The British audience also appreciated Charlotte’s clear enunciation of Shakespeare’s lines and her lack of a strong American accent. She had learned to speak well growing up among upper-class New Englanders and could pass for someone high-class. She had perfected the effect by copying Macready’s accent. In fact, wrote one jokester, she even looked a bit like him: “the bend of the knee, slight sneer of the lip / the frown on the forehead, the hand on the hip / in the chin, in the voice, ’tis the same to a tittle, / Miss Cushman is Mr. Macready in little.”
Charlotte was a convincing swordsman; she dueled like someone “to the manor born.” During a fight scene with Tybalt, Charlotte hit her opponent’s sword so hard that his weapon went flying downstage toward the audience. The pit erupted in cheers. “Miss Cushman is the one person we have seen who can handle a sword in stage combat so as not to make the encounter seem ridiculously prearranged,” marveled one critic, “and at the same time give the affray the appearance of reality without savageness.”
Her passion for Juliet also gave the appearance of reality, though with her sister as her costar, she was protected from further salacious gossip. Women found her Romeo an ideal lover: impulsive, sensitive, courageous, and cavalier. This sentiment was put best by an anonymous female fan: “Charlotte Cushman is a very dangerous young man.”
Men, too, were moved by Charlotte’s Romeo. Audiences were used to seeing plays that emphasized men’s capacity for savagery, but she showed them something new. When Charlotte discovered Juliet dead in a tomb, she did not merely hold the cold, dead hand, as others did, she crushed Juliet in her arms and wept freely. As Romeo, Charlotte revealed emotions men were not supposed to express in public. Her Romeo even made critics uncharacteristically self-reflective: “The character of Romeo is one which every man of sentiment takes to himself, and estimates according to his own feelings and impulses,” wrote one observer. “Perhaps a more intellectual and at the same time a more theatrically effective performance has never been witnessed,” enthused another.
Both men and women met her with flowers at the stage door.
Actors were sometimes criticized for making “points,” or playing just for the big scenes, which made the story seem disconnected and artificial. But Charlotte, as the Times of London wrote, gave the play “the vivifying spark, whereby the fragments are knit together and become an organized entirety.” It was this coherence, Coleridge claimed, that characterized the best interpretations of Shakespeare. She clearly saw Romeo as “an impetuous youth whose whole soul was absorbed into one strong emotion and whose lips must speak with the inspiration of his heart,” not merely a “fine speech maker” or maudlin “stage-lover.” In her hands he was “a creative, a living breathing ardent human being.”
A few, however, were furious that Charlotte would try to “ape a man” onstage. Women had played Romeo before, but the goal was to titillate the men in the audience, who enjoyed seeing a pretty actress in a short tunic. Charlotte, however, acted like a man rather than a woman in tights, besting men at swordplay. Then, when her chivalric Romeo collapsed weeping in the final scene, she gave men in the audience the dangerous impression it was okay to do the same.
A controversy broke out in the press and between audiences and critics. Charlotte might “split the ears of the groundlings,” wrote one of these critics, referring to the working-class audience who cheered Charlotte on from the pit, but he still believed she was nothing but a male “impersonator.” Eventually even Queen Victoria weighed in. The young queen declared that while Charlotte “entered well into the character” of Romeo, no one would have ever imagined her a woman, her figure and voice being so masculine.
The one thing everyone agreed on was that Charlotte made a convincing man. The performance was complete. When a joker in the audience faked a sneeze during one of Charlotte’s love scenes, she stopped the performance. Most actors would have ignored it, but Charlotte, still in character, led Juliet offstage “as a cavalier might lead a lady from a place where an insult had been offered her,” then returned to the stage and commanded: “Some man must put that person out, or I shall be obliged to do it myself.” The offender was lifted up by the crowd and carried away. “The audience rose en masse and gave three cheers for Miss Cushman,” who then went offstage to retrieve her Juliet and continued the play “as though nothing had happened.”
Charlotte had swagger, or what the Italians called “sprazzetura,” a kind of studied nonchalance. As Romeo, she walked like a man, spoke like a man, moved her body with the confidence of someone used to taking up space. The most manly thing about her was her sense of freedom.
In fact, some argued, she was a better man than most men. Her love speeches had a poetic cadence that, they argued, no male actor could achieve. Alternately the chivalric cavalier and the tender lover, she was perfect in each. One reviewer declared her Romeo was one of the “most remarkable pieces of acting ever witnessed.” Another wrote that, after seeing Charlotte Cushman, “lovemaking, as practiced by the other sex” would seem “a very stale, flat, and unprofitable affair.”
As Charlotte’s fame increased, she attracted more of London’s rich and famous to the theatre. One night, Charlotte heard that an important critic was there to see her: James Sheridan Knowles, a former
