"The Greatest Melodramatic Actress in the World"

When rumors of her collapse reached Philadelphia in June, the Pennsylvanian spread the word that Charlotte Cushman, "the greatest female performer in this, and probably any other country,"¹ was prostrated: she had barely been saved from the grave. The Spirit trumpeted the alarm that Charlotte was "sick in England and may retire forever."²

A month earlier Chorley had taken her to task about her health. He might not realize all the reasons for her sudden despair, but living as she had of late "on the railroad," he could still advise her not to move "hand or foot or eyelash"³ until the doctors gave her the word. At Malvern, she must gather her energies again, devise a simpler course for her life, and not even consider returning to London until fully able.

Speaking practically, London had little to offer just now. Even Fanny Kemble's fabled name was attracting only the meagerest houses. About Fanny's Juliet, Chorley could only say that it left him "cold, and surprised and sorrowful." What money people were willing to spend was going to opera--Mendelssohn's new Elijah was a sensation--and to Jenny Lind, the new Swedish soprano at Covent Garden. Even Rachel, in competition with the ingenuous singer, was finding the going difficult.

Chorley's advice made sense. Away from a London that had lost all its appeal, Charlotte could relax, in spite of the Theatrical Times' oddly expressed good wishes (for all her "ill-built" appearance and the fact that "in point of sex" Miss Cushman "is almost amphibious," the Times hoped that her health would soon mend, that "she may attain a century"⁴) and in spite of Chorley's assurance that she would soon be well enough to star in the play he had written for her.

As far back as February her excitement about Chorley's Duchess Eleanour had circulated all the way to Florence. "I warmly wish that Mr. Chorley may succeed with his play," Elizabeth Barrett Browning had written to Mary Mitford, "but how can Miss Cushman promise a hundred nights for an untried work?"⁵

But attractive or not, promising or not, she knew at last that London was after all her headquarters. By late summer, her energies partly revived, her spirits refreshed by the icy waters at Malvern, the time had come to put herself back in harness. She could shed no more tears for lost joy.

When an offer came from Maddox--at Macready's urging--to share his October bill with Macready, she could read it in a new light. Appearing at last in London with the tyrannical force that led her to it was a step she had delayed long enough. After three years, with her name established in all the right places, could Macready's rampaging ego trouble her? More importantly, could she sidestep the release it offered her from her grief?

In a speech concluding his 1847 season, Maddox thanked his patrons, then reminisced for a moment about his house: "I think we can certainly call this a legitimate theatre"; Fanny Kemble's recent work and Macready's Shakespeare had brought new prestige to the Princess's "and is not the talented Miss Cushman--whom I first had the honor of introducing to a British public--'legitimate,' too?" That lady, Maddox happily announced, would soon appear with the great Macready on "the opening of our next campaign."⁶

Charlotte made her way back to London, buried her regrets, established firm ties with a Unitarian Church, and took new quarters for herself--the family would remain in Bayswater--close to her work at 1 Baker Street, a more proper abode for the social role she now planned to play with a vengeance. It would, she hoped, fill an emptiness. When a struggling artist "sighed for success" within her hearing, her response--"Buy it, as I am doing!"⁷--shed light on the wider role she intended to play. Hardly concerned any longer about success on a London stage, her move to Portnam Square made clear her plans for social arrival.

She chose her location well. Portnam Square was an emerald expanse typical of urban London. Shaded by great trees, its broad walks evoked her girlhood under the elms of Boston Common. Brownstone houses of three and four stories surrounded the park, their brass-studded doors opening to London's more elegant names. Her neighbors, the Sanders, were already worth half a million.⁸

In her tall rooms, hospitality could counteract loneliness. Singing at her piano, plying her guests with the wines and meats she now could afford, she rekindled the excitement she had relished at old Samuel Rogers' breakfast board. People who answered her invitations, the American minister, the Monckton Milneses, the Putnams, Ruskin, the Carlyles--the many names she had met through Mary Howitt and Chorley--people who came to meet the actress left knowing the woman.

For Charlotte as actress, October 4 brought a chapter full circle. In honesty she could confess a debt to Macready: without him she might never have faced the wisdom of coming to England. But now Macready's patronage offered her nothing. Appearing with him at the Princess's was a box office trick, an answer to the public's curiosity to see them act in one piece. "The noted resemblance of Miss Cushman's manner, voice,--and shall we add countenance?--to that of Mr. Macready caused the combination to be anticipated as something amusing,"⁹ said the Spectator. Still, if life must continue, she must complement her social labors with work that could stretch her mind. Acting with Macready made valuable demands. Against the light of his art, she could display her own special brilliance.

On stage, Macready got more than he bargained for. "Acted Macbeth as well as I could," his diary noted. "Called for; led on Miss Cushman, who thanked me for the civility."¹⁰ It was the least she could do after almost demolishing him.

The Sunday Times gave the full story: the performance started pretty evenly, but it was soon obvious that Charlotte had determined not to lose a single point in her game. Throwing all her energies into the part, she quickly disconcerted Macready; "the 'old lion' soon felt his laurels withering on his brow." If the Sunday Times knew acting, Miss Cushman's earnestness, her "fiery eloquence" completely eclipsed "the measured emotions and frigid mannerisms"¹¹ of the great tragedian. After Duncan's murder, said another paper, she "literally dragged him off the stage."¹²

However much the experience had harried Macready ("an anonymous letter telling me the Sunday Times and Dispatch said I was decreasing in vigour--my kind, constant, and true friends!"¹³) Charlotte had made herself clear. If Macready failed to regret his shabby treatment of her in Boston, he could thank a poor memory. "There is a certain sudden earnestness about Miss Cushman, a hasty style of darting at a point, which is quite her own, and which is really the secret of her success,"¹⁴ said the Spectator. Writing to John Povey, she could report that her opening night of Macbeth was "grand"--in spite of the miserable illness she had had for the last seven months, "but I am better and hope by great care to get on."¹⁵ Even Macready's friend Forster praised her in Othello: "such a quiet picture of what we conceive the real Emilia to have been that it is quite delightful to witness it."¹⁶

Charlotte could play these old parts with her eyes shut, making them almost sleep-walking scenes throughout, but she tasted a new stimulant on October 13 when she first played Henry VIII's Queen Katharine to Macready's Cardinal Wolsey. In spite of her doubts about appearing in London in parts that invited comparisons, she took the risk as Queen Katharine and won. Living memories recalled Mrs. Siddons' special "feel" for the role and Samuel Johnson's enthusiasm for it: when Johnson asked her which of Shakespeare's characters most pleased her, Sarah had replied "Katharine," because it was the most "natural," the most lifelike, and Johnson agreed. "And whenever you perform it, I will once more hobble out to the theatre myself."¹⁷

Despite its stigma as Shakespeare's "weakest" play, the play whose cannons had fired the blaze that leveled the Globe in 1613, Charlotte saw in the Spanish Katharine's pitiable downfall a matchless chance to wield her power over an audience. An overflow house followed spellbound as her Katharine slowly realized that doom was upon her, that for reasons having nothing to do with justice or honor or fault in herself Henry had allowed Anne Bullen's prettier face ("O Beauty, till now I never knew thee!") to preempt her. Against the malice of Macready's Wolsey, Charlotte's Katharine became the play's one sympathetic character, the epitome of noble woman insulted and betrayed, creating even Anne's sympathy: "So good a lady that no tongue could ever pronounce dishonor of her . . . To give her the avaunt! It is a pity Would move a monster."

Afterward, observers disagreed about Charlotte's "style." Some saw in it Mrs. Siddons' classic grandeur; others, missing the grand manner "required" by the lines, rejected Charlotte's humanity in an "almost statuesque" role. She had given Katharine "physical attributes," made her a plain woman and a queen "to the world."¹⁸

But for eyes left weeping at Katharine's death, the question of "style" was meaningless. Chorley saw women "wiping their eyes on apricot-colored bonnet-strings."¹⁹ Charlotte had built toward that effect throughout the whole play. Reactions to various performances echoed the force Charlotte achieved in this first portrayal. At her entrance, dressed in flowing crimson, Katharine made clear her respect for Henry and her scorn for Cardinal Wolsey.

Kneeling at Henry's feet, her words trembled as she confronted his doubts at the legitimacy of their marriage. As Heaven was her witness, Katharine had been a true and humble wife, subject always to his "countenance," glad or sorry with it.

Sir, call to mind
That I have been your wife, in this obedience,
Upward of twenty years, and have been blest
With many children by you. If in the course
And process of this time you can report,
And prove it too, against mine honor aught,
My bond to wedlock, or my love and duty,
Against your sacred person, in God's name,
Turn me away, and let the foul'st contempt
Shut door upon me, and so give me up
To the sharp'st kind of justice. . . .

Until then, she begged him to spare her "till I may be by my friends in Spain advised, whose counsel I will implore."

When Wolsey assured her her interests were fully represented by "these reverend fathers" here assembled, Katharine turned in fury to him, struggling to hold back her tears. Then she looked away, pointed back toward him, and cried with a withering scorn, "Lord Cardinal, to you I speak!" expressing in her words and the accompanying gesture "lofty womanhood's superb contempt" for all "duplicity and meanness."²⁰

Leaving the court, when Henry had her recalled, "Katharine Queen of England, come into the court," and her attendant said, "Madam, you are called back," Katharine comported herself with "the air of a lioness." Head erect, her massive figure towering, her eyes "glowed" with anger as she waved him forward: "What need you note it? . . . Pray you, pass on."

But slowly breaking under her sorrows, she had donned the black velvet of grief by the time Wolsey and Cardinal Campeuis came to her apartment to give her "counsel."

"Ye tell me what ye wish for both--my ruin. . . .
 
Would I had never trod this English earth
Or felt the flatteries that grow upon it!
Ye have angels' faces, but Heaven knows your hearts.
What will become of me now, wretched lady!
I am the most unhappy woman living."

Near the play's end, hopelessly ill, Katharine's querulous "sick" tone became profoundly moving. Her halting "Reach a chair, So; now, methinks, I feel a little ease," broke with groans, then with a comfortable grunt of relief.²¹ When she learned of Wolsey's death, she elicited further sympathy. "So may he rest. His faults lie gently on him!"

Katharine's flashing indignation at a messenger's rudeness--"You are a saucy fellow. Deserve we no more reverence?"--her queenly anger clearing for a moment her voice and lifting her body, heightened the effect of her rapid decline. An "unearthly beauty and sweetness" in her acting touched one listener's heart "below the source of tears."²²

Dying, Charlotte caused Katharine's voice to thicken. Reaffirming her love for Henry, she commended "to his goodness the model of our chaste loves," his young daughter Mary. Then her cries became pathetic. Let Henry have pity upon "my wretched women, that so long Have followed both my fortunes faithfully," and upon her serving men; "they are the poorest (But poverty could never draw 'em from me)." Then she made a last request, delivered with the slow clutch of death on her throat. "When I am dead, good wench, Let me be used with honor. Strew me over, with maiden flowers, that all the world may know I was a chaste wife to my grave. . . . Although unqueened, yet like a queen, and daughter to a king, inter me. I can no more."

Acting the part, she had astonished even Macready; her final scene had set off a storm at the Princess's. But leaving the cheering theatre, she could feel only a deep dejection that echoed partly from Katharine's long dying, partly from a personal grief that still lay too near the surface. It had felt good to be busy again, but could the play do her real good or she any good to the part?²³ Could she continue to act a grief too nearly like her own?

Macready muttered his hostility next day. "Looked at paper in which I read a notice of last night's performance, that seemed to me most insulting and detracting--but what are my critics?"²⁴ But for Charlotte, the London Times was ecstatic: "The broken up attitude of that ghastly figure in the chair, the benignant smile that seems ever ready to vanish away in death, the flush of banished pride at the unmannerly entrance of the messenger . . . the look of approaching beatitude in sleep, when she is cheered by a celestial vision, are so many nuances all truthful to the last degree. . . . The whole scene is a refined specimen of histrionic poetry."²⁵ No ordinary intellect, declared the Times, could dive so deeply into the play's meaning and find such expression for it as did Charlotte Cushman as Queen Katharine.

A note from Chorley gave her further assurance: "It has given me a higher idea of your powers than any I have yet seen you act." The conception, "the queenliness" of the playing--all of it pleased him, but "most of all I was delighted to hear how your level voice, when not forced, tells, and tells thoroughly. . . . I am truly glad for your own sake you played the part."²⁶

Chorley's words carried an implication. Far from incapacitating her as an artist, her sorrow at Rosalie's passing had been translated into new insight, new power to convey the deeper truths. Though the Times praised an intellect that could delve into meanings, pure emotion enabled her to comprehend and express what she found. The wages of suffering were art.

Another good to come from this run with Macready would be an added weight to her purse--when and if she ever braved a return to America. After Forrest's attack on Macready in Edinburgh, she doubted that any English star would soon attempt an American tour--especially in the light of the testimonial dinner Edwin's American friends had recently tendered him. Writing to John Povey at the Park, she imagined that, without foreign stars, America might soon be thrown on her own resources--"which will be much better for you, I am sure." Despite her success in England, she could report scant vigor in the British theatre. Here, translations from the French and two- or three-act pieces were axes at the root of a dying tree. "Bye and bye when we have in the States a drama of our own and which we ought to have . . . there will be none in England."²⁷ A Whitman editorial could hardly have phrased it better. Povey must copy and publish "where they will do me good" the clippings she enclosed of her recent notices--against the day when she would return home, "gallop through the country as fast as I can, and make as much money" as possible.

This run at the Princess's brought a happy reunion with John Gibbs Gilbert, her childhood friend whose early success had fanned her own ambition. Matured into a tall, reserved gentleman, already one of America's favorite comedians, Gilbert was "getting on very finely here," she reported to Povey, "fast making himself an immense favorite." But the joy in renewing a friendship was tempered by an outbreak of anger backstage. However much he wished to keep a paying actress like Charlotte happy, Maddox offended the sensitive Susan. When rumor held Macready responsible for Maddox' taking Susan out of the Hamlet cast, Macready coolly declared his ignorance and unconcern: "it was of no consequence to me what either individuals or a multitude thought of me."²⁸ But Charlotte herself thought plenty, especially about the wily Maddox, and she found the necessary words: he and his whole theatre might "go to hell."²⁹

Macready fired off a word of advice. He hoped Charlotte had not yet made a decision on the subject of her letter to Maddox. "I should like to speak to you upon it, thinking, that the opinion or counsel of a cooler one might enable you at heart to form a more deliberate judgment."³⁰

Whatever Maddox' justification, Charlotte's blood told her to void immediately her contract with the Princess's: she could afford to fly in the face of any such man as Maddox. But she throttled her anger and felt happier when Susan garnered high praise on her own the middle of November. As Juliet, this younger Miss Cushman "sometimes rises to the verge of the sublime,"³¹ cried the Theatrical Times. Though she was no Helen Faucit, she was "a remarkably pretty woman . . . a very pleasing actress."³² For once, praise for Susan even outshone Charlotte. As Romeo, the elder Miss Cushman's "Americanisms" sometimes offended the ear,³³ though as the peculiar Meg Merrilies, even her faults were beauties; she "is the greatest melodramatic actress in the world." Bearing these facts in mind, Maddox might watch his manners.

True to her hopes, Charlotte's social whirl swept her up dizzily, and along with her, Geraldine Jewsbury. Geraldine's fame had opened almost every door in Victorian London simply because, as Jane Carlyle put it, "she had put her cleverness into a book, above all a book accused of immorality." When Rogers and Monckton Milnes both pursued Geraldine for breakfast, Jane sniffed, "Upon my honour I believe if a Lady had been tried for murder . . . she would have a better chance of 'getting' on in society here than one of whom nothing had been talked."³⁴

Invitations poured in. The wife of the new American minister to the Court of St. James, Mrs. George Bancroft, noted her delight in meeting both Charlotte and Susan at dinner. "They are of Old Colony descent (from Elder Cushman), and have very much of the New England character, culture, and good sense."³⁵ Over Chorley's artichoke hearts and champagne Charlotte and Susan--"hot from the Princess's"--impressed an American guest, Mrs. Brookfleld: the younger "has considerable prettiness. The elder one, the one, talked without reserve about acting."³⁶

Bathed in the light of such gatherings, fully aware of her own attraction, Charlotte broke out the sense of humor she seldom revealed on stage. She delighted in mimicking Maddox. At dinner, she could use her darkest tones on a waiter, looking him deep in the eyes and asking, "Is your name Sam?" recalling the same comic sense in Mrs. Siddons, who could say to a cloth salesman in her most tragic voice, "Will it wash?"³⁷

As Charlotte busied herself more and more in London society, things were changing at the Bayswater cottage. Susan was sending Ned off to school in Yorkshire and making plans for a wedding in June, "unless something unforeseen occurs to Dr. Muspratt."³⁸ When Charlotte finished her run at the Princess's, Susan struggled alone against Maddox. When she blamed "indisposition" for missing a rehearsal, Maddox again struck off her name and substituted another actress. The occasion was the London debut on January 5, 1848, of another American hopeful, Anna Cora Mowatt, in The Hunchback.

Though Susan missed several other rehearsals, she reported for the last one ready to play Helen, demanding to know why the character had been reassigned. While Anna watched, embarrassed, an angry scene ensued, so filled with fireworks that "a casual spectator might have supposed they were rehearsing some tempestuous passages of a melodrama"--until Maddox ordered the stage cleared and rehearsal continued. Forced to retire from the scene, Susan turned back a moment and offered an apologetic hand to Mrs. Mowatt.³⁹ In due course the Sun could report that "America has within the last three years given us Miss Cushman, the greatest tragedian at present on the stage, Mrs. Mowatt, the most interesting young tragedian, the most lady-like of genteel comedians."⁴⁰

In Susan's unladylike outburst, Charlotte read the signs clearly. With pleasure and silent envy, she could not question Susan and Sheridan Muspratt's impatience. To a solitary heart, the life ahead for the lovers seemed far more richly impelling, more real than all her social rounds, her efforts to fill the tomorrows facing her.