Abstract
In response to Sydney Smith’s oft-quoted attack on American culture, when Edwin Forrest debuted in Boston seven years later, the New England Galaxy enthused, “[C]ertainly the gentleman, whose name appears at the head of this article [E. Forrest], gives glorious promise of a splendid career, and justifies the hope of saying—Here! when asked, ‘Where is our Kemble?’”2 In this chapter I examine the fulfillment of that promise, as well as Forrest’s carefully constructed masculine image. Forrest literally and figuratively dominated the antebellum American stage. Although criticized for lack of subtlety and emotional dimension, no actor matched his physical stature, vocal power, and muscular passion. As an embodiment of self-made manhood, he inspired working-class male audiences, providing a theatrical equivalent of the Jacksonian model. Stigmatized by his role in the tensions leading up to the Astor Place Riot, as well as by a high-profile divorce, Forrest repelled the image-conscious middle class and elite. In his playwriting competitions, Forrest found dramatic vehicles that celebrated and propagated his masculine image. A close examination of the changes that he dictated in Robert T. Conrad’s Jack Cade suggests Forrest’s conscious construction and performance of manliness.
In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? Or goes to an American play?…. [Where are] their Siddonses, Kembles, Keans, or O’Neills?1
Sidney Smith, 1820
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Notes
In 1947, the bibliophile Grolier Club credited Alger’s novel as one of the most influential 100 American novels written before 1900 (Gary Scharnhorst and Gary Bales, The Lost Life of Horatio Alger, Jr. [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985], 86–87).
Quoted in Richard Moody, Edwin Forrest: First Star of the American Stage (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1960), 250.
Montrose J. Moses, The Fabulous Forrest: The Record of an American Actor (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, and Co., 1929), 134.
Charles T. Congdon, Reminiscences of a Journalist (Boston, MA: James R. Osgood, 1880), 190; The Age (Philadelphia), October 11, 1872.
Moody, Edwin Forrest, 44. For a discussion of prize fighting and its relation to nineteenth-century masculine identity, see Elliot J. Gorn, The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986).
James Murdoch, The Stage, or, Recollections of Actors and Acting From an Experience of Fifty Years; a Series of Dramatic Sketches (Philadelphia, PA: J. M. Stoddart, 1880), 294–95.
Joe Cowell, Thirty Years Passed among the Players in England and America, vol. 2 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1844), 74.
Lawrence Barrett, “Edwin Forrest” in Actors and Actresses of Great Britain and the United States, ed. Brander Matthews and Laurence Hutton, vol. 4 (New York: O. M. Dunham, 1886), 45.
New York Herald, September 11, 1860. Forrest’s connection to Jacksonian Democracy and its influence on his stage work is most effectively discussed in Bruce A. McConachie’s “The Theatre of Edwin Forrest and Jacksonian Hero Worship” in When They Weren’t Doing Shakespeare: Essays on Nineteenth-Century British and American Theatre, ed. Judith L. Fisher and Stephen Watt (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 3–18.
Jeffrey Mason suggests that, as theatricalized history, “Stone’s white audience could admire Metamora and sympathize with him, but as audience, they were not required to act on his behalf” (“Metamora and the Indian Question,” in Melodrama and the Myth of America [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993], 46). Also see Scott C. Martin, “Interpreting Metamora: Nationalism, Theater, and Jacksonian Indian Policy,” in Journal of the Early Republic 19 (Spring 1999): 73–101.
John Augustus Stone, Metamora; or, The Last of the Wampanoags, in Dramas From the American Theatre, 1762–1909, ed. Richard Moody (Cleveland, OH: World Publishing, 1966), 207, 224.
Robert Montgomery Bird, The Gladiator, in Early American Drama, ed. Jeffrey H. Richards (New York: Penguin, 1997), 240.
Robert T. Conrad, Aylmere, or the Bondman of Kent; and Other Poems (Philadelphia, PA: E. H. Butler, 1852), 132.
Bruce McConachie points out some of the parallels to Christ in these works. He also suggests a contrast in the English romantic tragedies of this era, all of which lack the providential hand that require the martyrdom of their hero (Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820–1870 [Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992], 103–04). McConachie and Richard Fletcher both suggest that the memory and fear of Napoleonic ambition and tyranny inspire and demand the endings of these romantic tragedies (McConachie, “The Theatre of Edwin Forrest,” 11; Richard M. Fletcher, English Romantic Drama, 1795–1843: A Critical History [Hicksville, NY: Exposition Press, 1966] 106, 152).
William Winter, quoted in Clement E. Foust, The Life and Dramatic Works of Robert Montgomery Bird (New York: Knickerbocker, 1919), 67.
Arthur Herman Wilson, A History of the Philadelphia Theatre, 1835–1855 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968).
Jack Cade has understandably been linked to Metamora and The Gladiator, and the three plays have been explored as a group in the following: Gary A. Richardson, “Plays and Playwrights: 1800–1865,” in The Cambridge History of American Theatre, ed. Don B. Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 1: 267–70;
McConachie, Melodramatic Formations, 97–110; Moody, Edwin Forrest, 90–91; Montrose J. Moses, ed., Representative Plays by American Dramatists From 1765 to the Present Day (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1925), 2: 427–30.
T. Allston Brown, A History of the New York Stage From the First Performance in 1732 to 1901, vol. 1 (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1903), 105–06.
Jack Cade opened on December 9, 1835 for a three-show run, averaging a respectable $290 per night, and was revived the following year for another three consecutive performances (Francis Courtnay Wemyss, Twenty-Six Years of the Life of an Actor and Manager [New York: Burgess, Stringer, and Co., 1847], 244–50).
Augustus A. Addams (?–1851) openly but artfully imitated Forrest, and actor Walter Leman ranked his potential higher: “In stature he excelled Forrest, and was not unlike him in manner and method. He died young, otherwise I think Mr. Forrest would have found in him a dangerous rival” (Walter M. Leman, Memories of an Old Actor [San Francisco, CA: A. Roman, 1886], 37).
Richard Hofstadter, Anti-intellectualism in American Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), 400.
Edgar Allan Poe, Graham’s Magazine, December 1841; Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer, The Literary History of Philadelphia (Philadelphia, PA: George W. Jacobs, 1906), 264.
For the history of women’s struggles for recognition and equality through the nineteenth century, see the following: Jean V. Matthew, The Rise of the New Woman: The Women’s Movement in American, 1875–1930 (Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee, 2004);
Jean V. Matthew, Women’s Struggle for Equality (Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee, 1998).
For Ibsen’s role in evolving notions of womanhood, see Joan Templeton, Ibsen’s Women (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication on the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
Marion Reid, A Plea for Woman (Chester Springs, PA: Dufour Editions, 1989).
Patricia Cline Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), 210. In the early part of the century, Patricia Cline Cohen argues, “Women were now construed to be the victims of seduction, not complicit participants.” Cohen goes on to discuss the increase in court actions in defense of “jilted brides and desolate or pregnant lovers,” from 1815 to 1830 (210).
In addition to Cohen’s discussion of class-based seduction, see the following for evolving societal and legal attitudes toward seduction and fallen women: Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease, Ladies, Women, and Wenches: Choices and Constraint in Antebellum Charleston and Boston (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990);
Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1982).
William Hill Brown, The Power of Sympathy, ed. William S. Kable (Columbus: Ohio State Univeristy Press, 1969). In her analysis of The Power of Sympathy, Cathy N. Davidson argues “that seduction … is a metaphor not just of women’s status in the Republic but of … a range of problems that arise when moral value and social responsibility are outweighed by the particular desires, no matter how basely self-serving, of privileged individuals or classes” (Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986], 108).
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 1 (New York: Barnes, 1858), 248.
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© 2012 Karl M. Kippola
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Kippola, K.M. (2012). “A Glorious Image of Unperverted Manhood”: Edwin Forrest as Masculine Ideal. In: Acts of Manhood. Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137068774_3
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