Shakespearean Celebrity in America: The Strange Performative Afterlife of George Frederick Cooke

{ 27 } \ Shakespearean Celebrity in America The Strange Performative Afterlife of george Frederick Cooke —RICK BOwERS In November 1810, NewYork theatre fans could hardly believe that George Frederick Cooke, the star of Covent Garden, was booked to appear as Richard III on the Park Theatre stage. For two seasons in the United States, until his sudden death in New York in September 1812, Cooke triumphed in Shakespearean roles. Having crossed the Atlantic, stormed the stages of Boston, New York, Baltimore , and Philadelphia—creating deep public animosity but also eliciting fervent admiration wherever he went—and married for the third (or perhaps fifth) time, this virtuoso Shakespearean expired with all the conflicted public mourning usually accorded to deceased royalty. Years later, it was rumored that Yorick ’s skull on the Park Theatre stage was in fact Cooke’s skull. And it was—on at least one occasion.1 More recently, in November 1980, Cooke’s skull appeared in a Mercer Community College production of Hamlet in West Windsor, New Jersey. Moreover, as Cooke biographer Don B. Wilmeth reports, the owner of Cooke’s skull in 2010, Jefferson University Medical School in Philadelphia, not only displays the relic proudly in its library, but will also “make the skull available on loan to responsible institutions, with a bond required of $25,000 for its safe return.”2 This macabre twist on Cooke’s career might not seem so strange in the light of his outrageous celebrity in relation to theatre and audiences. Indeed, his unprecedented assertions of self-willed celebrity—onstage, offstage, and within { 28 } RICK BOwERS his own self-mythologizing imagination—pitched themselves beyond the parameters of theatrical, social, even natural, life. Embodying conflict and contradiction within his art, Cooke lived and died in terms of radically contested histrionic self-performances—performances that, I argue, contributed to, even as they mirrored, post-Revolutionary American culture on the virtues, necessities , and dangers of asserted extremes. In this regard, I will adduce previously unconsidered biographical evidence from contemporary American periodicals and elsewhere that vividly attests to paradoxes of performance regarding the personal, national, and theatrical identity of this great actor. As the first publicly available virtuoso celebrity, Cooke could never leave the stage. A variety of media constantly reinforced his immortal significance as Shakespearean star, and his skull—on the Park Theatre stage or at Jefferson University—continues as after-image of his eternal and controversial “performance.” When Cooke arrived in America he was already England’s foremost Shakespearean actor in the tradition of Garrick, Macklin, and Kemble. But he exceeded those great actors through an energetic, emotionally committed style as well as a special reputation for menacing villainy onstage and drunken recklessness offstage. Born of obscure origins in Dublin or London, Cooke was raised by relatives in the northern town of Berwick-upon-Tweed. Throughout the 1780s and 1790s he developed as a professional actor on provincial stages before , in 1800, hitting the London stage at Covent Garden, where he would play Richard III, Shylock, Iago, and Macbeth. His reputation included triumph and disappointment, both as a result of his alcoholism and mercurial personality and because of his risky, often aggravating, but also original performance style. His career had declined by 1810, but his reputation for good and bad both preceded and pursued him upon arrival in America, where Cooke’s new brand of celebrity would encourage both good and bad in that paradoxical quality of abnormally interesting people, lately theorized by performance critic Joseph Roach as “It.”3 Theatre historian William Dunlap, who acted as Cooke’s personal handler, may have lacked the semiotic vocabulary, but he certainly understood that, in terms of revenue-generating star power, Cooke had “It.” Dunlap puts it succinctly in A History of the American Theatre from Its Origins to 1832: “The theatre was in a decline; when lo! George Frederick Cooke arrived, and all was well again,” unconsciously inflecting his praise with terms that would have much greater purchase within later celebrity culture. “It must be remembered that the stars took care to share the profit with the managers, except the greatest of all stars, George Frederick Cooke, and the profits of his performances were secured by...