Astor Place Riots
The most serious disorders ever connected with the American theatre occurred in 1849, although their origins can be traced back to 1826 when their two central figures, the American Edwin Forrest and the English actor William Charles Macready, both made debuts in New York. From the beginning both men, but especially the vain, jealous Forrest, perceived themselves as rivals, even though their styles were distinct and each attracted a somewhat different audience. Forrest's thunder and lightning acting appealed principally to the gallery and the pits, while Macready's more severe, formal methods pleased the boxes. When Forrest played London in 1845 he met with a cold reception, which he blamed on Macready. Early in 1846 both men were playing Edinburgh, and Forrest attended a Macready performance, sitting conspicuously in a box and hissing audibly. On Macready's 1849 visit to America, the English actor announced that he would perform Macbeth at the Astor Place theatre on May 7. Forrest promptly announced that he would play the same role on the same night at the Bowery Theatre. Many of Forrest's loyalists attended Macready's performance and created such a ruckus that the evening was a fiasco. Actors were pelted with rotten food, chairs were thrown onstage, and asafoetida thrown from the gallery. Macready wanted to cancel the rest of his New York engagement. A group of prominent citizens, led by Washington Irving, petitioned him to reconsider, so he agreed to appear again on May 10. While he was performing, a large horde of rabble, led by one E. Z. C. Judson, gathered to attack not only the theatre but also the homes of many of the men who had signed the petition. Judson, who wrote under the name Ned Buntline, was a founder of the Know‐Nothing Party and a notorious agitator. When the troublemakers approached the Astor Place theatre, they found it guarded by the police and the militia. Rather than retreat, the mob, armed with stones and clubs, assaulted their better‐armed opponents. In the ensuing melee, twenty‐two were killed and at least thirty‐six more injured, many seriously. Apart from a handful of radicals, most New Yorkers applauded Mayor Woodhull's firm handling of the rioters. Judson was later sentenced to a year's imprisonment for instigating the incident, but suspicion was widespread at the time and has remained that the real instigator was none other than Forrest. Albeit the whole ugly affair may have begun as a personal rivalry between two men, it quickly involved other issues. America had many Anglophiles, especially among the upper classes, but others still viewed England, thirty‐odd years after the War of 1812, with suspicion or enmity. Class distinctions also exacerbated the problem, as did seemingly simple aesthetic disagreements, although these were in no small part interwoven into the class differences. The Astor Place theatre never recovered from the incident, closing three years later. Nor did the Bowery remain a prime house, beginning its descent into a house of blue‐collar melodrama just two years later. Many students also date the start of Forrest's decline in popularity and vigor from this time, even if he remained an idol of the gallery gods for some while. The Astor Place Riots were the subject of Richard Nelson's Broadway drama Two Shakespearean Actors (1992).
