chapter two Quest
If her father had not left, Charlotte would have been forbidden to enter a theatre. In the 1800s audiences were primarily men, and theatres catered to male audiences by offering liquor and bawdy afterpieces that ran late into the night. In “that dark, horrible, guilty ‘third tier’ ” of all the large theatres men could purchase sex with prostitutes. Actresses were often former prostitutes and were considered only a step above your common whore. To become a star, an actress had to retain some veneer of respectability, and making it was a matter of survival as much as talent. Some older actors bragged about preying on the superlatives, or “supes,” who played minor roles like chambermaids and dancing girls. Girls who rose to fame on their good looks quickly found themselves wrung out and replaced, and yet the rare actress like the great British tragedian Sarah Siddons, who rose to fame, was treated like a queen. America had produced no actresses to rival Siddons, in part because no respectable family would allow their daughter to go onstage. It was seductive, however. Stepping into the theatre, you entered a raucous, debauched space, but it also promised connection with European high-culture through opera, Greek tragedy, and most of all Shakespeare.
The theatre wars in America went as far back as the Puritans who tore down Shakespeare’s Globe. Puritan polemicist William Prynne, born around the time the Bard was writing Hamlet, warned that “theater breeds spiritual anarchy by encouraging such inversions of nature as transvestism, irreverence and hypocrisy.” He argued that watching plays with “whores and strumpets” onstage would lead to “if not actuall, yet contemplative adultery.” Early American settlers feared the theatre in part because it was in competition with the church.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, growing up in puritanical Salem, Massachusetts, understood the Salem witch trials as a form of high drama themselves: mass hysteria and public murder of so-called witches by Puritans, the spectacle of young girls forced to confess to bizarre sex acts. As the future mayor of Salem Charles W. Upham wrote in 1831, “Pastors, deacons, church members, doctors of divinity, college professors, officers of state, crowded, day after day, to behold feats which have never been surpassed on the boards of any theatre.” Like Upham, Hawthorne did not “doubt the power of imagination so much as he fear[ed] it.”
Even before the American Constitution had been ratified, Americans were debating what to do about the theatre. Most plays were written by British writers, “that heathen riter Shakespur” the most popular among them. During Charlotte’s childhood, Shakespeare was performed in American theatres at least as frequently as in England, but a uniquely American theatre had not yet been born. Americans might have gained the right to call themselves a country, but culturally, they were still a colony. One problem, according to Herman Melville and others in the Young America movement, was that Shakespeare continued to overshadow American genius. Possibly more problematic was the enduring puritan squeamishness about theatre in general.
In the years following the Revolutionary War, Americans had turned their attention to the culture and entertainment their new freedom could afford them. Puritans saw clearly that theatre was in competition with the church for butts in seats. Other anti-theatre factions argued that since most plays were British, theatre was a form of cultural imperialism. (Ironically, theatre bans throughout the revolutionary period only solidified the British monopoly on theatrical culture.)
It seemed that every American had an opinion on the theatre paradox. On one hand, Americans were free people who believed that the government should not be allowed to dictate their entertainment choices. In Boston, one senator even argued that theatre was “the natural right of every man.” Yet the majority of the wealthy, influential Americans who made the laws mistrusted “every man,” and doubted that the average American had the intellectual capacity to know what entertainments were good for them. These same would-be aristocrats hired actors for private performances to entertain family and friends.
Foremen argued that the theatre would entice the poor to waste money and the working man to shirk his duties. But workers protested when their theatres were closed down. The Clergy recognized that the theatre was a powerful force that shaped public morals, but they failed to imagine working-class audiences could have any other response to a play than to emulate it. Clergymen “assumed the actors must be depraved because those who represented a passion had internalized it” and predicted that “women would expect to be treated like goddesses after viewing a play, causing the family to fall apart.”
But, by the early nineteenth century it had become clear that, like prostitution (which it was often likened to) theatre was nearly impossible to regulate. Laws banning it were unenforceable and only undermined the authority of the fledgling legal system. American writers pleaded for more theatres to be opened, so they could have an outlet for their plays. By the time Charlotte was born, the debate was no longer about whether theatre should exist in America, but about how Americans could use the theatre to develop their own culture. Still, the America of Charlotte’s youth was a country whose vision of itself had yet to come into focus.
When Charlotte and her uncle Augustus arrived at the Tremont Theatre the sun was dipping low in the late afternoon, casting long shadows across the cobblestone street. The theatre’s marble facade shone creamy white. Men leaned against a low stone wall, hands in pockets, hats tipped low to block the sun. Young boys dirtied their fine clothes playing tug-of-war with stray dogs, and women with parasols wore bonnets and long pastel dresses held away from their bodies with stiff crinolines and bustles, looking like bells about to be rung.
They were all here to
