The Man Who Was Rip Van Winkle: Joseph Jefferson and Nineteenth-century American Theatre - Hardcover

Mcarthur, Benjamin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300122322 ISBN 13: 9780300122329

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2007

Synopsis

The most beloved American comedic actor of the nineteenth century, Joseph Jefferson made his name as Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle. In this book, a compelling blend of biography and theatrical and cultural history, Benjamin McArthur chronicles Jefferson’s remarkable career and offers a lively and original account of the heroic age of the American theatre. 

 

Joe Jefferson’s entire life was spent on the stage, from the age of Jackson to the dawn of motion pictures. He extensively toured the United States as well as Australia and Great Britain. An ever-successful career (including acclaim as painter and memoirist) put him in the company of the great actors, artists, and writers of the day, including Edwin Forrest, Edwin Booth, John Singer Sargent, and William Dean Howells.  This book rescues a brilliant figure and places him, appropriately enough, on center stage of a pivotal time for American theatre. McArthur explores the personalities of the period, the changing theatrical styles and their audiences, the touring life, and the wide and varied culture of theatre. Through the life of Jefferson, McArthur is able to illuminate an era.

About this title

About the Author

Benjamin McArthur is professor of history, Southern Adventist University. He is the author of Actors and American Culture, 1880-1920, and was an associate editor of the American National Biography.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Man Who Was Rip Van Winkle

JOSEPH JEFFERSON AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN THEATREBy BENJAMIN McARTHUR

Yale University Press

Copyright © 2007 Yale University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-12232-9

Contents

Acknowledgments............................................................ixIntroduction...............................................................xiii1. Cradled in the Profession...............................................12. Marking the Progress of Civilization....................................293. Behind the Cart of Thespis..............................................544. An Actor Prepares.......................................................855. Echoing the Public Voice................................................1076. Triumphs in Comedy and Melodrama........................................1347. Nibbling at Stardom.....................................................1638. A Mighty Nimrod of Theatrical Touring...................................1849. Mr. Jefferson and Rip Van Winkle........................................21310. Bringing the "Sleepy Piece" Home.......................................24111. A Fellow of Infinite Jest, of Most Excellent Fancy.....................26912. Are We So Soon Forgot?.................................................305Epilogue: A Shy Thing Is Comedy............................................350Notes......................................................................357Index......................................................................423

Chapter One

Cradled in the Profession "I may almost say that I was born in a theatre," Joseph Jefferson confides at the opening of his Autobiography. "At all events, my earliest recollections are entirely connected with one." In an age when the socially conscious considered such origins dclass, Jefferson embraced his thespian pedigree without a hint of self-consciousness or embarrassment. Nor was the man who had delivered the famous paean to the "Little Church Around the Corner" for its kindness to a deceased and outcast fellow actor one to apologize for his own theatrical roots.

Those roots reached down as far as anyone's in the American theatre. He was Joseph Jefferson III, but he was actually part of the fourth generation of performing Jeffersons. Such family connections constituted the core of early theatre. Recall the Crummles family of Nicholas Nickleby, whose playbill "in very large letters" announced "Mr. Vincent Crummles, Mrs. Vincent Crummles, Master Crummles, Master P. Crummles, and Miss Crummles." The kinship basis of theatricals predated Dickens, reaching back to small itinerant troupes earlier in European history. It had been a family, the Hallams, which first brought professional theatricals to the British colonies in the 1750s. And the American frontier's westward march across the continent was accompanied by such barnstorming stage families as the Drakes and Chapmans.

Acting constituted a way of life. Wives acted alongside their husbands in this less patriarchal vocation. Indeed, they were among the few married women who could pursue a livelihood. Stage children performed among cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents. A multigenerational theatrical family could cast parts for the entire age range found in many melodramas. Even if they had wanted to, children might find it difficult to move outside the theatre, for the theatrical world was tightly bound, with few occasions for regular outside contacts. Parents' frequent travel denied children the usual clutch of permanent childhood friends. Grammar school education often gave way to the informal tutorials of the road. Their pertinent education occurred in the theatre. Children grew up poking around dressing rooms and wings, eavesdropping on the endless anecdotes of veteran players, literally and figuratively inhaling the greasepaint. It was an intoxicating environment. Add to this-less pleasantly -the ever-present drone of antitheatricality in Anglo-American culture, which drove actors to close ranks. This powerful sense of community seemed to hold children within its orb, even as some actor fathers (Junius Brutus Booth, for instance) pointedly advised their children to seek careers outside the theatre. More often, an acting career was an unstated assumption. "I can't even tell you when it was first decided that I was to go on the stage," Ellen Terry, the storied English beauty of the later Victorian stage recalled, "but I expect it was when I was born, for in those days theatrical folk did not imagine that their children could do anything but follow their parents' professions."

The Jefferson clan of Joe's childhood vividly illustrated the family basis of theatre. Fathers, mothers, and children acted, often from cradle to grave (in some cases a very early grave). Although members ventured forth periodically to work for other managers, most returned to the Jefferson troupe. Even after Joe had become a star in the 1860s and after the New York-centered theatre business no longer operated on kinship, he dutifully placed nearly all of his children at one time or another in his Rip Van Winkle productions.

Altogether, seven generations of Jeffersons labored in the theatre, reaching well into the twentieth century. Exact numbers are elusive, complicated by such questions as whether to include the branches of the various families the Jeffersons married into and those who acted for only a short time. The family genealogy tracing five generations indicates thirty-five members went on stage (not including their theatrical cousins, the Warrens).

Joe's great-grandfather, Thomas Jefferson (1728-1807), birthed the theatrical tradition. Family legend holds that as a young man he encountered the great David Garrick, who impressed by his rustic dash offered him a position. Jefferson performed with Garrick's Drury Lane Company in the 1750s, playing supporting roles in the Shakespearean productions Garrick so notably revived. Jefferson arrived during an efflorescence of English theatre, when the comedies of manners of Goldsmith and Sheridan graced the Georgian stage. Jefferson, admittedly, played a secondary role in this new Augustan age. His strengths lay in his versatility, strong declamation, and a superficial resemblance to Garrick (sufficient to allow him to be sometimes accepted as a substitute for the master). Most of his career, however, was spent away from the theatrical center of London, traveling with itinerant troupes in the provinces, and, increasingly, in managing his own theatre in Plymouth. Thomas Jefferson possessed the "docile amiability and droll humour" that would characterize many of his progeny. And as with his more famous descendants, only the imminence of death would drag him from the stage.

It was to Jefferson's second wife, a "Miss May," that Joseph Jefferson I (1774-1832) was born. After appearing on his father's Plymouth stage as a boy, Joseph headed to America in 1795. Charles Powell of the Boston Theatre, who had put Jefferson under contract and paid his way to America, was out of business by the time he arrived. Fortunately, Jefferson received an invitation to join the John Street Theatre Company in New York; in 1798 he moved to its successor, the Park. The Park's managers, William Dunlap and John Hodgkinson, were among the most important figures in early American theatre. Hodgkinson, the American stage's foremost player, was contentious and unscrupled, but he provided Jefferson an opportunity to advance in his line of low comedy. Jefferson spent five years at the Park, after which he was invited to join Philadelphia's Chestnut Street Theatre, where he stayed for many years. Jefferson debated the move, cautious about risking the popularity he enjoyed in New York and uncertain whether he could win the hearts of Philadelphians. In the end he "plucked up a manly spirit" and accepted.

It was a good move. The Philadelphia he found was then the second-largest city in the country, with some 200,000 residents who enjoyed living in perhaps the most beautiful and well-planned major town in the nation. Moreover, the Chestnut Street Theatre was then in the process of becoming one of the country's venerated houses under managers William Warren and William B. Wood. Indeed, Philadelphia during the 1820s temporarily surpassed New York as the theatrical center of the nation. The new theatre that replaced the one which burned in 1820 offered theatergoers a convenient location less than a block from Independence Hall and an elegant marble-columned front. Here, out from the shadow of Hodgkinson, Jefferson earned his greatest acclaim. Part of a company finely fashioned for comedy (though presenting the usual range of plays), Jefferson possessed the versatility necessary for the diverse repertoire of stock. Chestnut Street manager William Wood recalled that in just one season Jefferson performed three characters in Sheridan's School for Scandal, an unusual flexibility for a low comedian. Further, as a machinist Jefferson constructed intricate bits of stage wizardry from English models.

"Old Jefferson," as he was called (for his frequent and celebrated portrayal of old men), was the "reigning favourite of the Philadelphia theatre for a longer period than any other actor ever attached to the city," claimed later Chestnut Street manager and theatre chronicler Frederick Wemyss. Of slight build, Joseph Jefferson I was more handsome than his grandson. An illustration of him in his role as Solus in Every One Has His Faults shows a magisterial figure with a Grecian nose and somewhat imperious gaze. An actor "formed in Nature's merriest mood-a genuine son of Momus," Jefferson knew all the stage tricks. Antebellum novelist John Pendleton Kennedy recalled Jefferson's habit of declaiming his opening line from behind the curtain "to herald his appearance, and instantly the whole audience set up a shout." Jefferson's popularity and name led to an acquaintanceship with the Sage of Monticello; the two men speculated on possible family ties in the distant past.

Beloved by actors and audiences alike, Jefferson enjoyed the double fortune of a constant wife and bountiful children. Jefferson wed Euphemia Fortune, who adopted the stage and became part of the Chestnut Street Company. Of their nine children, seven followed their parents on stage. Although he was acclaimed in his career and content at home for much of his life, his final few years brought professional decline and private heartache, which were only too typical of the vagaries of theatrical life at that time. The Chestnut Street Theatre fell victim to the common afflictions of stock companies: fire, a fickle public, constant pressure of bills and creditors, the expenses of touring to Baltimore and Washington, and personal bickering among management. Jefferson's deepest wound came from being elbowed aside in the public's affection by the younger players of the company. When his final two benefit performances of the season-which produced a significant portion of a player's yearly income- earned scarcely enough to cover expenses, Jefferson, formerly the people's choice, had had enough. Devastated and demoralized, he viewed the indifference as a personal affront from the entire Philadelphia community. "I am not wanted here any longer," Jefferson declared, and he quit Philadelphia never to return.

Between the two most acclaimed Jeffersons, Josephs I and III, came the Jefferson noted more for affability than dramatic genius. Joseph Jefferson II (1804-1842), like most of his siblings, mounted the stage as a youngster and moved on to dramatic apprenticeships. But his attraction to acting was subordinate to his love of drawing and architecture, and his modest place in theatre history comes as a talented scenic artist. At the Walnut Street Theatre the middle Jefferson accomplished some spectacular effects. For the forgettable melodrama Undine he contrived "a huge flying fish and a bridge that changed into a 'car drawn by horses' amid atmospheric displays of water and moonlight." As a performer he, like his father, was most accomplished at playing old men. This curiosity-repeated again in his son's portrayal of Rip Van Winkle and Caleb Plummer-bespoke the essential strength of the Jeffersons as character actors.

In 1826 Joseph Jefferson II married Cornelia Thoms Burke, a widow eight years his senior. Cornelia's background was entwined with the revolutionary history of the Caribbean, her family having narrowly escaped the St. Domingue slave uprising of 1804. After landing in Charleston, Cornelia found an early talent as a vocalist, and a career on stage was launched. Her portrait reveals a dark-featured woman, heavy browed and large-boned. Portraits can deceive, but hers leaves an impression of a formidable woman, perhaps deficient in warmth, but if so, it was the excusable by-product of a life where survival itself remained the paramount goal.

Cornelia's first husband, Irish comedian Thomas Burke, died a wastrel's death in the mid-1820s, leaving her with a young son-Charles Burke-to raise. She married Jefferson II in 1826. Joe Jefferson III, their first and only son, was born in Philadelphia on 20 February 1829.

Imagining a Childhood

Born less than a year before his grandfather broke with the Chestnut Street Company, Joe, along with his parents, joined other family members in following the patriarch to Baltimore and Washington. While just a toddler, Joe discovered the footloose nature of theatre life.

Scattered playbills, newspaper accounts, and a few stage annals offer glimpses into Joe's childhood career, but his remarkable Autobiography remains our chief witness. Jefferson's description of his childhood trails the sort of wispy nostalgia common to Victorian memoirs. No storm clouds threaten his juvenile idyll. Only when baby sister Cornelia stole some of the previously undivided attention of doting adults does Joe recall any childish dismay, a lapse into jealousy at which he later pokes fun. The modern reader's skepticism about such roseate recollections (what of parents' irregular income? exhausting travel? social snubs?) is apt to be misplaced-at least in Jefferson's case. Jefferson lived the dream of most children. The backstage was his playhouse. Stage props loomed magically around him: "In a dark corner stood a robbers' cave with an opening through which old Ali Baba used to lug the bags of gold he had stolen from the Forty Thieves." The backstage warren's nest of wings and flats lay beneath an even more intriguing clutter of suspended artifacts, "boats and baskets, tubs and chandeliers, and those sure tokens of bad weather, the thunder-drum and rain-box."

Nor, despite his parents' downward mobility, can one say that Joe was the son of privation. His birthplace was a (rented) substantial three-story brick Georgian structure at Sixth and Spruce streets in central Philadelphia. His father, a yeoman of the theatre, was capable of providing a housekeeper/nurse for his children, Mary, whom Joe considered a beloved second mother (a more kindred spirit, his autobiography suggests, than his real mother). And it is doubtful that young Joe ever felt the sting of social disapproval. He belonged, after all, to the Jeffersons of Philadelphia, a boy whose grandfather once knew few equals on stage and lived an unstained personal life. The remarkable equanimity and emotional maturity Jefferson displayed throughout his life must be attributed at least in part to this gift of youthful security.

Joe attempted to balance this recitation of childhood bliss with a generally self-effacing depiction of his juvenile acting career and a not-very-convincing attempt to portray himself as something of a Huck Finn miscreant. "I was one of those restless, peevish children who, no matter what they have, always want something else," he tells us. "The last new toy was always dissected to see what made it go, and the anticipated one kept me awake all night." As an eight-year-old he managed to get some grammar school experience while in New York, perhaps the longest stretch of formal education in his life. More proudly he describes falling in with a group of rowdies whose pastime was painting gravestones. He softens this vandalism by admitting fears of ghosts lurking about the cemetery at night. The childhood persona Jefferson claimed as an adult was not so different from that of his stage Rip: mischievous, undisciplined, but essentially good-hearted. Moreover, when his autobiography appeared in 1889 Jefferson's public would have immediately recognized its Twainsian qualities and delighted in Joe's wholesome deviltry.

It would have been surprising had Jefferson chosen any career but the theatre. The gravitational tug toward the stage within acting families was nearly inescapable. Joe knew little else. He was, simply put, stage struck at the most tender of ages. Perhaps the affliction had its subliminal roots in having been carried before the footlights as the dressing-room baby, an infant prop. It may have been nurtured in the moments stolen from his nurse's supervision when he peered through the greenroom door at figures splendidly costumed-performers. The earliest surviving playbill listing young Joe dates from a 23 November 1832 production of The Legion of Honor at the Washington Theatre. The next documented appearance was the following January, when still shy of age four he was Julio in the "celebrated Melo-drama" The Hunter of the Alps.

Early Infatuations The tragedies and melodramas in which young Joe was most often paraded were standard stage fare. But he also crossed paths with two novelties of the American stage: tableaux vivants and minstrelsy, the first of which remains an intriguing footnotes to American theatre while the second quickly moved into the theatrical mainstream.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0300122322
• ISBN 13: 9780300122329
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 448