But keeping that promise is now the only thing Edwin can still do for his father. He nags and begs and barters until June gives in. On April 25th, 1853, he plays for the first time the role that will come to define him. He wears the somber costume, the dark tights, the short, black cloak. The somber demeanor comes easy. Old Spudge is there to cheer him on in the role of Polonius.

Whenever Edwin remembers, he throws in a gesture. Don’t just mouth your lines. Do something! Mostly he forgets. June is unimpressed with his performance and won’t allow a repeat.

But a young critic, Ferdinand Cartwright Ewer, leaves the San Francisco theater in a fever of excitement and goes to his newspaper offices to write a long review. Edwin Booth, he writes, has made Hamlet “the easy, undulating, flexible thing” Shakespeare intended.

Tastes were changing. Edwin’s Hamlet, as it developed over the years, was subtle where his father had been theatrical, contained where his father had been expansive, and natural where his father had declaimed. As Edwin aged, his Hamlet would become less agonized and more stoic—the embodiment of a good man enduring. This was a Hamlet who knew how his story would end, but moved forward anyway with courage and dignity. June may not have liked it, but Ewer says, in that very first review of Edwin’s very first Hamlet, that, in concept if not in polish, Edwin has already surpassed his father.

Lincoln and Clay

Having been led to allude to domestic slavery so frequently already, I am unwilling to close without referring more particularly to Mr. Clay’s views and conduct in regard to it. He ever was on principle and in feeling, opposed to slavery. The very earliest, and one of the latest public efforts of his life, separated by a period of more than fifty years, were both made in favor of gradual emancipation of the slaves in Kentucky. He did not perceive, that on a question of human right, the negroes were to be excepted from the human race. And yet Mr. Clay was the owner of slaves. Cast into life where slavery was already widely spread and deeply seated, he did not perceive, as I think no wise man has perceived, how it could be at once eradicated, without producing a greater evil, even to the cause of human liberty itself.

—Abraham Lincoln, 1852

Junius Brutus Booth is not the only luminary to die in 1852. The Great Compromiser, Henry Clay, Speaker of the House, Secretary of State, lawyer to Aaron Burr, and fierce critic of Andrew Jackson, a man whose shadow stretched from the presidency of Thomas Jefferson to that of Millard Fillmore, also dies. Lincoln, who has been out of office now for three years, is given the honor of eulogizing him at the Illinois state capitol. Henry Clay is Lincoln’s ideal politician, a person who seeks common ground, a person who brokers peace.