Macbeth Did It
Is Macbeth really Shakespeare’s most cursed play? (Even more cursed than All’s Well That Ends Well?) Perhaps.
Terrible occurrences have dogged performances of Macbeth ever since its premiere, when,according to theatrical legend, either an actor was killed onstage during a sword fight, or else a young boy playing Lady Macbeth died in an accident behind the scenes. (The cause of the curse, some say, is that Shakespeare supposedly included real witches’ spells in the play’s script.) But perhaps the darkest incident in the play’s long and murky history occurred on May 10, 1849, when a bitter rivalry between two competing Shakespearean actors sparked a devastating riot in downtown Manhattan.
The two actors in question were England’s William Macready and America’s Edwin Forrest. Both men were at the height of their game at the time and having twice toured the other’s country, had established names for themselves on both sides of the Atlantic. But while Macready represented the styles and traditions of Great Britain and classical British theater, Forrest—13 years his junior—represented a fresh and exciting new wave of homegrown performers, born and bred in a recently independent America.
Each actor had ultimately amassed an ardent and bitterly opposed following: Macready appealed to wealthy, upper-class Anglophile audiences while Forrest was idolized by the pro-American working classes as a symbol of anti-authority and—barely two generations after the Revolutionary War—anti-British sentiment.
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The personal rivalry between Macready and Forrest had originally been friendly and good-natured, and as a popular cause célèbre in the 19th century, the press had succeeded in boosting both men’s profiles and their audiences. It had been sparked several years earlier when, on Macready’s second tour of America, he had unwelcome competition.
According to the 1849 account of the riot, rival theater owners of the ones that Macready was set to play decided to book Forrest, who has billed as the “American Tragedian” with the result that Macready’s tour was unsuccessful. Whether deliberate or not, when news broke of Forrest’s ploy back in Britain, it did not go down well with British theatregoers, and during Forrest’s second tour of England the roles were reversed: This time, Forrest’s performances failed to attract large audiences and were widely savaged by the critics.
Forrest openly blamed Macready for manipulating both the press and the people against him and accused Macready’s followers of arranging a widespread boycott of his tour among British high society. Seeking revenge, Forrest attended a performance of Hamlet in Edinburgh with Macready in the title role, and loudly jeered and hissed throughout. (Forrest would later claim that he hissed in protest of a “fancy dance” that Macready acted, and said “as to the pitiful charge of professional jealousy preferred against me, I dismiss it with the contempt it merits.”) The feud was officially on.
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