Well, if it’s 10 May, it must be the 174th anniversary of the time a rivalry between two actors resulted in a riot outside a New York opera house that left more than 20 people dead.
This was the Astor Place Riot of 1849, the “largest and deadliest of pre-Civil War riots”. To be strictly accurate, though, the actors’ rivalry, while a factor, was more of a catalyst for rumbling American discontent with The Dastardly British.
According to Richard Moody’s The Astor Place Riot (1958), the theatrical beef may have started as early as 1826, with English thesp William Charles Macready finding Philadelphia-born German-Scottish Edwin Forrest’s style and nationality offensive — and vice versa.
Nigel Cliff, in The Shakespeare Riots (2007), says Forrest had been amazing audiences since the age of 14 with his “precocious self-possession, his refined elocution, and his strong and melodious voice”.
By 21, his “magnificent physique” and “sweet, deep voice” were earning him “the unprecedented sum, for an American actor, of two hundred dollars a night”. Macready was 13 years older, and appealed to… a different sort of audience.
We might look at them today and imagine you couldn’t get a cigarette paper between their ~ahem~ restrained and naturalistic acting styles…
…but we’d be wrong. Posh audiences liked Macready, who did Shakespeare “properly, not frontier style”, while the rowdy ‘Bowery b’hoys’ wanted Forrest’s “proudly worn populism”, and they became the focus of the fraught relations between their two countries.
In the 1840s, Britain and America were squabbling over their joint management of Oregon Territory (land north of California and west of the Rockies) and over Texas, which Britain wanted to be independent.
The hope was that Texas would “abolish slavery and become a friendly trading partner”, undermining slavery in the US, and thus raising the prices of cotton and sugar to make Britain’s colonies economically viable again (after they abolished slavery in 1837).
Yes, it does rather sound as though we misjudged the liberalism of Texas, but the point is: this was a culture war. Also, America owed tens of millions of dollars to English banks, causing the Times to judge the place “a confederation of public bankrupts”
So, tensions were high between the nations, and between the two actors. They had each toured the other’s country twice, and during Macready’s second US tour, Forrest started following him, appearing in the same play at the same time at a different venue in the same town.
Forrest’s fans supported him noisily, and not necessarily at his own performances. In Cincinnati, during this, Macready’s third and final America jaunt, things got a little out of hand.
He opened in New York, giving his Macbeth, on 7 May. Forrest’s supporters crammed into the balcony, and contented themselves initially with merely shouting and throwing the odd rotten egg. When this failed to deter the Great British Thespian…
How the cast reached the third act is anyone’s guess, but they did — at which point the Forrest fans started tearing out seats and hurling them down onto the stage. Macready threw in the towel, went to his hotel, and made plans to get the next ship out.
He was dissuaded by a petition, signed by 47 of the more moneyed class of New Yorkers (including Washington Irving and Herman Melville), and looked forward to another performance on the 10th. In the meantime, however, the ‘American Committee’ put out a handbill.
Thankfully, this language wasn’t AT ALL inflammatory, so by curtain up, the hostile mob in the streets numbered a mere 10,000. So, it’s lucky there weren’t any loose rocks nearby…
As Macready said in his diary
Stones were hurled against the windows in Eighth Street, smashing many; the work of destruction became then more systematic; the volleys of stones flew without intermission, battering and smashing all before them. As I was going to my raised seat in the banquet scene, Mr. Povey came up to me, and, in an undertone, and much frightened, urged me to cut out some part of the play and bring it to a close. I turned round upon him very sharply, and said that I had consented to do this thing to place myself here, and, whatever the consequence, I must go through with it – it must be done; that I would not cut out. The audience had paid for so much, and the law compelled me to give it. They would have cause for riot, if all were not properly done. I was angry, and I spoke very sharply to the above effect.
(Macready was, according to Richard Moody, “never timid about reporting his bravery”.)
Whether Macready’s account was accurate or not, outside the theatre, the authorities panicked, and called in the troops.
So, naturally, the mob was quite calmed by this — being sensible, rational people — and started hurling stones at the troops instead.
After all that very mauve prose, incidentally, ACCOUNT OF THE TERRIFIC AND FATAL RIOT AT THE New-York Astor Place Opera House shamelessly adds:
There may have been over 30 dead rioters in the end, and over 260 injured rioters, police and militia. The building became known as the Massacre Opera House at DisAstor Place, so it closed and the posh began attending a new venue further from hoi polloi.
Ultimately, the moral of this story is that, while it clearly is a bad thing in the 21st century to get pissed up, go to the theatre, sing badly along to a musical, and start a fight when asked to stop, things could be worse.
