13. Forrest of Philadelphia, Part One

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

[OPENING THEME]

There’s no one who looms larger than Edwin Forrest over the history of Philadelphia Theater. His name literally shines down from a theater marquee, The Forrest Theatre, as it has since 1927. There was another Forrest Theatre on Broad Street too, before that. But he was big in Philadelphia even before that stage was constructed. While he was alive, whether on the stage or off, you couldn’t miss him. He was just big. “That is a mountain of a man”, the actress Fanny Kemble said, after they first met. Even today a larger than life marble statue of Forrest towers above the people crowding the first floor lobby of the Walnut Street Theater, where he often performed. He wasn’t actually that tall, checking in at about 5 foot 10 inches, but his massive and muscled body, sculpted by years of intense discipline and exercise, made an immediate impact when he was on stage. His costumes were designed to show off his bulging arms and thick legs. His deep voice thundered to the rafters of every house he played. One of his favorite bits of stage business was to lift another actor - or at least an unfortunate supernumerary - up into the air and fling them into the wings. His ardent fans in the audience yelled and cheered whenever he did that trick, or whenever he emerged victorious from another stage fight, or whenever he didn’t and instead died gloriously and tragically. His various characters died at the end of almost every play, in fact - Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, Metamora, Spartacus, Jack Cade, Richelieu - he was a tragedian, that’s what he did. He died at the end and he died big. Sometimes he thudded so hard onto the stage the boards shook. The fans roared madly for him after every death scene, at every curtain call, for many decades.

Forrest started making big money by the age of 21. His box office receipts dwarfed those of any other actor of his time, and his carefully invested and hoarded fortune grew large during his lifetime and survived long after his passing. He was a big believer in making an impact. If I sound a little louder myself today it’s because I’m even boosting the level of the podcast a bit, in his honor. No whispery intimacy for Edwin Forrest, no sir. He wouldn’t have understood it or cared for it. Later in his life, when he went to see Edwin Booth do Hamlet, Forrest winced as he watched the younger actor walk discreetly onto the stage in Act One of Shakespeare’s play. After all, this was the son of his old friend Junius Brutus Booth, who had named the boy Edwin after him! For the life of him Forrest couldn’t understand why Booth was shambling on like that, head bowed like he was doing a servant’s role, instead of making a proper leading man’s entrance.

“What’s the damned fool doing? He looks like a super hunting for a sixpence,” he growled to a friend.

That was not how Edwin Forrest entered in Hamlet. Like the man himself, his Hamlet was not moody and introspective, but instead fierce and masculine. He walked into the court of Elsinore Castle like he could snap his uncle Claudius in two, right away, and it was only for Shakespeare’s sake that he did not do so.

But at the very beginning of his life, way back in the year 1806, Edwin Forrest had not made his entrance into the world that way. Not at all. He was a frail-looking boy, the seventh of eight children born into the lower-middle class Philadelphia family of William and Rebecca Forrest. His Scottish immigrant father, a failed shopkeeper and peddler who had a lowly position in a bank, was devoted to wife and his large family and struggled to support them. William Forrest suffered from chronic tuberculosis himself, and worried about his youngest boy. Little Ned was thin and pale, cried a lot, and had thin stooping shoulders. Deeply attached to his mother, he clung to her physically and emotionally. Surely he would be taken by consumption before he reached adulthood, his father said to his mother, and neighbors whispered the same thought to each other, and looked at the boy sadly. 

But that pale little boy overheard the adults talking about his likely early grave, and decided then and there to fight against his fate. If he cried often, it was from rage, not weakness of spirit. He wanted people to notice him, all the time. And the means to achieve it were there, if he could just grab ahold. Because it turns out that the world of Philadelphia theater was what was going to save little Edwin Forrest. In fact, it’s as if everything we’ve talked about over the last eleven episodes was coming together, just to create the environment that would challenge him, raise him up, and release him into a wider world, one that he would then bend to his shape. He would redeem his feckless father’s debts, burnish the family name in the city of his birth, and best of all, as far as he was concerned, his beloved mother would be So Proud of Him.

The life of Edwin Forrest is such a grand tale that I’m going to have to narrow it down a bit. That’s often my own challenge, in this podcast. Forrest led a big life. If you know anything about him, it’s either the story of his rivalry with William Macready and the Astor Place Riots of 1849, or his infamous divorce trial from his wife, Elizabeth Norton Sinclair that he insisted on dragging out for over 16 years. Those are amazing stories. But they’re already well-known, have been covered in other podcasts, and besides they mostly took place elsewhere. For our purposes, we’re going to concentrate on the Forrest of Philadelphia - the city where he was born, where he spent his childhood, where he returned to perform again and again, and where in his mature years he finally settled and died. And where, as I said, his legacy has never really ended. 

We’ll talk today, in Part One, about Forrest and his native city: His beginnings, his time in the theaters here, how left home and how he returned again in Triumph. In our next episode, Part Two, we’ll examine Forrest’s mature years in Philadelphia, and the legacy he left behind there.

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

From earliest days, his devout parents took little Edwin and his many siblings to St. Paul’s Episcopal Church on Third Street, where Dr. Joseph Pilmore was the priest. Most young children, then and now, are tortured by sitting still during lengthy sermons, but some are fascinated by how much attention the preacher gets. At the age of seven Little Ned, as his family called him, would come home after church, would stand on a chair, and give his delighted family an exact imitation of Dr. Pilmore giving that day's sermon, with his glasses perched on his nose. His father thought it was a sign that he might someday be educated for the clergy. He was sent off to school for lessons in reading and writing, and his father even paid for private lessons with local teachers of elocution such as Lemuel White and Alexander Wilson, who was also a famous ornithologist. Ned wasn’t interested much in birds, though, he wanted to learn how to be an orator - so Wilson taught him poems of Robert Burns, and Young Norval’s speech from the Scottish play Douglas - the one that began: My name is Norval! On the Grampian hills/ My father feeds his flocks. Apparently these elocution lessons stood Forrest in good stead for the rest of his life, because he never got any other sort of formal voice training. His three sisters, Henrietta, Caroline, and Eleonora, made little Ned a harlequin’s outfit to wear for recitations in the family home, complete with a mask and a wooden dagger. He would also eagerly show off these speeches for his friends in the neighborhood, and he earned the local title of “The Schoolboy Spouter.”

In later life Forrest would recall that when he was ten years old he became fascinated with the circus. This would have been 1816, so he must have been remembering James West’s equestrian circus that came to the Olympic Theatre that year with Timour the Tartar and other spectacles. That circus’ bills promised such delights as “Egyptian Pyramids, men piled upon men”, ballet dances, and both tight rope and slack rope walkers 

At the circus, spindly young Ned Forrest became entranced by the physiques of the acrobats - surely this was the way he could become strong, and drive away the fears of the inevitable early death his father had predicted for him! He began to hang around rehearsals at the Olympic, and some kindly circus folk taught the eager kid how to climb ropes, how to stand on his head, how to walk on his hands, how to do backflips and somersaults. His body began to develop strength and agility, and so was his lifelong obsession with making himself into a modern day Hercules. He also began to develop his acting muscles by performing amateur dramatics with a group of other young Philadelphians called the ‘Thespian Club’ that his brother William organized. Inspired by the success of the young American actor John Howard Payne at the Chestnut Street Theatre, they imagined that they too could actually play on the stages where normally only British actors seemed to tread.

Ned recited to the workers at the tannery where his oldest brother Lorman worked - any chance to shine and see that admiring look in people’s eyes that he could  then run home and tell his doting mother about. People all up and down Cedar Street - which was then the name for South Street, knew about him. A desperate Charles Porter, then managing the ramshackle Old Theatre on Cedar and Apollo, even hastily enlisted the lad for a last minute substitute as Rosalia, a female role in a play called Rudolph or the Robbers of Calabria, a role which he played lying on a sofa in a borrowed dress, an improvised wig, and a script at his side. The engagement went fairly well until one of the local boys in the audience noticed Rosalia was wearing heavy boys’ boots and blue Germantown socks. Jeering and raillery issued from the house, and immediately fair Rosalia was yelling back that he would fight them and lick him as soon as the play was over. He always did have an urge for instant retribution against anyone who wronged him, his entire life. Fortunately Charles Porter just hauled the young actor off the stage at that point.

His father died when he was 13, leaving his mother with many debts and expenses. Times were hard, and his three sisters opened up a millinery shop out of the family home on 77 Cedar Street. Ned had to help out too, so he left school and went to work in the printers shop of The Aurora - a fiercely Jeffersonian newspaper which helped to shape his lifelong political allegiance to the Democratic party. He got another job working at a ship's chandler, where he still doggedly spouted speeches amidst the shelves in the back room, much to his employer’s annoyance, who told him that this Theatrical Infatuation would be his Ruin, and reminded him of the well-known fact that Play Actors Never Grow Rich.

Undeterred, Ned continued to attend plays, circuses and other entertainments whenever he could, and he was in the audience at the open air Tivoli Gardens amphitheater, on Market and 13th Streets one summer evening in 1820. There he watched a public demonstration by a so-called ‘professor’ about the effects of nitrous oxide, or laughing gas. When volunteers were called for, Young Ned stepped out of the crowd and offered to take several deep whiffs of the stuff. Upon receiving its disinhibiting benefits, he immediately began reciting a speech from Shakespeare’s Richard III and turning somersaults. The audience roared its approval, and a delighted Philadelphia city alderman, John Swift, who saw the incident was instantly convinced the young lad had something special and told him he could be playing at the Walnut Street Theatre. Years later, when Swift became the Mayor of Philadelphia, he would proudly boast that he sent young Forrest on the path to stardom.

William Warren and William Wood, you will recall, after the New Theatre on Chestnut Street had burned down in April of 1820, had ensconced themselves and their acting company in the old circus hall formerly known as the Olympic Theatre and renamed it the Walnut Street Theatre. But first they had to renovate the space, which had been mostly unoccupied for a year, to make it acceptable for the presentation of serious drama. The architect William Strickland was employed for the job, and he immediately took down the immense dome that had topped the circus, and gave the building a lower roof with better acoustics. The circus ring was also eliminated so the pit area could be filled with seats, and the stage apron was extended to allow actors to be better seen from the galleries. Lobbies and boxes were all upgraded - and in light of what had happened to their former home, new fire exits were installed on Ninth Street. Most especially, every effort and inducement was made to entice their former audience to follow them into the new theater, but when the season opened on November 10th, 1820, attendance was merely respectable. Big stars such as Thomas Cooper and Edmund Kean were booked to appear later in the season, but clearly the managers, who were in pressing financial straits, needed a boost of some kind in the meantime.

John Swift, the alderman who had been so taken with the Schoolboy Spouter on Laughing Gas, thought he had just the answer for them. He introduced Edwin Forrest to William Wood, claiming the lad was sixteen, and ready for his big break. Wood, who was always suspicious of local talent, and had seen many a likely young Roscius walk though his door and then out again, was dubious and did his best to talk the fresh-faced young Philadelphian out of a career on the stage. quote:

“We had been so unfortunate in the numerous ‘first appearances’ of late, that the young aspirant could hope for little encouragement of his wishes, the drooping state of theatricals furnishing another and stronger reason for our course.  . . . The toils, dangers, and suffering of a young actor were represented with honest earnestness, but, as was soon discovered, in vain. Forrest was at this time a well grown young man, with a noble figure, unusually developed for his age, his features powerfully expressive, and of a determination of purpose which discouraged all further objections.”

But business needed picking up, so what the heck. The ‘well-grown youth’ was engaged, and given the script for the part of Young Norval in the play Douglas, or The Noble Shepherd, and told to go home and learn it. Forrest immediately and truthfully answered that he already knew the role. So the play, which was seen as a fitting stepping stone for young leading men to debut in, was announced on the bills of the Walnut Street Theatre for November 27th 1820. William Wood was to play Glenalvon, the villain, and William Warren would play his foster father, Old Norval.

We have the playbill from the show, carefully preserved in the scrapbooks of the historian Charles Durang. I put it on the blog for the show on the website AITHpodcast.com, if you want to see it. Forrest’s name is not on it - it proclaims that the part of Young Norval will be played by a “Young Gentleman of Philadelphia”. This was a common tactic, deemed enough to spark local interest but also enough to prevent the youthful aspirant from embarrassment if things should go horribly wrong. But young Edwin showed up that night, raring to go, and doubtless the lines he was given to speak seemed so apt to his own life story that he could hardly help making them his own.

The play Douglas was highly regarded in its day, a classical verse drama set in Scotland. The title character, who does not know of his own noble birth, has been given away by his mother to an old shepherd to raise. Nevertheless the lad grows up to be a warrior after all and proves himself in battle, where he unknowingly saves the life of Lord Randolph, his true father.

[SFX] “I must know who my deliverer is!” demands Lord Randolph.

[SFX] “A low-born man, of parentage obscure,/ Who naught can boast but his desire to be/ A soldier, and to gain a name in arms,” replies the youth, discreetly.

[SFX]“Blush not . . to declare thy birth!” says Randolph.

And then Edwin Forrest got to do Young Norval’s speech - which was famous, as i said, in its day:

[SFX] My name is Norval! On the Grampian hills
My father feeds his flocks; a frugal swain,
Whose constant cares were to increase his store,
And keep his only son, myself, at home.
For I had heard of battles, and I long’d
To follow to the field some warlike lord;
And heav’n soon granted what my sire denied.
This moon, which rose last night, round as my shield,
Had not yet filled her horns, when, by her light,
A band of fierce barbarians, from the hills,
Rush’d like a torrent down upon the vale,
Sweeping our flocks and herds. The shepherds fled
For safety and succour. I alone
With bended bow, and quiver full of arrows,
Hover’d about the enemy, and mark’d
The road he took; Then hastened to my friends,
Whom, with a troop of fifty chosen men,
I met advancing. The pursuit I led,
Till we o’ertook the spoil-encumbered foe.
We fought and conquered. Ere a sword was drawn
An arrow from my bow pierced their chief
Who wore that day the arms that I now wear.
Returning home in triumph!

[End SFX. TRIUMPHANT TRANSITION MUSIC OUT}

The lad acquitted himself astonishingly well in the role, allowed Wood, and the box office receipts from all the young Philadephian’s friends and family who piled into the theater were encouraging enough to schedule the play for another night. Wood and Warren admitted that this performance was quite good too, for a novice, and Forrest’s former employer William Deane, the editor of the Aurora gushed: “Of the part of Norval, we must say that we were much surprised by the excellence of his elocution, his self-possession in speech and gesture, and a voice that, without straining was of such volume . . . as to carry . . .to the remotest corner of the theater!” This was only somewhat encouraging to Wood, who scheduled Forrest in a couple more plays, but then when the box office did not pick up, he told the ardent and confident young man that he had no further employment for him. Besides, Cooper and Kean were soon arriving, he needed to rehearse the regular company and concentrate on these stars. When the great Thomas Cooper did arrive, Forrest, eager to press his case and get advice, arranged an interview with him. The experienced star, who had been performing in the city for over twenty years by now, told the young man to wait his turn, take some smaller roles, and learn his craft first. Well that was not what young Edwin Forrest wanted to hear. He would never consent to being a supernumerary or a servant. He wanted, like young Norval, to “Return home in Triumph’! Nothing else would do. So he angrily stalked out of the room. Leaving an astonished Cooper to contemplate the the stiff-necked ambition of the fourteen year-old Philadelphian

What even a youngster like Forrest could clearly see for himself was that the future of theater only belonged to star actors. As much as Warren and Wood disliked it, as they looked back on sixteen years of being able to carefully set their seasons and distribute roles and profits as they saw fit among their company, from now on visiting star actors, especially ones coming from across the Atlantic, had the upper hand. George Frederick Cooke’s visit eight years before had set the bar, and increasingly many British actors who had ever had a single leading role at Drury Lane or Covent Garden began to make a tour of America. And elite audiences in New York, Philadelphia and Boston, their cultural radar still finely tuned to the London theater scene, would hasten to buy tickets for each one of these novelties and disdain American stock company actors as perennial and natural second-raters.

Some of these touring British stars were passing fads, making a quick killing, but others were true leading lights of the profession. Thomas Cooper, who had spent the majority of his career in America, had always been a draw, but now more recent leading actors like Edmund Kean were arriving as well. After setting the London theater world ablaze with success since 1813, Kean arrived at the Walnut Street Theatre in January of 1821 with his Othello, Hamlet, Richard III - as well as the neoclassical play Brutus, written especially for Kean by the American actor and writer John Howard Payne - who had himself left the United State to live in London, knowing where the real status in the theater world could be found.

Philadelphia’s response to Kean’s performances  at the Walnut was overwhelming. At the end of the play, they refused to stop applauding until Kean came out again and took another bow. It may seem odd to us, but before then it was regarded as poor taste for actors - especially actors playing tragic characters who had just died at the end of the play - to spring to life again and walk in front of the proscenium drop to take a ‘curtain call’. But after that it became an expectation, and then a tradition. So that’s a major theatrical convention Philadelphia can take credit for: the curtain call. And Edwin Forrest was reportedly present at every performance of Edmund Kean’s, soaking up not only the dynamic and exciting acting style, but noting how he took that final bow. He could see that in the end, a star’s most important relationship is not with the other actors on stage, but with their fans in the audience. Develop a loyal following and feed that relationship, and you could rise to unheard of heights. 

After Kean, the trickle of British stars every season playing the American circuit became a flood. Warren and Wood, even after they built a new Chestnut Street Theatre in 1822, could never re-establish their economic dominance over the Philadelphia market. The New York theatrical manager Stephen Price snapped up the lease to the Walnut Street Theatre, and kept recruiting more and more British actors and circus performers to compete with the Chestnut in Philadelphia. He would pay these actors exorbitant salaries to play New York, and then send them off to other American cities to make up the difference. Philadelphia loved the thrilling parade of new performers every week for their perusal throughout the season, and Warren & Wood could only respond by joining the arms race and booking their own stars. But the cost of paying these stars exorbitant salaries was breaking them and raising ticket prices was impossible without creating public furor. Eventually Wood had had enough, and demanded Warren buy him out of their partnership. By 1826, the two had split and from that point on, though Philadelphia, along with Boston, remained a major theatrical market, it was increasingly New York that was setting the terms and creating the cultural buzz in America. And the star system was in place from then on. Big name actors and actresses would arrive, demand half of the gross box office receipts and more, and the local managers in American cities could only comply. Being a theater manager, which had once been a fairly steady guarantee of income, now was a highly risky gamble. Most lasted just a few seasons before leaving or moving on, at any theater. Stars hired them, rather than the other way around. And this power dynamic was destined to last until the final decades of the 19th Century

[TRANSITION MUSIC] 

But meanwhile, what of our young Edwin Forrest of Philadelphia? Where would he go? Well, he tried staying in the local theater market, even briefly renting the short-lived Prune Street Theatre carved out of an old warehouse just east of Washington Square to show off his own version of Richard III. But that was not enough to perform for a crowd made up chiefly of family and friends. He wrote to James Caldwell, a manager he had heard of who was doing grand business in his theaters in far off New Orleans, but received no reply. William Wood hired him to do one night in the role of Zaphna in the play Mahomet, but then, distracted by his own troubles, lost interest in young Forrest again. He quit his day job so he could concentrate on preparing for his likely acting roles, but no further progress was made in booking any work. He started borrowing money from relatives. Those of you who have been struggling young actors may recognize the pattern.

Then, in September of 1821, two Western theater managers, Joshua Collins and William Jones, arrived in Philadelphia to recruit actors for theaters that they owned in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, Lexington Kentucky, and Cincinnati Ohio. They weren't looking for British actors, they were looking for ANY actors. American ones would do just fine. Forrest, by then 16 years old, presented himself at their hotel room and was hired on the spot for eight dollars a week. By the next week he was bundled into a stage coach and saying goodbye to his weeping mother and sisters. One brother, William, had already embarked on a theatrical career and was at that moment performing in obscure theaters in central Pennsylvania, his other brother, Lorman, for his part had left home for an adventure to South America, and was never heard from again. Perhaps Edwin would suffer either fate: obscurity or death, or both.

But he did not die, and he certainly did not disappear. Forrest’s three years in the West, working along the Mississippi and Ohio River valleys, instead made him into the actor he was to become. He discovered that on the frontier, just as in the working class neighborhood he grew up in, folks liked their entertainment loud and straightforward and unabashedly patriotic. He learned how to form a direct bond with a working class audience, and they were eager to identify with an American actor. Even the roughest frontier shack back was likely to have two books: a copy of the Bible, and a copy of Shakespeare’s works. They loved anyone who could embody the characters of the Bard, and make his lines speak to them directly. Wherever he went, local newspaper editors and reporters took his side and began to trumpet his name in their publications. When the managers Collins and Jones went bust and left the acting company stranded, he worked in a circus for a while, then made his way down the Mississippi to New Orleans and worked in the leading theater company. There the audiences, especially the ladies, loved his dark good looks and fine physique. But he found he was uncomfortable in high society, and instead befriended the rough characters on the levees and docks. He had adventure after adventure. He met Jim Bowie. He survived a bad case of malaria. He fell in love with the actress Jane Placide, challenging his rival in her affections, his boss, to a duel and publicly calling him out. When his challenge met nothing but scorn and immediate unemployment from the theater, Forrest was ushered out of the city by another friend, a Choctaw Indian named Pushmataha, and although the details of this episode were perhaps exaggerated in the telling, he later claimed he spent two months in the wilderness with him learning the ways of Indigenous life, revelling in the freedom of the unencumbered human body and spirit.

By the summer of 1825, ready to head home, he left New Orleans and finally got on a boat to Philadelphia. He arrived, unannounced, on the doorstep of the house on Cedar Street, and his mother and sisters shrieked in surprise and they all wept together in happy reunion. Still determined to be a great actor, and hoping for leading roles now that he was almost twenty years old, he found the Walnut Street Theatre filled with circuses from New York. The Chestnut Street Theater was dark, and he had no prospects of being employed there in the Fall. It seemed again his hometown of Philadelphia was closed to his advancement. But where once this would have meant the end of a young actor’s ambitions, times were changing. There were now theater companies in cities all over the country, and eager competition for likely young talents like himself. Getting a sudden offer from a manager to join a stock company in Albany, New York, he left for the Hudson Valley and found himself performing with the well-regarded actors William Conway and Thomas Hamblin. He was doing roles like McDuff and Mark Anthony, which he loved, and also some romantic comedies, which he rather detested. He wanted to be a tragedian ONLY, and after this year he would never again consent to play anything but serious roles. During his off hours he studiously avoided the temptations he saw his fellow company members falling into to drink and gamble away their salaries every night. Instead he developed a ferocious and regular devotion to his daily workout routine, a combination of weights, ropes, and gymnastics, combined with a vigorous washing and buffing with towels to keep his skin gleaming.

When Edmund Kean, now on his second tour through America, arrived in Albany for the month of December, Forrest received a master class in acting. Though the aging star's own personal habits tended towards dissipation, drinking and the open disdain of American audiences who did not appreciate his art, he was still a formidable presence on stage. He liked the eager young Forrest and the two appeared together in Macbeth, Richard III, and Othello, and once again local journalists also supported his cause - scouts from New York arrived and lobbied to get him a position at the enormous new Bowery Theater, which was under construction in Manhattan.

But until that New York theater was actually completed, his future was still uncertain, and Forrest headed back home once again to try his luck at the Chestnut Street Theatre, which had been finished while he was away in Kentucky. Seating over 2000 people when full, its marble front boasted once again the wooden William Rush statues of Comedy and Tragedy. And though by this point Warren and Wood were barely speaking to each other and could not agree on much, by tradition they could not deny the request of a member of the stock company, Charles Porter, when he requested that for his benefit night, the 20 year old Edwin Forrest be allowed to perform with him in Ottway’s Venice Preserved. (This was the same Charles Porter who had first cast him as Rosalia ten years before.). The box office was quite good, Forrest’s performance was even better - he received nine rounds of cheers at the curtain call .

He was immediately booked again to play Rolla in Pizzaro - a play about a young Peruvian rebel leader - again a role considered a standard stepping stone for an actor on the rise. Backstage he was still shy about even entering the famously well-regulated Chestnut Street Theatre’s Green Room, but onstage he was masterful. The reviews in the Philadelphia papers were ecstatic:  “He left us a boy, and has returned a man. The talents he then exhibited, improved by attention and study, now display themselves in the excellence of his delineation. He is by no means what he was when he left us.” Edwin read them all to his mother, and tears ran down her cheeks in happiness. Forrest even received real concrete proof that he had arrived - a print was made of “Mr. E. Forrest as Rolla” - something his fans could collect and share. It’s the earliest actual picture we have of Edwin Forrest, looking fierce in the beaded necklaces adorning his “Peruvian” costume and a sword hilt clasped firmly in his hand. It would become the first in a long line of images, a series that would run into the thousands over the course of his career.

But nothing was settled yet. Remember I said that 1826 was kind of a turning point for our story. Edwin Forrest was not yet a national star - because he had not yet made a hit in New York. From this point on, a New York success was what put you over the top in American Theatre. Though Philadelphia would continue to be important, it could no longer drive national tastes. The influential media, and the real money were to be found chiefly, though not solely, in Manhattan. And indeed later that year, he made his New York debut as Othello - first at the Park Theatre - which usually featured British acting stars, and then at the even more capacious Bowery Theatre which was to have a policy of chiefly American performers. The startled New York managers were amazed by the young Philadelphian with the massive limbs and the blaring voice and the firm grasp of how to keep the audience enrapt throughout the play. In the boxes a visiting English actor by the name of Charles Macready watched the young Forrest with an appraising eye. But in the pit, the young working class American men of the audience were unrestrained, thrilled to see one of their own make such an impression, and they yelled their approval over and over again.  “By heaven, he has made a hit! A HIT by Jupiter”, gasped the manager of the theater, and hustled backstage to raise the young man’s salary, and to beg him to stay for the rest of the season. In fact, Forrest never lacked for work again in his entire life. And the money began to roll in. By that summer, he was able to return to Philadelphia, drop $400 into his mother’s lap and tell her he was moving the family into a new house. He later recalled: “The applause I had won before the footlights? Yes it was most welcome and precious to me. But compared with this, it was nothing, less than nothing. Her fond and approving eyes seemed to sink into my very bones.” 

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

By 1829, Forrest had already played several seasons in New York and many other American cities, always playing the biggest houses. Audiences everywhere flocked to see him. Able to demand, and receive, from managers half of the box office gross receipts, he was raking in money. He had paid off his late father’s twelve year old debts. He had bought and furnished a house in Philadelphia for his mother and his sisters with his earnings, and carefully invested the rest.  

In January 1829 he returned to Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Theatre - he only had time to play four nights for the adoring hometown crowd. He opened with Damon and Pythias, followed this up with Hamlet (which he had only just added to his repertoire), and then did William Tell, the Hero of Switzerland. He concluded the run with Brutus, the play written especially for Edmund Kean. The hometown press was no less exultant than the rest of the crowd. “We believe no performance upon the Philadelphia stage has been marked with such uniform excellence,” gushed the United States Gazette.

And so that is where we’ll leave the happy young Philadelphian, at the first blush of real success, having accomplished what he set out to do in life by the age of 21, and set to travel even further. He already possessed the enterprise, the drive, the habits of sobriety and discipline that would sustain him through a long career. He always drove a hard bargain with every theater manager, and he especially had a keen regard for lucrative real estate investments that would form the basis of his substantial fortune.

We’ll discuss the details of that fortune, and of his artistic career as it relates to Philadelphia, in our next episode. But I want to mention one particular aspect of his rise to fame and fortune in the American theater, even before we get to that . .

So, as many theater historians have heralded him, Edwin Forrest was the first true native born star of the American Stage. Although interestingly, he was almost never to play any actual characters that were explicitly American, he made his identity as a performer explicitly on his American-ness. It’s what everybody knew about him then and knows about him now.

But Forrest had an almost exact contemporary, a man born in 1807 just one year later than him - someone who also dreamed of becoming a great actor, and who was determined to succeed against all the odds. Ira Aldridge was African American, the son of a free black minister in New York City. He received an education at the African Free School - probably a better education than Forrest had received in Philadelphia. Like Forrest, he would attend plays at the city theaters, and was stage-struck at an early age. In 1820 as Forrest made his debut at the Walnut Street Theatre, Aldridge was working with the African Grove Company, where the actors James Hewlett and William Alexander Brown struggled to carve out a new theatrical space that was not dependent on British Stars, or on white people at all. There's a famous picture that you might have seen of James Hewlett as Richard III - just like George Frederick Cooke and Edmund Kean and Junius Brutus Booth and Edwin Forrest, Hewlett knew that Richard III was the first great role that every classical tragedian needed to conquer. It seems that ambitious young Ira Aldridge became a member of that troupe, along with other black performers from New York. He played Romeo in Romeo and Juliet once, and just like Edwin Forrest, he played Rolla in Pizzaro, the leader of a rebellion against the Spanish invaders.

But the African Company was quickly suppressed. Stephen Price, the manager of the Park Theater, didn’t want the competition, and local authorities didn’t like independent black people doing things generally. Riots were deliberately provoked in the audience and the police shut it down. By 1823 it was out of business.  So like Edwin Forrest,  Ira Aldridge literally had no place to pursue a career as an actor in his hometown. Blut unlike Edwin Forrest, he couldn’t strike out into the West and South and forge a new identity for himself in far-off frontier cities. That simply wasn’t an option. He couldn’t go to New Orleans and act in elegant theaters - even travelling outside New York at all left him at risk of being kidnaped, enslaved and sent to the South. There was no future for him in America. So, he got on a ship and went to England. He made a career in Europe. It wasn’t easy, but he did it. It’s one of the famous stories of theater history. He played Othello, too, but he did it in his real skin, unlike Forrest or Macready or Kean or all the other white tragedians of the day. By the time Edwin Forrest eventually toured England in the 1830s, he would have been aware that Aldridge was already working there, too.

We noted many occasions where Edwin Forrest, although born with almost no family connections, was talent spotted and assisted by helpful and admiring newspaper editors, politicians, managers, and other mentors. We’ll see in the next episode how he came to embody the ideal of Jacksonian America - self educated, muscular, aggressive, patriotic, deeply attached to egalitarian and democratic ideals. A self-made man, and a highly successful one. But although Edwin Forrest was self-made, he made that self in a nation where he if he needed to open stage doors that were shut to him, he could. In his own country Ira Aldridge couldn’t even get the key to that stage door. There was no key - for him. And no door, either. He never came home in triumph. In 1867 he died while doing a final tour in Łódź, Poland, and is buried there.

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Next episode we continue the story of Edwin Forrest in Philadelphia. Chris and I have been having a blast making this podcast series, but it's been a lot of work getting it up on its feet.  We need a break, so we’re taking some time off. In two weeks, in place of a normal episode, we will be releasing a special episode! It's an interview with me by Mike Lueger of The Theatre History Podcast, which he shared on his own show a few weeks ago. In case you missed that, Mike has kindly consented to let me share it with my own particular listeners, too.

I also want to highly recommend to you another Philadelphia history podcast! It’s called All Bones Considered, and is researched and hosted by Dr. Joe Lex. It’s become one of my favorite podcasts, and certainly one of my go to sources to learn fascinating stuff about Philadelphia history. I’ll put a link in the notes to some of his shows that have particularly to do with theater history in the Quaker City. The guiding principle of the show is that all of Joe’s subjects are eventually buried in Laurel Hill or West Laurel Hill Cemetery. He’s an amazing storyteller, please check it out.

Well that’s our show for today. Please remember to rate and review our show on Apple Podcasts or Overcast, or you can write a review directly on our show’s website: AITHpodcast.com . Stop there and look for the blog post for this episode, where I post additional images, information, and a bibliography. If you want to find even more blog posts and bonus episodes about Philadelphia theater history, check us out on Patreon. As always, we would appreciate your support. Some special events are coming up there this Fall, in particular.

The voice for Young Norval in this episode was played by Tom Schmitz. Young Norval’s real father was played by Tom Schmitz’s real father. I’m Peter Schmitz, and the sound and the music are by Christopher Mark Colucci. Thanks for coming along on another Adventure in Theater History: Philadelphia.

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