“I’m coming,” Edwin said, and having said so, he’s able to rise. He leaves the dressing room and takes his place on the stage. The actors around him are stiff with tension.

One of the hallmarks of Edwin’s Hamlet is that he makes no entrance. As the curtain opens on the second scene, it often takes the audience time to locate him among the busy Danish court. He sits unobtrusively off to one side, under the standard of the great Raven of Denmark, his head bowed. “Among a gaudy court,” a critic had written of an earlier performance, “ ‘he alone with them, alone,’ easily prince, and nullifying their effect by the intensity and color of his gloom.” On this particular night he seems a frail figure, slight and dark and unremarkable save for the intensity and color of his gloom.

The audience finds him in his chair. Claudius is already speaking when someone begins to clap. And then someone else, and then someone else. The audience comes to their feet. The next day’s review in The Spirit of the Times reports nine cheers, then six, then three, then nine more. The play cannot continue and as they clap, many of them, men and women both, begin to sob.

Edwin stands and comes forward into the footlights. The audience sees that Edwin, too, is weeping. It makes them cheer him louder. It’s as if he’s taken on all the suffering of the nation and is carrying it for them, along with the heavy share that is his alone.

Few actors, if any, have embodied so much and been so beloved. His fellow players gather tightly in, clapping their hands.

Hamlet has his father’s ghost, so why not Edwin? In the midst of the applause, he smells his father’s pipe and his father’s whisky and beyond that, the forest of his childhood home. He hears his father’s voice beneath the clapping, low but close and clear. “There, boy,” his father says. “There, boy. Your foot is on your native heath.”

viii

What is it like to love the most hated man in the country? Loving John is something the world simply will not have. Not loving John is something Rosalie and Asia simply cannot do.

Edwin tries. For many years, John’s name is forbidden in Edwin’s presence. A young actress asks him one day how many brothers and sisters he has. She realizes her mistake the moment she makes it by the sudden hush that falls over the room. But Edwin is kind. “Let’s see,” he says, and he counts each name on his fingers. John is not among them.