Rosalie wishes they would stop talking. Edwin’s voice is so intense. “ ‘Then bid me kill myself, and I will do it.’ ” It’s romantic, or it would be if Mother and Asia would be quiet, if Richard weren’t so evil and Edwin not her little brother.

Finally, finally John appears. “ ‘Thrice is he armed that has his quarrel just; And he but naked, though locked up in steel, Whose conscience with injustice is corrupted: The very weight of Gloster’s guilt shall crush him . . .’ ”

Rosalie hears Mother catching her breath. She thinks she knows why. “He looks so much like Father,” Rosalie whispers. The resemblance is so strong as to be startling.

But Mother says no, he looks like Edwin. So very much like Edwin.

This isn’t true. John is taller. John is handsomer. The handsomest man in America, some are saying. A woman in the audience compares him to a new-blown rose, its petals still beaded with the morning dew.

—

In future, it will be a rare review that doesn’t make these comparisons: Edwin to Father, John to Father and Edwin. Few argue for the sons over the legend of the father, but between the brothers things fall out more evenly—Edwin the better elocutionist, John with more fire. Edwin with more poetry, John with more passion.

Of course, Edwin is working under the handicap of so often performing drunk.

—

On this particular night, J. H. Stoddart, the actor playing Buckingham, declares both performances splendid. “I shall never forget the fight between Richard and Richmond in the last act, an encounter which was terrible in its savage realism,” he says.

That fight ran so long and was rendered with such ferocity that certain members of the audience feared they were about to witness actual and serious injury. Certain members like Rosalie.

Edwin

xii

Edwin’s career benefits from a lucky advantage with regard to timing. Back in 1853, only a year after Father’s death, the legendary tragedian Edwin Forrest retired from the stage. Forrest had gained early notice through his popular Indian roles, particularly the last of the Wampanoags; shot to notoriety by rudely hissing William Macready as he played Macbeth, a feud that later culminated in the deadly Astor Opera House riot; responded to the exposure of his own infidelities by accusing his wife of the same (she claimed he had mistaken a phrenology examination for love-making); brutally whipped one of the men he held responsible for the destruction of his marriage, a man in such ill health he was utterly unable to defend himself; sued his wife for divorce in a six-week trial the public followed avidly and which he eventually lost; and then lost a later suit for the assault. He was tired.