Junius Brutus Booth: Theatrical Prometheus

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. Asia Booth Clarke, The UnlockedBook: A Memoir ofJohn Wilkes Booth by His SisterAsiaBooth Clarke (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1938. Reprint. Benjamin Blom, 1971), 69-70. Asia later described the burning ofBooth's records without specifying time or place. She recalled obtaining some additional records from "an old relative," possibly Booth's brother-in-law, James MitchelL Adam Badeau, a friend ofEdwin Booth's, recalled staying at Tudor Hall in 1858, there seeing "old books and letters, and journals, and pamphlets," according to his article, "A Night with the Booths," New York Times) 7 Aug. 1858. 1. A Gentleman ofthe Name ofBooth L Drury Lane and Covent Garden still operate today. Both theatres originated from royal patents or licenses, awarded by Charles II shortly after the Restoration ofthe British monarchy in 1660. Until the revocation ofthe Licensing Act in 1843, Covent Garden and Drury Lane offered the only legitimate theatre (the origin of tllat term) in London, although other producing agencies attempted to overcome the monopoly. Booth became ensnarled in the controversies over this monopoly in 1820. 2. Gabriel Harrison, John Howard Payne, Dramatist) Poet & Author of Home) Sweet Home! His Life and Writings (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1885. Reprint. New York: Benjamin BIom, 1969), 72. Payne (1791-1852), an American actor and playwright, emerged as a literary and tlleatrical child prodigy at age fourteen and had himselfappeared at Drury Lane with great success. Among his scripts was Brutus; ot; The Fall ofTarquin) later played by Booth. 3. Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke, Recollections ofWriters (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1878), 15. William Godwin (1756-1836), an English novelist and political writel; later became tlle father-in-law of Percy Bysshe Shelley. 279 280 Notes to Pages 3-5 4. Unidentified clipping, Harvard Theatre Collection, Cambridge, Massachusetts . Sally Booth (1794-1867) made her London debut in 1810. 5. Booth's newspaper reviews for 12 and 13 February 1817 were examined in the Colindale Newspaper Archives, a branch of the British Library, London. Reviews customarily appeared the day after the performance. The same archives provided· provincial reviews when Booth later toured the United Kingdom. 6. Izola Forester, This One MadAct ... The Unknown Story ofJohn Wilkes Booth andHis Family (Boston: Hale, Cushman & Flint, 1937), 135-36. The Booth Spanish ancestry has stimulated considerable controversy, but attempts to corroborate or negate the legend by correspondence with the leading Spanish and Portuguese archives have proven fruitless. Searching the Archivo Biograftco de Espana at the University ofRochester, Rochester, New York, for the names Ricardo Bethe or Bothe failed to locate either..As for the Booth genealogy, Stanley Kimmel, The Mad Booths ofMarylandJ 2d ed. (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), traced them no furtller than John Booth, the Clerkenwell silversmith. Late in his life, Edwin Booth (Junius Brutus Booth's son) sought to connect his family to Barton Booth, tlle early eighteenth-century Drury Lane actor-manager, and to that end subsidized research in the London archives. He accumulated a list ofwills recorded in London of various people named Booth, some related, some not, many tmidentified, but failed to determine any relationship with Barton Booth. Thelist is now in the Players, New York. Ernst Friedrich Kraentzler recorded some ofthe Booth genealogy in his article, "John Wilkes Booth- Ancestry and Family," Genealogical Digest: Genealogy Club of America Magazine 8(Aug. 1977): 163-70, in which he assumed the accuracy ofIzola Forester's connection to the Booths but offered no further documentation. 7. Clerkenwell was then a London parish extending northwards from St. Andrew's, Holborn, and Smithfield to the Pentonville Road, boundedon the west by the Fleet River (tlle old River of Wells) and on the east Goswell Road, from the Charter House to the Angel at Islington. Clerkenwell had early become a favorite spot fur Londoners. The area gained its name for its mineral wells, said to have medicinal qualities, near which local parish clerks performed religious plays annually. By the sixteenth century the area gained a tainted notoriety as a resort of thieves and prostitutes, as described by Elizabethan and Restoration playwrights. Shakespeare's Falstaff, speaking of Justice Shallow, says, "This same starv'd justice hath done nothing but prate to me ofthe wildness ofhis youth, and the feats he hath done aboutTurnbull Street, and every third word a lie" (2 Henry IV; III, ii, 304-7). By the eighteenth century, however, streets were rebuilt in the Georgian manner, and the quality began to displace the criminal element. By the time the...