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three The Glass Case Interior Life in Washington, D.C. did the performance of the play relate to other happenings in Washington that day? The readiest answer is no. Attending a play by the 1860s was an increasingly private experience, a ceremonial occasion when spectators were cut oª from one another, left to lose themselves in their dreams and meditations about what they saw, and largely cut oª from the world outside as well. Lincoln was not the only one to draw inward. Audiences observed “new codes of politeness,” according to Bruce McConnachie. “The manners of the genteel parlor, first regularly enforced in museum theatres in the 1840s, had overtaken theatregoing by 1870.”1 Probably the crowd at Grover’s on October 17 observed such manners, though play watching that night was also a notably public experience. “Enthusiastic ” throughout, according to the Daily National Republican, the frequently applauding crowd was a phalanx of national solidarity. But each moment of the performance would also have allowed—would even have been made for—the private consideration of viewers.2 Cushman’s friend Annie Fields, after watching the actress play Lady Macbeth in Boston on September 25, noted that the “deep-drawn breath of sleep is thrilling” in the actress’s final scene. That deep-drawn breath would presumably again draw in the audience three weeks later in Washington, aªording another chance for spectators to thrill privately to the action. Only a few years before, this genteel privacy had not been so attainable. 9 4 Shakespeare in antebellum America was part of “a rich shared public culture ,” according to the cultural historian Lawrence Levine. The eighty-six men arrested at the Astor Place Riots of May 1849, fighting it out after rival performances of Macbeth in New York City, were “coopers, printers, butchers, carpenters, servants, sailmakers, machinists, clerks, masons, bakers , plumbers, laborers.” In the years following Astor Place, however, “Theater no longer functioned as an expressive form that embodied all classes within a shared public space.” Instead it was part of a gradual “stylistic bifurcation ” into “serious” and “popular” cultures, a split that was well under way by 1863, and “serious” meant increasingly the quietude of becoming absorbed—lost—in the play.3 Ambitious theaters such as Grover’s solidified these pretensions by actively seeking to exclude the unruliness of the outside world. In a newspaper notice on October 17 Leonard Grover encouraged those who had already purchased tickets to arrive early, lest the sight of placards reading Taken on empty seats provoke “much growling and morose feeling” when the play began. (As it was, the play that night started twenty minutes late.)4 Once secured, these “capacious arm chairs” encouraged politeness and privacy, “so that no individual is encroached upon and every one has room enough and to spare,” contributing to the theater’s overall “elegance and comfort.”5 Ford’s Theater, a few blocks away, aimed for the same experience. Fanny Seward noted that on her tour of Ford’s with Cushman on October 10—“a very pretty theater, tasteful & convenient”—she saw on the gallery level “placards with very large letters with various hints etc, calculated to promote order.”6 As the signs indicate, keeping everyone quiet and polite in these venues was an elusive goal. The grand opening of Grover’s Theatre on October 6, a performance of Othello, was marred by “the heathenish conduct of boys in the gallery, who must be taught to keep still.”7 At another performance of Othello that fall at Niblo’s Garden in New York, a “profound silence” came over the theater as Othello smothered Desdemona until, according to a Harper’s Monthly writer who was there, “a voice proceeding from our immediate neighborhood made itself audible, as it seemed to me, to the utmost extremity of the house, perfectly calm, and clear, and resonant: ‘What! Is he a-slaughtering on her?’”8 By contrast, a bourgeois theatergoer’s exasperation at a performance was probably best expressed privately afterward. Benjamin Brown French noted in his diary on October 18 that the previous evening’s performance “was well done, but, as Macbeth himself would say, ‘It were well it were done quickly.’ I never saw a character so ‘long drawn out’ as [Lester] Wallack’s i n t e r i o r l i f e i n w a s h i n g t o n 9 5 [3.129.45.92] Project MUSE (2024-04-16 18...

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