Word: booth
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Everything But Guts? He married again, another Mary. Before long, her mind began to go to pieces. Booth became used to running to & fro between stage and dressing room, Hamlet or Lear at one moment, nurse to a hysterical woman the next. Then the second Mary died, and Booth was alone except for his daughter Edwina...
...noticed after his first wife died that his grief gave him "new insight" into Shakespeare. Every play revealed meanings he had not suspected-and Booth, no matter how deep his private misery, was never deaf to dramatic demands. Even in his drunken days, it was said, he managed to suit his intoxication to his part: he was "melancholy-drunk for Hamlet, sentimentally drunk for Othello, and savagely drunk for Richard III." Personal tragedy began to shape all his parts-and in such a way as to suggest that he was rooting out forever the elements that had brought misery...
Gone was the fanatical exuberance, the frothing and the mouthing. In their place was a profound intensity, expressed with rigorous restraint and the most economical of gestures. Oldtimers were appalled: it seemed to them that Edwin Booth had forgotten what "drama" was. Stage managers and critics begged him not to "refine his art too much," urged him to revert to the "awful burst of passion" of his younger days. "Edwin had everything but guts," complained Walt Whitman bitterly...
...Rarely Know . . ." Few of his contemporaries could appreciate the calculated "quietness" which was to be Booth's greatest contribution to the American stage. Moreover, illness and exhaustion sometimes caused Booth to collapse on the stage. The public was showered with "inside" stories of Booth's drunkenness (in fact, after his first wife's death he rarely drank). But by now he had made himself almost oblivious of the outside world ("I rarely know who's President," he said). One who saw him trudging through the snow "like Hamlet in a greatcoat" said: "I have never...
...moment before his death (in 1893), the electric lights in the house and street went out. When his daughter cried out, "Don't let father die in the dark!", all the lights flashed on again. And in that instant, Booth died. As his coffin was being carried from the church in New York, a "splintering roar" was heard in Washington. By a macabre coincidence, the interior supports of Ford's Theater had collapsed, killing 21 people. He left a new tradition, but the old one pursued...