Astor Place Riot

The Astor Place Riot occurred May 10, 1849 at the Astor Place Opera House in New York City and resulted in 25 killed and at least 100 injured. [Nigel Cliff, "The Shakespeare Riots" (New York: Random House, 2007), 228, 241] It was the deadliest to that date of a number of civic disturbances pitting immigrants and nativists against each other and ultimately against the upper classes (who controlled the police and militia) in the urban United States of the 19th century, particularly in Manhattan. It was the first time the National Guard had been called out and had shot into a crowd of American citizens, and it led to the creation of the first police force armed with deadly weapons. [Nigel Cliff, "The Shakespeare Riots" (New York: Random House, 2007), 241, 245] Yet its genesis was a dispute between Edwin Forrest, the first great American star, and William Charles Macready, the greatest English actor of his generation, which largely revolved around which of them was better than the other at acting the major roles of Shakespeare.

1. Background

The riot, and its seemingly absurd origin in a feud between two actors, can be best understood by appreciating that, in the first half of the nineteenth century, theater was mass entertainment - in most places, the only form of entertainment on offer - and that rival stars amassed an intensely loyal following. It followed eighty or more years - since the Stamp Act riots of 1765, when an entire theatre was torn apart while British actors were performing on stage - when British actors touring around America had found themselves, because of their prominence and the lack of other visiting targets, the focus of often violent anti-British anger. [Nigel Cliff, "The Shakespeare Riots" (New York: Random House, 2007, 8, 125-9]

The fact that both actors were specialists in Shakespeare can be ascribed to the godlike worship of Shakespeare in the nineteenth century as the figurehead of Anglo-Saxon culture. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his journal that beings on other planets probably called the Earth Shakespeare. [Nigel Cliff, "The Shakespeare Riots" (New York: Random House, 2007), 264] Shakespeare's plays were not just the favorites of the educated: across America, towns, mines, and saloons were named after the Bard, and working men shouted out prompts in frontier theaters when the actors forgot their lines. In gold rush California, miners whiled away the harsh winter months by sitting around campfires and acting out Shakespeare's plays from memory; his words were on the tip of everyone's tongue, from every echelon of society. [Nigel Cliff, "The Shakespeare Riots" (New York: Randnom House, 2007), 13-18, 260-263]

2. Genesis

The roots of the riot were multifold, but had three main strands. (1) A dispute between William Charles Macready, the greatest English actor of his generation, and Edwin Forrest, the first real American star, former friends whose understanding fell foul of theatrical rivalries and the poisonous Anglo-American relations of the 1840s, and became a notorious bone of contention in the English and (particularly) the American media, which filled columns with discussions of their respective merits. (2) A growing sense of cultural alienation from Britain among mainly working-class Americans, along with Irish immigrants; though nativist Americans were hostile to Irish immigrants, both found a common cause against the British. (3) A class struggle between those groups, who largely supported Forrest, and the largely Anglophile upper classes, who supported Macready. The two actors became figureheads for Britain and America, and their rivalry came to encapsulate two opposed views about the future of American culture. It was an irony that both were famous as Shakespearean actors: in an America that had yet to establish its own theatrical traditions, the way to prove its cultural prowess was to do Shakespeare as well as the British, and even to claim that Shakespeare, had he been alive at the time, would have been, at heart at least, an American. [Nigel Cliff, "The Shakespeare Riots" (Random House, 2007), 120-1]

3. Proximate causes

Macready and Forrest had each toured each other's country twice before the riot broke out. On Macready's second visit to America, Forrest had taken to pursuing him around the country and appearing in the same plays to challenge him. Given the tenor of the time, most newspapers supported the "home-grown" star Forrest. [Nigel Cliff, "The Shakespeare Riots" (New York: Random House, 2007)] On Forrest's second visit to London, he was less popular than on his first trip, and he could only explain it to himself by deciding that Macready, the leading English actor, had maneuvered against him. He went to watch Macready playing Hamlet and at his most famous point, stood up and loudly hissed him. The ensuing scandal assumed ridiculous dimensions and followed Macready on his third and last trip to America, where at one point the carcass of half a dead sheep was thrown at him on the stage. [Nigel Cliff, "The Shakespeare Riots" (New York: Random House, 2007), 150-164, 176]

By this point Edwin Forrest had become increasingly inflexible in his role as a star, an affliction that had already visited the older Macready, who hated the theater world because it prevented him from becoming a respectable gentleman. Despite the fact that Forrest had married an English wife, he justified his attacks on Macready by whipping up his friends and the public, in a series of articles attacking Macready in the newspapers. Things mounted still further when he instigated divorce proceedings against his English wife for immoral conduct. Because he aligned his wife with the dissolute Anglophile upper classes of New York, his patriotic friends became more determined to make a stand on his behalf. [Nigel Cliff, "The Shakespeare Riots" (New York: Random House, 2007), 165-184] Among several rabble-rousers who espoused Forrest's cause, the most prominent was Ned Buntline, a dime novelist, muck-raking journalist and thug for hire. [Nigel Cliff, "The Shakespeare Riots" (Random House: New York, 2007, 196-9]

When the two rivals arrived in New York City, their proxies had already turned the contest into the deciding match in a cultural war. Forrest's roots among working people and the gangs of New York ran deep: he had made his debut at the Bowery Theatre, which had come to cater mostly to a working class audience, drawn largely from the notorious, immigrant-heavy Five Points section of lower Manhattan a few blocks to the west. Forrest's muscular frame and impassioned delivery was deemed admirably "American" by his working-class fans. Wealthier theatergoers, to avoid mingling with the immigrants and the Five Points crowd, had built the Astor Place Opera House at the junction of Broadway - then the purlieu of the upper classes - and the Bowery - the working-class entertainment strip. With its dress code of kid gloves and white vests, the very existence of the Astor Place was taken as a provocation by populist Americans for whom the theater was traditionally the regular gathering place for all classes. [Nigel Cliff, "The Shakespeare Riots " (New York: Random House, 2007), xiv-xvi] As the new theater proved incapable of supporting itself on seasonal society subscriptions, it opened itself to less elevated entertainment, which at the time included Shakespeare, and it was at the time known as the Astor Place Theatre. [Nigel Cliff, "The Shakespeare Riots " (Random House, 2007), 205]

4. The riot

On May 7, 1849, three nights before the climactic riot, Forrest's supporters bought hundreds of tickets to the top level of the Astor Place theater, and they brought Macready's performance of Macbeth to a grinding halt by throwing all sorts of missiles, including rotten eggs, potatoes, old shoes, stinking bottles of asafetida, and seats ripped up in the theater, onto the stage. On May 10, having been persuaded to go on again by a petition signed by 48 well-heeled New Yorkers, including authors Herman Melville and Washington Irving, Macready reprised Macbeth. A few blocks away, Forrest was also playing Macbeth at the huge Broadway Theatre. [Nigel Cliff, "The Shakespeare Riots" (New York: Random House, 2007), xvi-xx]

On the day of the riot, the National Guard had already been alerted by the new Whig administration and was amassing in reserve. Posters went up all over the city inviting working men and American patriots to show their feelings to the British. By the time the play opened, up to 20,000 people filled the streets around the theater. Ned Buntline and his young troops set up relays to bombard the theater with stones, and fought running battles with the police. They and others inside tried, but failed, to set fire to the building. As the theater fell in on their heads, the audience were in a state of siege; stubbornly defiant, Macready finished the play and only then slipped out in disguise. Fearing they had lost control of the city, the authorities called out the troops, who were jostled, attacked and injured, and finally lined up and, after unheeded warnings, opened fire at point blank range. Several who were killed were innocent bystanders. In saloons and shops around the district, dozens of injured and dead were laid out, and the next morning pitiful scenes saw mothers and wives combing the blood-soaked stones and searching morgues for their loved ones. [Nigel Cliff, "The Shakespeare Riots" (New York: Random House, 2007), 209-33]

Reported the "New York Tribune": "As one window after another cracked, the pieces of bricks and paving stones rattled in on the terraces and lobbies, the confusion increased, till the Opera House resembled a fortress besieged by an invading army rather than a place meant for the peaceful amusement of civilized community." The police force could not quell the riots so the National Guard from the Seventh Regiment, already mobilized and prepared, was called in. Most of the rioters did not disperse even as the soldiers assumed the firing position. To the surprise of many, even among the soldiers, the order was quickly given to fire directly into the crowd.

The next night, May 11, a meeting attended by thousands was called in City Hall Park, with speakers crying out for revenge against the authorities whose actions they held responsible for the fatalities at the "Massacre Place Opera House". During the scrum, a young boy was killed. An angry crowd headed for the Opera House and fought running battles with mounted troops, but this time the authorities quickly got the upper hand. [Nigel Cliff, "The Shakespeare Riots" (New York: Random House, 2007, 234-9)]

5. Consequences

According to Nigel Cliff in The Shakespeare Riots, the riots furthered the process of class alienation and segregation in New York City and America; part of that process was that the entertainment world separated into "respectable" and "working-class" orbits. As professional actors gravitated to respectable theaters and vaudeville houses responded by doing skits on "serious" Shakespeare, Shakespeare was gradually removed from popular culture into a new category of highbrow entertainment, and Americans forgot why their forbears took to the streets in their thousands, over several decades, to support their actors of Shakespeare against the English. On a positive note, despite his travails, Edwin Forrest's heroic style of acting led directly to the matinee idol school of early Hollywood, of performers like John Barrymore; his attacks on his English rival were unexpectedly lethal, but in some ways his struggle with English acting gave birth to the star system and to American mass culture.

Depictions in Literature

The riot is a key turning point in the plot of Anya Seton's novel "Dragonwyck" (1944).
The Interpretation of Murder (2006) by Jed Rubenfield contains discussion with Sigmund Freud about an Astor Place Riot in which he incorrectly suggests that theater goers rioted over whether Hamlet should be a feminine or masculine character. The book is a work of historical fiction. The historical fiction play Two Shakespearian Actors deals mainly with the event surrounding and leading up to the riot.