Preface

A century ago, a period when little serious American talent wrote plays, three dynamic stars brought a vigor, an excitement, a dimension to the art of acting that has not since been matched in this country. While recent biographies have treated Edwin Forrest and Edwin Booth, no attempt has ever been made to document fully the life of the solitary actress completing that bright constellation. Even now, Edwin Forrest's name is shadowy, and Booth's fame is coupled largely with the notoriety of his brother, John Wilkes. But Charlotte Cushman's name is vaguest of all.

Why have such names and talents as theirs faded so cold? The answer involves more than straight biography. Partly a fact of life in the theatre, their disappearance is at once a personal story and a commentary on the country that produced and adored them for a time, and then cast them from all memory.

That Charlotte Cushman rose from genteel poverty on a Boston side street to the pinnacle of international fame is a fact. That her circle included many of the period's most celebrated names is a fact. That she experienced many of the major events of her nation's history is no less true than the fact that for years after her death her grave in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge was, among all the famous graves, the one most often visited. She is the only actress yet admitted to the Hall of Fame for Great Americans. Yet to the public now and to most of those who stroll past her bronze bust in the Hall of Fame the name beneath it is shrouded in mystery. This is perhaps the most extraordinary fact of all.

The person who bore the name Charlotte Cushman merited a different fate. In Hamlet's charge to Polonius to see the players "well bestow'd," Shakespeare gave one guide for thinking about actors. "Do you hear, let them be well used, for they are the abstract and brief chronicles of the time." Polonius' reply is succinct, "My lord, I will use them according to their desert." Whether Miss Cushman's world used her according to her desert, whether one sees in her now some brief chronicle of her time or sees her strictly as herself, the impression stands that in its most powerful actress America appreciated for a time one of the shining figures that by their light illuminate the path for lesser men. As much as Emerson, Longfellow, or Thoreau, she was a brilliant blossom in the sudden eruption of talent that came to be called the flowering of New England. As such, she belonged to that early band of pioneers who accepted the challenge Emerson laid down for all Americans in 1837. "We have listened too long," he declared, "to the courtly muses of Europe." Too long had the American people timidly doubted their ability to create independently a culture worthy of world respect. Both as woman and as star, Charlotte Cushman relished all her life her strategic position in the campaign that eventually rectified that error.