"A Very Dangerous Young Man"

Before Charlotte had taken her final bows in Edinburgh, an undertone of further gossip had reached her. "Some of the hospitable people of Edinburgh took it into their heads that poor Sue was not married."¹ By the time Charlotte had arrived in London, her memory of Scotland had become "anything but agreeable." Letters from the busy George Combe were waiting.

She could not lightly toss off the ugly words. Why should the Scots care about Susan's marital state, and why should she herself let the matter rankle so deeply? In facing the question, Charlotte faced a new fact about herself. As her social circle widened, these recent months in England and Scotland had added a further range to her personal values. If acting had earlier seemed quite sufficient to center a life upon, it no longer seemed so adequate.

Cheers and bouquets at her feet could not cancel a city's gossip. "What justice of friendships," Combe wrote, "would it be to hear reports circulated against you that, if unrefuted, could necessarily exclude you both from all virtuous society?"² She might have ignored Edinburgh's suspicions if success in the world she now occupied had not become something more than high billing on a placard. "We have been obliged to send for marriage certificates, bills and papers, to prove our respectability," galling as the whole affair was to her pride and "mortifying" to Susan. "Thank God, we can meet the slander boldly."³

The whole affair smelled of jealous intrigue, with one prominent face glowering in the shadows. Combe's letters soon divulged the fact that Edwin Forrest, now appearing in Edinburgh, had chosen this means of embarrassing her, to pay her back for "embarrassing" him at the Princess's. To the friends she and Susan had made in Edinburgh, Forrest was broadcasting a torrent of slurs about Susan's "immorality," the details of which "I forebear," wrote Combe, "to place in writing." And Helen Faucit's name, intentionally or not, figured in the ugly campaign. Theodore Martin, the man who hoped to make Helen his wife, was openly spreading reports about Susan which he said he had picked up in London, feeling it his duty "to warn" her Edinburgh friends "for their own protection."

"If you have a male relative," advised Combe, "it is his duty to call on Mr. Forrest for his proof." If not, Susan must either prosecute Forrest for defamation of character or present written proof from the persons he had named "that what he says in their names is false."⁴ Unless such efforts were made, Susan could never move in Edinburgh society.

Charlotte took some comfort in the fact that Fanny Kemble came forward, however reluctantly, to defend her in letters to Combe, though Fanny's recent arrival in England gave her reason to fear a new threat. Separated at last from Pierce Butler, Fanny had come home, determined to regain stardom in roles that Charlotte fully meant to claim for herself. "Stout, middle-aged, not particularly good-looking," as Fanny described herself now, she had lost the youthful charm that had been her greatest asset. In its place, her age and weight might fit her perfectly for Lady Macbeth and Queen Katharine.

For Charlotte, the days immediately ahead would show if any of her fears were important. Certainly the Romeo debut in London was vital, and both sisters bent their efforts single-mindedly toward it. Long hours of practice at the Bayswater cottage and tryouts in Southhampton busied them until the London opening on December 30.

In presenting a female Romeo, Benjamin Webster had no fear of the "moral offense" that Combe had predicted; moral offenses, if not too openly flagrant, could as surely fill theatres as empty them. Well before opening night he had taken his stand on the impression Charlotte meant to create. During rehearsals, when the Haymarket company had risen up in resentment of these "American Indians," the Misses Cushman, who insisted on doing the original Shakespeare instead of the familiar watered-down Garrick version, Charlotte explained herself to Webster. "Understand me, pray, that I am thoroughly prepared to do whatever you wish," but not necessarily to appear in this Garrick "flummery" to please a lazy company.⁵

Webster posted his reply on the greenroom wall: any lady or gentleman who made any difficulty or raised objections to the wishes of the Cushmans was welcome to leave the cast.⁶ The matter was clear. Now that Drury Lane and Covent Garden were no longer the only licensed houses in London, Webster would overlook no opportunity to make the Haymarket London's outstanding house, its most exciting stage, having the most fashionable clientele.

When the curtain rose on Verona, the actress portraying Romeo gave no hint that she was anything other than Shakespeare's lovesick swain. Answering Benvolio's questions, Romeo's masculine vigor established the vital illusion.

"What sadness lengthen Romeo's hours?"

"Not having that which, having, makes them short."

"In love?"

"Out--"

"Of love?"

"Out of her favor where I am in love." Against Susan's delicate femininity, Charlotte was completely the athletic force pursuing her. Few Romeos in London's memory had looked young enough and passionately agile enough to be convincing, but watching this fiery young gallant, one witness was soon exclaiming that this Miss Cushman seemed "just man enough to be a boy."⁷

The love scenes rang with a passion London had not seen for years; the impulse in Romeo met a balance in Juliet's "maiden modesty."⁸ Throughout the play, Charlotte carefully matched her actions to the words. Romeo's parrying sword thrusts with Tybalt only furthered the illusion that in this young actress London had discovered a new Romeo of consummate grace and skill. When Romeo's single lunge ended the fight, one woman was heard to whisper, "Miss Cushman is a very dangerous young man."⁹

Watching the acting, Westland Marston saw in Charlotte a virile power greater than that of any male actor he had ever seen in the part. "The house was roused to the wildest excitement, as if by some tragic event in actual life."¹⁰ Another found the performance so real, Romeo so "ardently masculine" and Juliet so "tenderly feminine," that he felt the least Miss Cushman could do, once the engagement was over, was marry her sister.¹¹ In another report, the play's final scenes could only be seen "through tears," a "testimony" far more telling than all the ringing applause.¹²

At home, Charlotte and Susan could only wait tensely now for word from the critics. When the papers arrived, they were not disappointed. Charlotte Cushman's Romeo is "far superior to any Romeo we have ever had . . . a living, breathing, animated, ardent human being,"¹³ cried the Times. To Lloyd's Messenger, "Passion spoke in every feature, and the illusion was forcible and perfect . . . She is the best actress that has appeared upon the English stage since the days of Miss O'Niel."¹⁴ Sheridan Knowles considered the acting "a triumph of pure genius." Let London recall Edmund Kean's third act of Othello, said Knowles. "Did you ever expect to see anything like it again?" In Miss Cushman's acting there was no trick. "No thought, no interest, no feeling seems to actuate her, except what might be looked for in Romeo himself were Romeo reality. . . . My heart and mind are so full of this extraordinary, most extraordinary performance, that I know not where to stop or how to go on."¹⁵

Though the reviews for Susan were hardly so flattering, her efforts were "promising." "Many actresses now on our boards could play Juliet in a manner immeasurably superior," said the Illustrated London News, but John Bull welcomed her "considerable merit."¹⁶ Knowles fully agreed; she played Juliet "admirably"; her place on the London stage was assured. The Illustrated devoted a full page to a drawing of the balcony scene.

To crown their success, within a few days a note arrived from Samuel Rogers. "My dear Miss Cushman, Can you and your dear sister come to breakfast with me tomorrow morning at 1/4 before 10?"¹⁷ And from Geraldine in Manchester came a shower of praise, echoing her torrent of comment to Jane Carlyle. Jane sniffed her reaction. "Her letters have been filled with lyrics about this woman--till I could stand it no longer--and have written her such a screed of my mind as she never got before--and which will probably terminate our correspondence--at least till the finale of her friendship with Miss Cushman."¹⁸

The Romeo triumph helped explain Charlotte's failure to note Susan's reaction. The phrase that now recurred again and again in the press, "Miss Cushman and her beautiful sister," sounded like praise, but its reference to Susan's beauty implied that Susan possessed little else. "Miss Cushman" meant Charlotte with all her stunning powers; "her sister" was the pretty one.

Due to the play's popularity Webster decided to extend it indefinitely. On January 17, "The rush to see Miss Cushman as Romeo continues; and on the nights when this gifted actress performs, every available corner is occupied." A week later, "Miss Cushman fills the house, literally to the ceiling, three times a week as 'Romeo.'"¹⁹ When word reached New York, the Spirit of the Times proudly quoted Sheridan Knowles; for Charlotte in London "the genuine heart storm was on."²⁰

Not that the play lacked detractors. Late in the month Robert Browning wrote to Elizabeth: "I went last night, out of pure shame at a broken promise, to hear Miss Cushman and her sister in 'Romeo and Juliet,' The whole play goes . . . horribly; Romeo goes whining about Verona by broad daylight. . . . Whatever is slightly touched in, indicated, to give relief to something actually insisted upon and drawn boldly . . . here, you have it gone over with an unremitting burnt-stick, till it stares black forever."²¹ Browning did not declare himself quite so boldly in conversation with Charlotte herself at Henry Chorley's.

When a letter arrived from George Combe the first week of February, wanting to know how the enterprise had turned out ("Was my view . . . subverted or condemned by the ultimate result?"²²), Charlotte could grandly reply that his judgments about London were, for the most part, dead wrong. So wrong in fact that she tackled another male role almost immediately. Her success as Ion in Talfourd's play was even greater, in John Bull's opinion, than Romeo. For her Viola to Susan's Olivia in Twelfth Night, she wore a knee-length skirt, a velvet jacket, and a sash and dagger at her waist.

In the flush of her continued success, she put a question to Westland Marston. "I want you to write me a drama, and I can tell you at once the sort of character I should like--in fine, I long to play a woman of strong ambition, who is at the same time very wily and diplomatic, and who has an opportunity of a great outburst when her plans are successful--in short, a female Richelieu."

"Captain Charlotte," Marston answered (using a nickname "her straightforwardness had caused some of us to give her"), "are not your qualities rather those of passion than of diplomacy? You can fight, perhaps, better than you can manoeuvre."

"A great soldier," Charlotte replied, "must be a diplomatist too. I feel I could act the dissembler splendidly."

Marston assured her that "for one of the sincerest women alive to show herself a successful hypocrite" would be a triumph of art.

"You know what I want," she said. "Think of it."²³

Marston would think of it, but he was sure that his other commitments would forever prevent his writing the play Charlotte wanted.

Throughout the spring, Romeo attracted full houses. In the February Almanack of the Month, Gilbert Abbott á Beckett described the scene at the Haymarket doors.

"But what's the attraction? Why thus do they rush, man?
Don't you know? 'tis Romeo, played by Miss Cushman"

And he carried his fun a step farther, though he echoed Browning's discontent with the other actors.

"Now, as for the acting--though 'tis not complete--
It is, on the whole a most exquisite treat.
Miss Cushman and sister--the Friar, the Nurse,
Have never been better, and often been worse;
But here, approbation, I fear, must be ended;
The less that is said will the soonest be mended."

Charlotte's resemblance to Macready did not escape á Beckett's notice either.

"What figure is that which appears on the scene?
'tis Madam Macready--Miss Cushman, I mean.
What wondrous resemblance! the walk on the toes,
The eloquent, short, intellectual nose--
The bend of the knee, the slight sneer on the lip,
The frown on the forehead, the hand on the hip;
In the chin, in the voice, 'tis the same to a tittle,
Miss Cushman is Mister Macready in little.
The lady before us might very well pass
For the gentleman, viewed the wrong way of the glass.
No fault with the striking resemblance we find,
'tis not in the person alone, but the mind."²⁴

Mister Macready cared little, one could be sure, for the witty comparison.

With Queen Victoria's unbridled support, only P. T. Barnum's Tom Thumb outdrew Charlotte's Romeo during this spring of 1846. At the Bayswater cottage, life settled into a busy routine, now that Charlotte and Susan were both established at the Haymarket. With Susan's name defended against all Forrest's charges, with its firm appearance on the Haymarket bills, Mary Eliza might have adopted a happier outlook, but as she grew more comfortable, she found less and less joy in the life swirling about her. To Geraldine Charlotte's mother seemed a querulous, embittered old woman, resentful that Charlotte's greater fame seemed a threat to Susan. "The younger daughter Susan was the mother's favorite."²⁵

The fact explained much about Charlotte's own hunger for recognition, especially among the circle of women that continued to expand around her. And if Susan truly resented Charlotte's greater eminence, her charm gave her compensations, among them the attentions of young Gansevoort Melville, Secretary to the American Legation, who sought out the Cushmans and came to call. A gifted orator blessed with a majestic figure, flashing black eyes, and a forehead "as noble as Daniel Webster's,"²⁶ Melville remembered Charlotte's earliest acting in Albany, where he and his young brother Herman had eked out a living in the family's cap and fur store.

Gansevoort had watched Charlotte's climb to American fame; his meeting her now was a tribute to her English success. In recent months, he had busied himself with frequent London visits to Washington Irving, lately in from diplomatic service at the Spanish court, and with seeing Herman's Typee through the presses. In reply to his note of January 30, Charlotte invited him to Bayswater.

After spending most of the day correcting proofs of Herman's book, Gansevoort made his way out to the cottage. "I was welcomed by Miss Cushman and introduced to her mother, sister, brother, . . . The mother is a 'rale American,' a fine hearty old lady. The sister is pretty. . . . Miss Charlotte Cushman is a woman of plain tho' expressive and intelligent features, tall and rather full person, full of conversation and vivacity and decidedly agreeable, tho' dashed strongly with masculineness. It was 11 when I left."²⁷

Melville could hardly have missed Charlotte's "masculine" manner, garbed as she was in the strange costume she was affecting more and more. Fully determined to be herself, she made no effort to simplify the matter for the highly mannered society she chose to move in. The fact presented a paradox, a dilemma few Victorians easily understood. Why would any woman willingly make herself outlandish in a man's collar, cravat, and Wellington boots? Charlotte never explained, but the case had to do with her Boston honesty. If life on the stage was a constant pretense, life offstage would be otherwise.

The artist in her had grown since she had left Philadelphia, but the woman had grown even more. A dozen reasons could justify a person's seeking acclaim on a theatre stage, but ever since Edinburgh, she had known more and more surely that life, if she were truly to live it, would have to be clothed and transacted in her own terms--not necessarily the terms that would guarantee perpetual applause. The conviction might exact a cost, but she was prepared to pay. She was secure enough now at the heart of an admiring circle that she had little fear of rejection. It was a simple question of being true, and now was the time.

Gansevoort saw the family again at a concert. "I met many Americans, Mrs. Cushman, Miss Charlotte and Miss Susan Cushman . . . There were there also [Charles] Dickens and his wife--both coarse and vulgar in appearance, Eliza Cook short dumpy and hair most boyishly dressed. . . . I took a seat by Susan Cushman and maintained it. She was by far the prettiest person present. . . . After the concert I accompanied the Cushmans home to Bayswater--I escorting Miss Susan."²⁸

By the nineteenth Gansevoort had eyes only for Susan at a dinner given by G. P. Putnam, the publisher, for guests including Eliza Cook and Charlotte. "Mr. P. has a large and beautifully arranged collection of autographs which we inspected. Illustrated editions of Moore's Melodies, Lockhart's Spanish ballads, and The Beauties of the opera occupied Miss Susan and I for some time."²⁹ Three days later, Melville made another "very agreeable" visit to Bayswater, "Miss Susan appearing . . . to great advantage. Her manners are certainly feminine, lady-like and high-bred. They go to Dublin on Saturday--to play an engagement there."

Though the little flirtation was a happy send-off for Susan, Melville's attentions only planted a wistful envy in Charlotte. Not all her powers on stage had ever brought anyone quite like the handsome Gansevoort Melville knocking at her door. She found what cheer she could in the fact that London's approval of her Romeo had stretched the run to an unprecedented thirty performances,³⁰ a success that could have gone longer had she not already booked herself for six weeks in Dublin and beyond. On the strength of these latest ovations, she could demand fees dwarfing anything she had ever received in America.

For all Dublin's certainty that its taste was better than London's, the force of a Haymarket victory was not lost on the Irish. Charlotte's success in Dublin's Theatre Royal was practically assured. Her coming to Dublin added a sparkle to life on both sides of the footlights, where audiences were famous, if not notorious, for tempests always about to break loose.

Dublin liked serious acting; it had its own ways of laughing at stage pomposity or at anything else that struck it odd. Once during a performance of Knowles' Virginius, just as the maiden's father tenderly placed her hand in the suitor's, saying almost through tears, "My drowning voice and choking utterance upbraids my tongue that tells thee she is thine," a distant voice in the gallery shouted, "I forbid the bans!"³¹ During a Hamlet, when Lucianus, nephew to the Player King, stole across the stage to pour poison into the sleeping King's ear, a gallery voice sang out, "Aha! ye poisoning blackgyard! I'm watchin' you!" And from across the house another had cried, "Whisht, Tim, wid ye! or ye'll wake up the ould gintleman aslape in the cheer!"³² Charlotte knew to beware.

Before such could happen to her, more serious word reached her from Scotland. In the staider air of Edinburgh, catcalls and hoots from the audience were rare. All the more reason why the hisses that broke up Macready's Hamlet at the Theatre Royal the night of March 2 got headlines. "Acted Hamlet, really with particular care, energy, and discrimination," Macready assured his diary. "At the waving of the handkerchief before the play [within the play], and 'I must be idle,' a man on the right side of the stage, upper boxes, or gallery, hissed. I waved the more, and bowed derisively and contemptuously. He remained, however, very staunch to his purpose, but the audience stood by me and bore it down."³³

Edwin Forrest was known to be in town, and Macready's suspicions could easily believe that his jealousy had prompted him to come to the theatre, secrete himself in an upper box, and watch for a chance to embarrass his English rival. A day or so later, an eyewitness who had seen the dark eyes and bulldog jaw of the famous American reported the fact to Macready. "I feel glad," Macready noted carefully, "that it is not an Englishman--but no Englishman would have done a thing so base . . . The low-minded ruffian! That man would commit murder, if he dared!"³⁴

In Dublin, when a guess about Forrest's implication reached Charlotte, she was certain. She told Calcraft, the manager, "It is Forrest,"³⁵ a report Calcraft lost no time in sending to Macready. For better or worse, the Spirit of the Times gave New York a full report of the matter on May 9.

Had Forrest been in Dublin, Charlotte could have imagined a similar hiss at herself. But she received no such complaints. Her Romeo to Susan's Juliet brought the same intense cheers it had set off in London. In the banishment scene, when she fell prone to the floor, taking "the measure of an unmade grave," she waited moment after moment for the great outburst of applause to end. When quiet reigned, a fine Irish brogue cried out, "Bra-vo, Char-let!"³⁶ And Charlotte added her laughter to the crowd's. The cheering continued, with one faction trying to outshout the other's favorite. A voice sang out, "Three cheers for the divil!" At that, when both parties had cried their lungs hoarse, Charlotte and company went on with the play.

No disturbance ever troubled the nights when she and Susan played Romeo and Juliet, or when she appeared alone as Meg, "the grand triumph of the night," cried the Dublin Evening Packet. Men held their breath while listening "to the wild language of the sybil, uttered with a passion, a power, an impestuous force that carried all before them." In her fluttering rags, with the wisps of her hair escaping, "all idea of mere scenic illusion"³⁷ was forgotten.

Before she finished her Dublin run, Charlotte wrote again to George Combe. Surely by now she and her sister could rest from the knotty questions raised against them in Edinburgh. Surely, after Forrest's treatment of Macready, all Edinburgh knew how to interpret "anything he might choose to assert."³⁸ His hissing Macready was proof enough that the man lacked every regard for decency.

Leaving Dublin, she took heart in the Freeman's Journal's praise of her talents. "Should that gifted lady again visit our shores, and again gratify us with her truthful impersonations, we . . . will hail and welcome the advent of genius, tenfold." Her many and wonderful struggles, "as an unaided, unsupported female, to reach her present proud position," would not soon be forgotten among Dubliners. Whenever she came among them again, she could be certain of an Irish welcome, a cordial offered to genius "in the person of a stranger and a woman."³⁹ The Irish farewell was praise indeed, and it gave her courage as she and Susan departed again for Scotland.