Emma Crow Cushman had been traveling with Charlotte since June, and Fanny found her friendly and intelligent, but was not smitten as she was with Charlotte. When Seward came home, Charlotte joined the men talking politics. She spoke easily of current events, observed Fanny, “with the ease and air of habit which is usually confined to men,—her views comprehensive, clear, far-sighted.” The men often kept her up talking until late at night. As the hub of an enormous network of friends and acquaintances—and with a massive correspondence she kept up meticulously—Charlotte had access to excellent information, and she was not shy about connecting people she liked if she thought they could do each other good. She was also widely read, funny, engaging, and an excellent conversationalist.
President Lincoln came nearly every night to dine with Charlotte while she stayed with the Sewards in Washington. Much had changed since she met him in 1861, when they still hoped the war would be over quickly. Now, three years into the war, Lincoln, like Macbeth, was “in blood stepped in so far that should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er.”
During her last visit, Lincoln’s “ready good humor” had made her laugh so much she forgot what she wanted to say. Now, however, Lincoln’s face seemed “so overspread with sadness” he resembled Shakespeare’s sad clown Jacques, “translated from the forest of Arden to the capital of Illinois.” Yet he lit up when he spoke on subjects that interested him, like his favorite play.
“I think nothing equals Macbeth,” Lincoln had written to the actor James Hackett three months earlier. He preferred to read Shakespeare himself, which let him study the text the way he also studied the Bible, but he also enjoyed finding out how an actor’s conception of the play differed from his own. In fact, when a congressman brought the actor John McDonough to the White House one night, Lincoln kept him talking for four hours about Shakespeare. “Lincoln was eager to know why certain scenes were left out of productions… He was fascinated by the different ways classic lines could be delivered,” McDonough recalled. During their conversation Lincoln often lifted his “well-thumbed volume” of Shakespeare from the shelf, reading aloud some passages, reciting others from memory. Charlotte, who had seen Hackett perform in 1845 and declared him terrible, was celebrated for her understanding of the sense as well as the effect of Shakespeare’s lines. Lincoln was eager to see her and had tickets for the night of October 17.
A few days before the performance, Charlotte and Fanny took a tour of the new Ford’s Theatre. The theatre was only a few blocks away, on Tenth Street, so they walked, talking animatedly the whole way. Inside Ford’s Theatre daylight streamed in through the high windows. In a nod to growing female audiences, the building had a separate ladies’ entrance and exit. Charlotte entertained Fanny by revealing stage secrets. Next to the prompter’s box was a long, hollow piece of iron filled with dried peas hung on the wall. Charlotte took hold of it and shook it mightily, making thunder.
On the night of October 17 Lincoln walked to Grover’s Theatre, a few blocks from the Capitol and within spitting distance of Ford’s, its rival. Grover’s was not well insulated, and was known to be cold in winter and hot in summer, but Lincoln had been there more than a hundred times, sometimes with Seward, sometimes alone. “Exceedingly conversant in Shakespeare,” Lincoln turned to the Bard to help him in a time of great stress. As with the Bible, Shakespeare gives no straightforward answers, but riddles, which, when puzzled out, offered a method for thinking through a problem.
Macbeth begins on a battlefield, the war already lost and won. It is a play not about war but what comes after, themes already on the President’s mind: “o’er-leaping ambition” that jumps over the top step and falls on the other side. Ambition is, as in the Bible, an “illness” rather than a virtue (a profoundly un-American sentiment). Ambition makes Macbeth paranoid and makes Lady Macbeth mad.
That freezing October night the dead still lay unburied on the field at Gettysburg, where they had been rotting since July. On Lindon’s desk lay an unfinished draft of the Gettysburg Address.
In the icy auditorium, Lincoln watched Charlotte as Lady Macbeth in the sleep-walking scene. She seemed to glide downstage silently as a ghost, violently wringing her hands, trying to wash away the unseen gore: “Out, damned spot! out, I say!—One: two: why, then, ’tis time to do’t.—Hell is murky!—Fie, my lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard?”
The scene echoes the Old Testament’s Matthew 27:24, where Pontius Pilate washes Jesus’s blood from his hands. With his long study of Shakespeare and the Bible, Lincoln would have recognized the way the Bard associates Lady Macbeth and her husband with Pilate the traitor. He may also have recalled Pilate’s next lines: “I am innocent of this man’s blood,” Pilate announces. “You shall bear the responsibility.” And the people answer, “His blood be on us and on our children!”
A year later, in 1864, Edwin Booth
