Edwin Booth

Edwin Thomas Booth was born near Bel Air, Maryland, on November 13, 1833, into a family in which Shakespeare was both literature and a living. His father, Junius Brutus Booth, was a celebrated actor with a formidable repertory, an unpredictable temperament and a drinking problem. Edwin’s early education included watching him perform—and learning to look after him.

As a boy, Edwin accompanied his father on tour, learning the plays while helping to keep their leading actor safe and ready to work. There was little time to be a child himself. In a letter to Edwina years later, he recalled trying to learn to skate at thirty-eight: “I make a poor ‘foot’ at it.”

His first professional appearance came in Boston in 1849, as Tressel in Colley Cibber’s version of Richard III, with his father in the title role. The boy who had watched from the wings now had a part of his own. He learned by taking whatever roles were available, including comedy.

California offered a more demanding education. He went west with his father in 1852 and stayed after Junius returned east and died that November. In the theatres of Gold Rush California, Edwin played a wide range of characters, accumulated experience and began to emerge from his father’s reputation. A tour to Australia followed. The work was uneven; the distance from home was enormous.

When he returned to the eastern United States in 1856, he was still in his early twenties, but already a seasoned travelling actor. Successful appearances in Boston and New York in 1857 helped establish that the name Booth now belonged to a second accomplished performer.

Booth met the actress Mary Devlin while working in Richmond. She had a career of her own: in 1858 she played Juliet at Niblo’s Garden opposite Charlotte Cushman’s Romeo. She and Booth married in 1860; their daughter, Edwina, was born the following year.

Mary died in February 1863, while Booth was performing in New York. He reached her too late. The loss stayed with him for the rest of his life. Edwina, still a very small child, became the recipient of letters that could move in a few lines from practical instruction to an almost overwhelming tenderness.

He saved things she made him. In one letter, he explained that a little handmade present was dearer to him than anything money could buy. Years later, a portrait of Mary would hang in his rooms at The Players.

On stage, Booth’s great part was Hamlet. His admirers described a prince who seemed to think as he spoke: the pauses, the close attention to a word, the sudden force that could break through stillness. His friend and biographer William Winter remembered the eyes and the changes of expression as much as the voice. An audience had to watch him closely.

No film preserves that Hamlet. Photographs show the slim, dark-haired prince in black; promptbooks record how Booth prepared the text. What happened between a gesture and the audience’s response survives in the recollections of people who were there.

At New York’s Winter Garden, Booth’s Hamlet reached its hundredth performance on March 22, 1865. The program for that night survives at the Folger. Theatres ordinarily changed their repertory frequently; here, one actor in one Shakespearean role kept bringing people back. Less than a month later, his brother would assassinate the president.

Edwin’s politics were very different from his younger brother’s. He supported the Union and Abraham Lincoln. In an October 1864 letter to Adam Badeau, an officer on Ulysses S. Grant’s staff, he wrote of his enthusiasm for Lincoln’s reelection. He also performed to raise money for Union causes.

When John Wilkes Booth assassinated the president in April 1865, Edwin withdrew from the stage. The family name was suddenly inseparable from the murder. He feared that his profession, and the public life he had made for himself, were over. He would never again accept an engagement in Washington, D.C.

He had no part in his brother’s crime. Nevertheless, he had to decide whether he could face an audience again—and whether an audience would allow him to. Friends urged him to return. His own explanation was also practical: he had debts to pay, a family to support and a love of his art.

On January 3, 1866, he reappeared as Hamlet at the Winter Garden. Laurence Hutton described nine cheers as he entered and flowers falling onto the stage. The audience had answered the question Booth could not settle for himself. He could go on acting.

Public absolution did not end his private reckoning. His property man, Garrie Davidson, later told the actor Otis Skinner of a night early in 1873 when Booth took him to the furnace room beneath Booth’s Theatre and opened a trunk of his brother’s costumes and effects. He handed the garments to Davidson to burn, sometimes taking the iron himself to turn the burning mass. The trunk went into the furnace too.

Across these unsettled years, Booth kept writing to Edwina about her lessons, manners and health. He could also be wonderfully silly. In 1873 he reported that Pip the dog and St. Valentine the bird wanted to write, but that he would have to hold the pen for them. The following year he supplied letters in their voices.

He explained the purpose of the nonsense quite seriously. Comic parts had helped him avoid stiffness as a tragedian; playfulness, he thought, would improve her letters and conversation too. Then he caught himself: “Well, I declare, I’ve dropped into a sermon, after all, haven’t I?”

Writing as St. Valentine in one of these family letters, he announced: “I have the nicest seed you ever seed!”

On April 4, 1891, Booth played Hamlet at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. He did not intend it as a farewell. “I hope that this is not the last time I shall have the honour of appearing before you,” he told the audience. He wanted to return with renewed health and strength. Illness prevented it.

His remaining years were spent largely at The Players. He died in his third-floor bedroom in the early hours of June 7, 1893, aged fifty-nine. Winter recorded that the electric lights in the clubhouse and the neighborhood briefly went out just before his death. The Players kept his bedroom and parlor as he had left them—preserving his slippers, his pipes and the volume of Charles Dickens’s letters lying beside his bed—through the century that followed. He was buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, beside Mary Devlin.