While there have been several major scholarly contributions to our knowledge of Edwin Booth (e.g. L. Terry Oggel, Charles Shattuck, Daniel J. Watermeier), this is the first full account of Edwin Booth's life authored by a professional theatre historian in over a century. The text focuses only on Edwin (not the other Booths), and only on theatre (not on Lincoln's assassination), omitting embellishments. Two more biographies are in the works.
Bloom's prodigiously researched chronological biography covers Booth's untutored childhood, successes, marriages, theatres, managerial failures, earnings, tours with Lawrence Barrett and Helena Modjeska, and his club, The Players. Booth's moral weaknesses, including his self-absorption and his alcoholism, are on display in clear and crisp prose with humane judgements. Bloom addresses Booth's aspirations to high art without much inflection. This was the actor, we need to remember, who loved to take the stage as the protagonist of the melodramatic Richelieu, one of his most popular roles. But neither in the biography section nor in the ‘Performance History’ does Bloom delve deeply into Booth's acting.
The ‘Performance History’ is better described as a performance calendar, with review listings and extensive annotations of selected entries. This is a remarkable catalogue of Booth's performances – almost day-by-day – from 1849 to 1891. Here, amid the small-font calendar entries, a diligent reader can find excerpted letters and newspaper reviews about Booth's performances of, say, Hamlet or Richelieu. But the handling of Booth's acting will not satisfy those who have come to this book seeking vivid reasons for the actor's stature in US theatre history. Even Thomas Edison's recording of Booth performing Othello's speech to the Venetian senate gets no discussion. In it, readers today can at least hear a mellifluous baritone voice; idealizing, noble tones of premodernist performance; and an intelligent parsing of Shakespeare's language. (The recording can be found online or purchased from Naxos Audiobooks.) Also, critics in Booth's time reflected with discrimination on whether Booth's gifts included genius. We are not given insights into that conversation here.
Bloom's priority is to cover Booth's everyday life in documentable plenitude. The author asserts that ‘the past is knowable through a rigorous examination’ of period sources (p. 1). He has chosen to ignore critiques of positivism or the ways that we might see a theatre event amid a complex of cultural force fields and consider individual agency in relation to them. His focus on a major theatre artist is a welcome contribution to theatre studies, but I longed for more substantive cultural contextualizing, original insights into Booth's performances, and masterful syntheses from a scholar who knows Booth and the theatre well.
