Starring Madame Modjeska: On Tour in Poland and America

5. On the American Road

5 ( On the Ameri­ can Road After her California debut, Mo­ dje­ ska’s hybrid identity as earnest settler and classy import rendered her an unusual sort of touring star. In fact, Mo­ dje­ ska began her Ameri­ can career as a recently arrived foreigner who could barely manage a simple conversation in English. She might easily have been dismissed as a single-­ season sensation or relegated to the ethnic margins of Ameri­can culture. Yet Mo­dje­ska resisted performing anywhere but on America ’s English-­ language stage, unlike her closest immigrant counterpart, the German-­ speaking Czech actress Fanny Janauschek. Janauschek first made her name in German-­ language theater in the United States and only shifted to English-­ language performance late in her career, on the strong advice of her new manager Augustin Daly.1 Mo­dje­ska would not duplicate Janauschek’s slow progress into the mainstream. The America she entered in the late 1870s disdained the increasing numbers of Polish immigrants as distinctly lower class, as one of the new ethnicities expressly needing Anglo-­ Saxon cultivation . Polish-­ language theater in America was a modest and very localized affair in the late nineteenth century, a ghettoized circuit. In talent, charisma, and star status elsewhere, Mo­ dje­ ska resembled such great continental touring rivals as her contemporary, Bernhardt, and her successor , Eleonora Duse. If she had not been Polish, she might have succeeded as a visiting star whose foreign tongue could be tolerated in bilingual productions . Like the opera, nineteenth-­ century Ameri­ can theater readily featured some foreign language and multilingual performances. Bernhardt and Duse played respectively in French and Italian on tour. The great actor Tommaso 150 Starring Madame Modjeska Salvini overwhelmed audiences with his tragic power in Italian, co-­ starring with Edwin Booth in bilingual productions.2 Two decades earlier Booth had tried a bilingual Othello with Mo­ dje­ ska’s compatriot, Bogumił Dawison, although the latter, it should be noted, played his part in German.3 Yet even if Polish had been an acceptably civilized performing language for a critical mass of America’s theatergoers, Mo­dje­ska had set herself the imposing goal of playing Shakespeare in English. To this end she worked tirelessly to improve her English-­ language enunciation and debated with critics over her right as a “non-­ Anglo-­ Saxon” to perform Shakespeare, a genius she insisted belonged to all humankind. In her memoirs, Mo­ dje­ ska argued most forcefully for her sacred right to the world’s “greatest poet” and “greatest analyst of human souls”: “The attitude of those who claim that only English people, or their descendants, have the right to touch the laurels of Shakespeare , reminds me, speaking with all reverence, of the narrowness of certain disciples of Christ (see Acts of the Apostles), who claimed that salvation was restricted to Jews, and did not benefit the converted Gentiles.”4 Thus, unlike the famous European stars who toured the world as monolingual , but international, celebrities, Mo­dje­ska assiduously developed herself as a bilingual, binational artist, adapting to and cultivating two national theaters. While she retained her status in Poland with intermittent tours, she aimed for the equivalence of native stardom first in America and then in England, asserting her right to try out new repertoire on these stages and, above all, to perform in Shakespeare’s plays. In England her ambitious plan did not succeed , but in America the critics, public, and theater historians embraced her as a natu­ ralized star.5 In his historical typology of Ameri­ can acting, Garff B. Wilson identifies the foreign-­ born Mo­ dje­ ska as a key practitioner of what he names the classical school of Ameri­ can acting style, the female counterpart to Booth himself.6 More particularly, Charles Shattuck categorizes Mo­ dje­ ska as a “classic” along with Booth, Lawrence Barrett, and Johnston Forbes-­ Robertson in her passionate devotion to Shakespeare’s “play and to no other objective.”7 The Polish Modrzejewska’s establishment as the esteemed Ameri­ can star Mo­dje­ska was a rare feat, given the great preference of late nineteenth-­century Ameri­can critics and audiences for British talent. With superior elocution and accents impressive to Ameri­ can ears, British actors were avidly patronized, whatever their capacity and stage of career.8 Established Ameri­can stars, such On the Ameri­ can Road 151 as Edwin Booth, planned English tours to prove their performing mettle in...