Edwin Booth — What Makes Us Truly Important?

The Opposites Make One Important

In "Mind and Importance" Eli Siegel says the word "important" means "that which carries something to us," and continues, "we're important because we carry much weight." Booth's acting took on increasing weight and he had a powerful effect.

For example, when Julia Ward Howe attended a performance in Boston of Richelieu (pictured left), upon Booth's first lines she leaned over and whispered to her husband, "This is the real thing!" And Eleanor Ruggles writes about Booth's acting Sir Giles Overreach in Massinger's A New Way to Pay Old Debts, in the death scene:

As his body thrilled in a horrible spasm and pitched face forward to the floor, the whole length of it seeming to hit the stage at once, and there continuing to twitch and quiver, so strong a sense of evil poured out of it that half the [audience] turned away their eyes . sick and shaken.

In time, along with this passion, Booth's acting had a terrific sense of control—a quietude invested with such great feeling and meaning, it was arresting.

Eli Siegel stated the most important sentence about beauty and what people are hoping for in their lives in this great principle: "All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves."

In The Right Of #212, subtitled "All the Arts," Mr. Siegel writes greatly about the opposites of passion and control, and he speaks of two American actors. Edwin Forrest, a contemporary of Booth's, "generally stood for passion in the art of acting," writes Mr. Siegel, and "Another Edwin, Edwin Booth...represented meditation." One critic said that quality in Booth, his quiet intensity, made him seem in the soliloquies to speak "from inside the listener." Booth began to act with a simplicity that was new in tragedy—he seemed more like a person one might meet. Yet he was never ordinary at the expense of grandeur; he conveyed a great sense of humanity and the soul of man.

At the Winter Garden Theatre in New York, Booth produced a series of classical revivals unlike anything that had been. He played Hamlet, Othello, Shylock, Iago, Romeo. He was impelled to have people like Shakespeare, and they did—these sumptuous productions were the hit of the day. Booth insisted on using the original Shakespearean texts, which in the 18th century had been altered and cut into versions untrue to Shakespeare. All his life Booth had a reverence for Shakespeare. He once wrote that Shakespeare "says scarcely anything that is not true and good." How much he would love Eli Siegel, the person who understood Shakespeare and humanity; and who, I'm so grateful to say, taught me to love Shakespeare honestly, too.

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