Personal Essay: Edwin Booth, Agent

By THOMAS CARON

Thomas Caron

Sanford Meisner said of today’s actors that they are very lucky. Why? Because so little is asked of them.

My preoccupation with the players of the 19th century began when the Journal of William Charles Macready was on the reading list for incoming students at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre. Back in the day, an actor of any standing was obligated to maintain a repertory of roles at the ready. In the course of a single season, one could expect to be called on to play a wide variety of parts, often at the last minute, as the management saw fit. Actors in search of an engagement would carry a “repertoire card” of the roles that they had committed to memory.

I couldn’t help but wonder if I would have had the discipline and the mental capacity to have thousands of lines of Shakespeare at my beck and call at all times. I was determined to find out. I was also motivated by the awareness that within a typical rehearsal period of four to six weeks, it’s only possible to scratch the surface of the Bard’s profundity. I figured if I set about learning King Lear’s lines then, in my early thirties, imagine how prepared I would be when I was actually old enough to play the part.

I was living in Union City, N.J. For much of the mid-1980s I made it my practice to get up at dawn, head for the Palisades and pace the bluffs above the Hudson, repeating the lines of the latest part I was learning, and reviewing the ones I had already memorized. Like a true player of the past, I had a card printed with the names of the characters I was prepared to personate at the drop of a hat. They were Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, Richard III, Richard II, Timon, Othello, Iago, Leontes, Pericles, Angelo, Iachimo, Troilus, and Caliban.

I did not have to wait long to play Lear. As a result of having learned the lines in advance, I was cast as the mad king at the age of 36 in a production held under a tent at a Renaissance fair in upstate New York. Two shows a day. (Try doing that in your latter days!)

There occurred another unexpected outcome. To commemorate having attained my goal of mastering the texts of so many parts, I made a pilgrimage to Cambridge, Mass., to place a bouquet and my repertoire card on the grave of Edwin Booth, the first of what would turn out to be not infrequent visits to the gentle knoll on Anemone Path, when I found myself some years later managing a modest theater company in nearby Concord.

A month or so later, there was a message on my answering machine from an anxious-sounding Englishman. Apologizing for his forwardness, he explained that he had found my card by Booth’s headstone. How it had endured the elements and groundkeepers’ rounds was mystifying to me. He thought that we might have much in common, and proposed that we meet for a drink.

It turned out he was an American who had been raised in England and lived there. He shared my devotion to the memory of the Booths, so great that he had developed a solo show in which he played John Wilkes. In due course he told me he’d be directing King Lear, which would first be performed in Oxford, before moving on to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. He invited me to play Edmond.

Somewhat self-conscious of my decidedly un-British tone of voice, I resolved to enunciate my words with exceptional clarity. The day came when I was approached by a woman who had seen through me. “I knew you were an American,” she said, “by the way you pronounced d-u-k-e.” I was saying dook, as befitting John Wayne. The Duke. Whereas the proper pronunciation across the pond is dyook.

A most memorable experience. The Scotsman complimented my performance, made possible, I like to think, by the intercession of the soul of Mr. Booth.

Thomas Caron

Player Thomas Caron has made his home in Shanghai for nearly twenty years. He is the founder and artistic director of Shanghai Shakespeare, a mostly Mandarin speaking troupe now entering its second decade. He received his training at the hands of legendary Group Theatre alumni Harold Clurman, Sanford Meisner, Robert Lewis, and Stella Adler. He has played Hamlet three times, King Lear three times, Macbeth, Timon of Athens and Leontes in The Winter’s Tale (both twice), and many other leading Shakespearean and classical roles. In 2024 he had the honor of performing his solo show, Macready, in London, and at the Macready Theatre in Rugby.