The critics are split in their judgments. One who favors Edwin says that Forrest represents “the biceps aesthetic; the tragic calves; the bovine drama; rant, roar, and rigmarole.” Later, when Edwin’s Hamlet is described as slightly feminine, Edwin will be pleased. That is just what he was going for.

Meanwhile, in Columbus, Georgia, moments before John is to go onstage and play Hamlet, Matthew Canning, his new manager, shoots him.

xix

John’s relatively short career as an actor is replete with accidents and illnesses. His energetic sword fighting will regularly result in injury, either to his opponent or himself. In the course of a single play, he will stab a fellow performer and fall on his own sword, bleeding copiously but continuing his scene.

He will suffer a voice-threatening bronchitis, a life-threatening streptococcal infection, and a large tumor on his neck. His extremely active love life will occasion bouts of venereal disease, and one lover, cast aside for her own sister, will slice open his face. And he will carry always the bullet from Canning’s gun in his body.

Asia first learns of the accident when she reads about it in the paper. One of the peculiarities of the Booth family is how often they communicate via article and review. The article has a winking sort of quality, a certain delicacy in the wording. Asia gathers that John has been shot in the buttocks. In fact, the bullet is in his thigh.

By the time she rushes to Mother with the news, Edwin has already wired. He’s expected to live, Edwin says consolingly, but rather than calm Asia down, this alarms her. Nothing in the article suggested the injury was ever anything but humorous. She understands now that it’s much worse than she’d thought.

How exactly it happened remains unclear. Either John or Canning was careless with Canning’s gun. Either John had taken the gun from Canning’s pocket and it had fired as Canning tried to recover it, or Canning was laughingly threatening the whole troupe to perform well or else, and had inadvertently hit the trigger. Or something entirely different. Accounts vary. Accounts vary wildly.

John was lucky that the bullet missed the femoral artery. He had an excellent doctor, who decided against removing it; it had gone too deep for that. The doctor cleaned and bandaged the wound, had John transported to his bed with instructions to remain there. The show went on, with John’s understudy playing Hamlet. John’s recuperation lasts several weeks.