15. Forrest of Philadelphia, Part Two

(© Podcast text copyright Peter Schmitz. All rights reserved.)

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Hello, everyone. Welcome to the second part of our story about Edwin Forrest, perhaps the most well-known actor to ever come out of the city of Philadelphia.

In the last episode, we detailed his early years, starting from his childhood, through his struggles to break into the acting world in his teens, his journey to the American West, and his return home in triumph. And we told the story about how by the age of 21 he achieved theatrical stardom and financial success.

So what’s left? Quite a lot, because we’ve only just reached the first few chapters of most standard biographies of Edwin Forrest’s life. He lived 46 more years, after all. He performed on American and British stages thousands of times, in dozens of leading roles. He would be a central figure in one of the most famous urban upheavals, the Astor Place Riots, and he was at the middle of the greatest celebrity divorce trial of the 19th Century, perhaps of all time.

But as the focus of this podcast is Philadelphia theater history, we are going to narrow down the story by sticking to the parts of his life and career that pertain to Philadelphia. In fact let’s set the terms of the episode now: In this episode, Part Two, we’ll discuss Forrest’s sponsorship of an annual playwriting contest, and how iit fit into the literary and theatrical life of Philadelphia in the 1820s, 30s and 40s.

In Part Three, the next episode, we’re going to skip right over the Astor Place Riots and his contentious divorce. That has been covered extensively elsewhere, and though parts of it did take place here, on the whole these events don’t necessarily pertain to Philadelphia. We’ll look instead at how after that crisis he returned to the city, and made it his home once again, even though it had now transformed into a metropolis far different from the one he had grown up in.

Finally, we’ll take a look at the long-term legacy of the Forrest of Philadelphia - what he hoped to leave behind here, and how his legacy continued to shape institutions and his reputation for years to come.

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We left Forrest at 23, during the first blush of success. Both in New York and Philadelphia he was now a genuine star, and could command his own fate. Soon he was demanding, and receiving, a guaranteed $200 per show, as well as 50% of the gross box office receipts. Wherever he went, that was his standard contract. Theater managers didn’t like it, but no one knew how to refuse him, because his presence on the bill could almost guarantee a full house. 

And they needed full houses, desperately. Philadelphia’s own Theatrical scene at this point was in a confused, disrupted, and financially perilous state, one that it would not escape for almost 20 years. Three theaters, the Walnut Street Theatre, the Chestnut Street Theatre, and the newcomer the Arch Street Theatre - a few blocks away from each other and each located, unsurprisingly, on their namesake streets - would vie for audiences throughout this period, playing a never ending game of Beggar Your Neighbor. If one theater had a star name or big attraction, the other two would do anything to poach their audiences away, even if it bankrupted them - and often, it did just that. Theatrical managers would cycle madly through each house, often lasting for only part of a season before moving on to another. Warren and Wood, the former leaders of the Philadelphia scene, were among these managers, but were eventually reduced to becoming stock company members again, and gratefully accepting charity benefit performances staged to keep them from penury. Philadelphia’s regular corps of resident actors were seldom paid, as managers were forced to guarantee visiting stars a huge portion of the box office. And worst of all, the city’s theaters had lost their primacy.  Though Philadelphia retained a respectable cultural stature in the American theater world, along with Boston and New Orleans, from now on, no other American city could really compete with New York. 

It’s not that exciting plays stopped being produced in Philadelphia, not at all. If you read through the numerous histories and memoirs of the period, they are full of accounts of plays and actors and lively anecdotes. Audiences flocked to see some plays, and stayed away from others. Great actors came through town: Charles Kean, Fanny Kemble, Charles Matthews, Madame Vestris. Some were lauded, some were scorned. Some new young American performers began to make their own reputations. Circuses, variety acts, operas, ballets, melodramas, hippodramas - all could be seen regularly. Philadelphians, like all Americans, continued to expect and receive theatrical entertainment. Just as they had always done, Philadelphia’s clergymen even kept denouncing the wickedness of the stage - Edwin Forrest’s own mother and sisters found themselves compelled to listen to a sermon at Grace Church, as they sat in a pew that Edwin had paid for, denouncing  the wickedness of the stage and all actors. 

Other changes were coming, however. Industrial development boomed in the city, and immigrants flocked there to man the factories and workshops. It was a fractious and contentious era, politically and socially. Riots and civil disturbances were increasingly common, Pennsylvania Hall, that ‘temple of free discussion’, would be burned down by the anti-abolition riots in 1838, and in 1844 the Nativist riots caused miltia troops to engage in all out warfare in the streets with anti-Catholic mobs.

Through all this, however, Edwin Forrest continued to make Philadelphia his base of operations. From 1827 through 1836 he shared a home with his mother and sisters, on  North 10th St., continually lavishing it with new furnishings and silverware. He toured throughout the country, playing to mostly packed houses wherever he went. He was the family’s main support, especially after, March 4th 1834, when his brother William, who was then a co-manager of the Arch Street Theatre, died suddenly and painfully of a bowel obstruction, despite the best efforts of the eminent Philadelphia physician Dr. McClellan to save him. Edwin Forrest was unable to say goodbye to his brother, since he had left on a boat for New Orleans that very day.

As he traveled around the country, Edwin Forrest’s repertoire of roles at this point were still largely Shakespearean and classical-style tragedies: Othello, Macbeth, Lear, Richard III, Hamlet. A favorite role was Damon in Damon and Pythias - the story of two friends so devoted that they would gladly volunteer to die in the other’s place. He also liked doing William Tell and Virginius, by the English writer and actor Sheridan Knowles. Forrest could also do Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello, and indeed many times switched off the roles of Iago and Othello with other actors during a run, including Thomas Cooper, who had once advised the fourteen year-old Forrest to learn his craft and not fixate on stardom. Now Cooper, nearing the end of his long career, was happy to hitch his fading name to Forrest’s rising one. Forrest could fill New York’s enormous Bowery Theatre with his huge fan base, he was a hot property, as we would say today. 

And like all leading men of his day, Edwin Forrest was looking to expand his repertoire. Because again the standard practice of the day was not to develop each play slowly as an ensemble, as we do today, but for actors to arrive at a theater with roles already memorized, and their portfolio of roles at easy command. Actors usually supplied their own costumes, and the theater managers would arrange for scenery and musicians. Except for the very newest plays, one or two rehearsals was all that was considered necessary. 

He was looking for tragedies. Comedy was not his brand. He was a tragedian, and in keeping with his political and philosophical temperament he preferred plays that had stories about brave and muscular male characters standing up to invaders and tyrants. Sure there might be a minor love story in the plot somewhere, but he never played the lover himself. His preferred character type was a mature man with intensely loyal male friendships, who was defending his wife, his children, and his country. 

Just as rigorously as he continued to train and build his athletic body, he continued to study and expand his craft, and as one of the first native-born American actors to ever achieve prominence, he soon felt a responsibility to encourage American drama. He was a Jacksonian Democrat, through and through, and like many other Americans he felt strongly that fifty years after the American Revolution it was time to end the dominance of British high culture in many areas of American life, including the theater. He was already regularly performing in two plays, Brutus and Therese, by the American actor and author John Howard Payne, but Payne’s work had already been widely produced by British theaters and actors. He wanted something that would be identified with him alone. An avid and voracious reader, Forrest discovered that the Washington Irving novel The Last of the Mohicans and also the Mordecai Noah play entitled She Would Be a Soldier were thrilling stories, and that their depiction of American Indians reminded him of his youthful sojourn in the Louisiana backwoods with his Choctaw companion Pushmataha. Immediately, he saw the possibility of the aboriginal indian as a vigorous and physical characterization, with a free spirit and a defiant independence.

In 1829 Forrest issued a public invitation for American writers to submit plays to a contest he would sponsor, for a five hundred dollar prize, with the stipulation that the principal character be ‘an aboriginal of this country’. The winner of the contest was John Augustus Stone, an actor from Massachusetts who dramatized the story of King Philip's War, the bloody conflict between the Puritans settlers and Native Americans from the late 17th Century. It was called Metamora, or the Last of the Wampanoags. 

Stone had acted with Forrest, including productions of She Would Be a Soldier, so he knew exactly how the leading character should be written to win the star’s attention: a natural man, with a free spirit and a beautiful body, one who sleeps amidst the roar of the waterfall, and wakes to defend both his family and his land. There was a subplot involving a young white Puritan woman improbably named Oceana who is pursued by a villain named Fitzarnold, but most of the action involves Metamora - rescuing Oceana from a wolf, defending his village against the invading whites, declaring all out war, finding his young son dead after being defeated in the battle, and finally killing his own wife Nahmeokee rather than have her become a victim of the white man’s predation. At the end, Metamora is gunned down, and he falls next to the body of his wife and child as the curtain descended. Forrest himself worked closely with Stone on revising and shaping the piece to show off all his strengths as an actor, including a famous speech in which he defies and curses his oppressors:

White man, beware! The mighty spirits of the Wampanoag race are hovering o’er our heads; they stretch out their shadowy arms to me and ask for vengeance; they shall have it. The wrath of the wronged Indian shall fall upon you like a cataract that dashes the uprooted oak down the mighty chasms. The war whoop shall start you from your dreams at night and the red hatchet gleam in the blaze of your burning dwellings!  . . till the lands you have stolen groan under your feet no more!. 

Forrest’s entire body transformed to play the character, everyone who ever saw the piece recalled. He became lithe, self-contained, full of supple energy and mystery. The vituperative speech brought down the house, every time, as he threw a hatchet into the ground and stalked off the stage.

Metamora debuted at the Park Theatre in New York City on December 15, 1829 to wild acclaim. Its success was everything Forrest had hoped for. Stone received the prize money and the receipts of the third night, and then after that the play became Forrest’s exclusive property. It would remain in his repertoire for the next 35 years. On January 22, 1830 he brought it to the Arch Street Theatre in Philadelphia, and the reception was similarly overwhelming. During Forrest’s lifetime, it was a rare year that the play was not performed at least once in the city. Many times, both there and elsewhere, he would make sure that delegations of actual Native Americans were in the audience, and supposedly their whoops were sometimes added to those of the actor’s onstage, although more often they just kept their thoughts about the play to themselves. Despite its fierce main character and his denunciation of white invasion, as scholars have pointed out more recently it actually helped white audiences psychologically to ease the way for the removal of Native Americans from their lands in the East, and then the West, too. Most Americans were content to see Metamora as a hero of a bygone day, and did not trouble themselves about their own rights to the land they currently inhabited. The Indian way of life was doomed - so very sad, wasn’t it? But it made such a great play!

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The success of his first playwriting contest inspired Edwin Forrest to form a committee of eminent literary men as judges, and to make it a regular event. He even raised the prize to one thousand dollars. And it would continue regularly for many more years. Forrest read hundreds of plays personally, looking for another text that could also be a successful hit for him - though he dropped the stipulation that it be about Aboriginal Americans. The winners of the contests were always male, primarily wrote plays on classical subjects in Shakespearean-style verse, and they were always Philadelphians. Though all this may call into question whether the playwriting ‘contest’ was really much of a contest, it did seem that Philadelphia was finally developing its own dramatic literary scene. John Augustus Stone even moved to Philadelphia and won the contest again in 1833 with a play entitled The Ancient Briton, though this play failed in its sole performance at the Arch Street Theatre and was never repeated again. Beset by money worries and personal problems, Stone fell into a deep depression the following year, and committed suicide by jumping in to the Schuylkill River. Forrest paid for his funeral and memorial headstone at a Philadelphia cemetery.

A similar lack of success met the 1830 winner, Richard Penn Smith, the son of the Provost of the University of Pennsylvania, for his play Caius Marius about Republican Rome. Nor was any production ever staged for the next winner: Pelopidas, or, the Fall of the Polemarchs, about the liberation of Ancient Thebes from the Spartans. It was by another Penn graduate, a young physician named Robert Montgomery Bird, who was to become a significant figure in Forrest’s life.

Robert Montgomery Bird was born in Delaware in 1806, but his family moved to Philadelphia when he was four, after the death of his father. He graduated from Germantown Academy and the University of Pennsylvania. Trained to become a physician, he quickly gave up practicing medicine and was instead determined to have a literary career. He set out a careful plan: to write multiple biographies, novels, and plays - comedies, melodramas, and tragedies.

After his first play won Forrest’s contest, he became close friends with the actor, and Bird quickly sent him another. Entitled The Gladiator, it was about the slave rebellion led by Spartacus during the late days of the Roman Republic. Forrest loved it, and proposed that they work on it more together. They would do so as they traveled together throughout the United States, stopping often on their journeys to view Niagara Falls, which was one of Forrest’s favorite natural wonders. The play perfectly suited Forrest's public image as a performer: Strong, independent, and defiant - educated, but with a decided populist and appeal to the white working class. After all, was his story not their story?  Wrote an admiring editor in the Dayton, Ohio Journal: “His success is indeed an incentive to the young men of this country who are struggling with adverse circumstances - and is typical of our free, go-ahead and ‘universal Yankee nation’.” 

Despite Forrest's famous political support of Democratic president Andrew Jackson and for American territorial expansionism, in The Gladiator there is in fact a surprising critique of American Imperial ambition and Manifest Destiny. In it we find this passage, when Spartacus, a rebellious slave from Thrace, first sees the city of Rome. His friend Bracchius asks him: "And what thinkest thou, now thou hast seen it?" Replies Spartacus:

That—if Romans had not been fiends, Rome had never been great! Whence came this greatness, but from the miseries of subjugated nations? … There is not a palace upon these hills that cost not the lives of a thousand innocent men; there is no deed of greatness ye can boast, but it was achieved upon the ruin of a nation; there is no joy you can feel, but its ingredients are blood and tears.

But the clearest theme in the play was the struggle of the common man against tyranny. This was exactly what Forrest was looking for, and he made sure it was highlighted. He knew his audiences, after all. When the play was first staged in September of 1831, reception at the New York’s Park Theatre was enthusiastic. In the climactic scene at the end of Act Two, which takes place in the gladiatorial arena, the slave Spartacus is told by the aristocrat Crassus that if he kills his next opponent, he and his family will be freed. But his next opponent, it turns out, is his long-lost brother, Pharsarius! Instead of fighting, the two brothers instantly plot a rebellion. “Freedom for gladiators!” Spartacus shouts.” Death to the Roman fiends, that make their mirth/ Out of the groans of bleeding misery!/ Ho, slaves, it is your hour to kill!/ Kill and spare not - for wrath, and liberty!/ Freedom for bondmen - freedom and revenge!”  There are shouts and trumpets, as the gladiators and their guards rush to combat. Forrest, as Spartacus, would strip to the waist, draw his sword, and pose downstage center!  His muscled torso gleamed in the light, and his mighty legs stood like two huge pillars of strength. The curtain fell and the audience invariably roared its approval. 

Now I know what you are thinking: Did nobody see the parallels between the call to liberate Ancient Roman slaves and the necessity to end the American institution of chattel slavery? Did Bird and Forrest really have to go all the way back to Ancient Rome for examples of tyranny and despotism and the fight for liberty? You feel like saying: If you’re looking for slave rebellions, fellas, you don’t have to go far. What about Nat Turner, or Toussaint l’Overture? Well, suffice it to say that, like almost all white Americans of their day, no they did not make that connection at all. Their conceptions of the struggle for liberty against tyranny pretty much began and ended with white men. Although Forrest for his entire life rejected the company and politics of the social elite in America, he never made common cause with the situation of black people in his country. He would have been appalled even at the suggestion.

The Gladiator, along with Metamora, would become the backbone of his standard repertoire. Later he would also add to this repertoire the play Jack Cade, based on the revolt of English peasants in the 15th Century, which is also portrayed in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, part 2. Although the play Jack Cade had actually been written for a rival actor by yet another Philadelphian, Robert T. Conrad, when that actor failed in it, Forrest snapped the script up and made it his own. In Jack Cade, again, he played a strong and independent rebel against aristocrats, who falls at the end of the play, but dies defiantly, fiercely defending his rights. “Until our chains are molten in the glow/ Of kindled spirits; for I seek not power,/ I know no glory - save the godlike joy of making/ The bondman free.”

Some people, at least, saw the problem. The poet Walt Whitman, reviewing The Gladiator in his newspaper The Brooklyn Eagle in 1846, saw that Forrest was tapping into a deep vein of American political emotion, but was missing a huge opportunity to give it direction - despite what was sitting right there if you took the lines of the play literally. “This play is full of Abolitionism as an egg is off meat,” he declared. But like most of Forrest’s plays, though it explicitly appealed to the American common man, it was not actually telling American stories. Indeed, except for Metamora, none of Forrest’s repertoire of plays took place in America, or had American characters in them! “Give us American plays too, matter fitted to American opinions and institutions,” Whitman begged Forrest. This would do the republic service, and himself, too, in the long run. But Forrest and his audiences were never to make that connection. In fact the only ones that seemed to see how his plays were relevant to current American politics was an audience in Augusta, Georgia, in 1831. White Georgians, many currently engaged in dispossessing and banishing their Cherokee neighbors, were indignant at his performance of Metamora’s roaring assertions of Indian rights. The Georgians rose with yells of scorn and indignation against Forrest from the audience. A local judge declared: “Any actor who could utter such scathing language, and with such vehemence, must have the whole matter at heart . . Forrest believed in that damned Indian speech, and it is an insult to the whole community!” The next night, no one showed up to the theater in Augusta, and the rest of the run was canceled.

But on the whole that was a rare failure to please the crowd for Edwin Forrest. Those plays, Metamora, The Gladiator, and Jack Cade, along with the rest of his repertoire, were performed in almost every city in America, from California to Maine. They were performed over and over again at Philadelphia’s theaters: almost every year he would bring them for a run of several weeks at the Walnut, the Chestnut, or the Arch. Jack Cade was especially popular in Philadelphia, comprising one quarter of his total appearances between 1841 and 1856. It is estimated that he earned the majority of his money, over the course of his lifetime from the three plays he had commissioned, but after paying the initial prize money of one thousand dollars, he considered his financial obligation to the playwrights over. Although Robert Montgomery Bird provided him with two more plays, Ollaroosa and The Broker of Bogota (both set in America, finally, but in South America), they were not as lucrative. Certainly not for Bird, who felt that Forrest had promised him even further royalties. Forrest refused to pay more royalties, and the two men had a falling out and never spoke again. Forrest never published the texts, and tightly held the scripts in his own control. When U.S. Copyright law over plays was finally established, he registered them in his own name. They were his plays, after all, weren’t they? He paid for them, and made them famous, he felt. And indeed they never were to have any theatrical life after he was done with them. Though by all accounts they were absolutely thrilling theatrical experiences in their day, looking at the texts now they seem like stodgy relics of a bygone era, their language mannered and stilted, their plots unperformable. Although Forrest had hoped to spark and inspire a revival of American dramatic literature, springing from his home city of Philadelphia, his prize winning plays were to prove a dead end, in literary terms.

It was to be not a gentleman of Philadelphia, but a lady in Brunswick, Maine, Harriet Beecher Stowe, who was finally to write directly about the themes of slavery and injustice in her own country, and bring them to life. Unauthorized stage adaptations of her 1852 anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, would have literally hundreds of productions in the years leading up to the Civil War. It did more to move people’s hearts, and actually make the bondman free, than Forrest’s plays ever would.

I’m Peter Schmitz, and the sound and music are by Christopher Mark Colucci. For extra information about this episode, please visit our website. There is a blog post there with lots of images from the life of Edwin Forrest, more insights and explanations, and a bibliography of our sources for this episode. Thanks for coming along on another Adventure in Theater History, Philadelphia.

 
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