Ars Brevis, Vita Brevis

"'I may almost say that I was born in a theatre,'" wrote actor Joseph Jefferson of himself (p. 1). Benjamin McArthur takes Jefferson's starting point as his own, patiently detailing the actor's rise from itinerant player to the millionaire celebrity whose likeness appeared on cards packed into Duke cigarette cartons. Along the way, McArthur introduces the reader to an extraordinary number of nineteenth-century actors, plays, and playhouses and to Jefferson's own Autobiography, as well as to such unexpected if modest delights as the hippodrama—a genre "acted" by horses. The Man Who Was Rip Van Winkle is an engrossing work of labor history and cultural history as well as a biography. Despite what turns out to be the elusiveness of the art and the artist at its center, it is a remarkably generous and useful act of scholarship.

Born in 1829, Joseph Jefferson was reared in one of the many acting clans who trod the boards in England and America. Theaters, in McArthur's description, were household economies on stage; husbands, wives, children, and grandchildren labored together (p. 2). Joe's great-grandfather was an English itinerant actor, and Joe's grandfather, who immigrated to America in 1795, was a handsome and—for a time, in this unpredictable profession—a successful comedian. Joe's father was, McArthur notes with characteristic gentleness, "noted more for affability than dramatic genius," and he seemed to find his true calling more in painting sets than in performance (p. 5). As for Jefferson's mother Cornelia, McArthur makes clear that she confronted the endless challenges of the family's itinerant, entrepreneurial life without her husband's armor of a cheerful disposition.

Joe grew up in and around stages and on the road; the childhood travels that McArthur's diligent research has unearthed included journeys to Missouri, Illinois, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama. The Jeffersons toiled during decades when "insecurity, hunger, illness, physical danger" and penury "were common hardships" for actors (p. 31). The constant presence of family, McArthur persuasively suggests, did not always ameliorate the difficulties: the combination of "chronic financial worries" and "prolonged intimacy," in which "days of group travel and rehearsal were followed by evenings together at the performance," could and did lead to simmering discontent (p. 47). Nonetheless, Joe, like many another child of the stage, never seems to have considered another profession.

Deciding early on that he was suited to the light comedies that had long been his family's mainstay, the teenaged Jefferson labored to support his mother and sister after his father's early death (p. 83). Despite the vagaries of the profession and the nineteenth-century economy, Jefferson, in McArthur's apt phrase, "moved steadily forward" throughout his young manhood (p. 135). At a time when audiences craved novelty more than theatrical perfection, Jefferson mastered a huge number of roles. He also traveled doggedly from theater to theater: Charleston, South Carolina; Wilmington, North Carolina; Columbus, Georgia; Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Boston all found him working as an actor and, in some cases, as a stage manager. In 1857, when Jefferson was twenty-eight, the mercurial and talented Laura Keene invited him to join her company in New York City. In McArthur's words, Joe's "scrambling days were over" (p. 134). Jefferson had made himself a desirable commodity and for the rest of his life would choose his roles and his venues—venues that ranged from Melbourne, Australia, to London, and across the United States. By the final years of Jefferson's life—he died in 1905—he traveled not from theater to theater but from vacation home to vacation home; a close friend to President Grover Cleveland, he gave genial lectures on theater to admiring students at Ivy League schools, and his final illness was the subject of sorrowful interest in many of the nation's newspapers.

A great deal of Jefferson's long life is recounted in this book, and the effect...