May 1837, nearly twenty banks failed. The financial crisis put stress on the theatres, who relied on audiences’ disposable income to survive. Edmund Simpson and the co-owner of the Park, Stephen Price, needed something new to lure audiences into their shows and keep them coming back.
One morning Charlotte got word that the actress playing Meg Merrilies was sick and she would need to fill in from her manager at the National that very night. Meg was a leading role, with many lines, and Charlotte had less than a day to learn them. She raced to the theatre to pick up a copy of the full script. Managers normally only gave a full copy of the play to the leading actors, limiting the number of manuscripts in circulation to keep them from being sold to a competing theatre.
But Charlotte had already had her eye on the starring role. When she wasn’t onstage singing and dancing in ridiculous musical numbers, she had been hiding in the wings, listening for clues to Meg’s character, and noticing where the lead actress—Mrs. Chippendale—made mistakes. Mrs. Chippendale, a British actress, interpreted Scott’s Gypsy queen as a young woman. But Charlotte had realized that if Meg had raised a baby boy from infancy into manhood, she would not be young. In fact, since Meg was not the boy’s biological mother, she could be very old.
Charlotte went to rehearsal the day of her debut as Meg still hoping to “catch some inspiration.” Unlike many actors in a starring role, she didn’t pay attention to just her own character, but also to how other characters talked about her. Rehearsing onstage with her script in hand, she heard one gypsy say to another that Meg “rules the tribe” and yet “she doates,” meaning that she is too tender and maternal. Off to one side, Charlotte took notes, but kept her plan a secret.
That night, when the order for “places” was given, Charlotte did not come to the stage. She was still in her dressing room. John Braham, a “sweet-voiced” young English tenor who was meant to play opposite Charlotte, waited anxiously in the wings for his new costar. Then behind him in the darkness he heard a sound, and when he turned what he saw gave him a cold chill.
From the velvet gloom a thing of supernatural power came forward. The face was deeply carved with dry creek beds of wrinkles, her dark hair, parted in the middle, escaped in uncombed tangles down her back. Her tattered dress was simple and dark, reaching to the floor. The sleeves were cut short to reveal well-muscled arms. She seemed to glide when she walked, like an apparition. In her hand was a tall staff of power, forked at the end. Braham gasped, then realized with a shock that this crone was Charlotte Cushman.
Charlotte had likely taken some of her inspiration from one of her favorite poets, John Keats. Keats’s ballad “Meg Merrilies” imagines the character as an emblem of romantic wildness, not beautiful in the traditional sense, but in the way that craggy hills are beautiful. She weaves garlands of woodbine, crooning eerily to herself. Old Meg is “tall as Amazon” but copies womanhood with a tin ear: her cloak is an old red blanket, and she wears a “chip hat,” out of fashion for nearly fifty years. Like Lady Macbeth, her power is not quite human.
Moments before the curtain went up, Charlotte crept into the gypsy tent that had been placed for her onstage. Her gray-clad figure seemed to hover, ghostly in the silver moonlight. When the show began and she finally spoke, her voice sounded as if it came from another world, hoarse and broken.
In her next scene she leapt from the wings onto the stage with a “strange, silent spring,” terrifying the audience. Then she stood suddenly straight “like a great, withered tree,” with her arms outstretched and a “look of fire,” as she began to prophesy: “The dark shall be light / And the wrong made right”
“If ever the dead come back among the living,” Meg crooned, “I’ll be seen in the glen many a-night
