Edwin Forrest — What Makes a Man's Life Large or Small?

Acting Shows That a Man Wants to Be Large

"People have acted and people have watched acting," Ellen Reiss wrote in The Right Of, "But never before was it seen that when a person takes on a role, the biggest hope of everyone's life is concerned." And that hope is in the great sentences by Mr. Siegel she quotes from a lesson he gave to actors:

According to Aesthetic Realism acting shows that you don't have to be fettered to yourself. You can be other people .... [Acting] is a way of being somebody else for the purpose of coming back home immediately. You take a trip in order to find out who you are.

Forrest did so playing Shakespeare's tragic heroes such as Othello and King Lear, and persons in history fervently struggling against tyranny, such as Spartacus in The Gladiator, and the role for which he became most famous, about which Mr. Siegel wrote in The Right Of when he commented on "the conspicuously unfettered Edwin Forrest, who stirred America with his portrayal of a sad and expressive Indian chief in Metamora."

Forrest was impelled as an actor to become another person with all of himself. Moody writes, "Forrest never walked through a part. Either he used full steam or he did not play." And his "full steam" often had tremendous precision.

In accounts of his acting, one sees the truth of the Aesthetic Realism principle stated by Mr. Siegel, "All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves." For instance, Moody says that although Forrest was "not of more than average height, spectators invariably were amazed at his seemingly gigantic proportions...and to see a giant move with such matchless grace gave them an uncommon thrill." These are the opposites of power and grace which, when together, make for a mighty effect—as in Forrest's portrayal of Jack Cade and Rolla.

There are description of Forrest's booming and penetrating voice, and yet, "in the...tender passages he could sing in a soft tremolo that would move the hardest heart...The world has probably never seen a more effective speaker of words," says Moody.

Edwin Forrest's powerful effect arose from the most careful and exacting intellectual work. Richard Moody tells this—and it is large and small working beautifully together in a man:

He probed the play texts, particularly those of Shakespeare, uncovering the layers of meaning...Other actors marveled at the energy he applied to a microscopic and painstaking examination of a single phrase, or even a single word. No detail was neglected.

Edwin Forrest was born and raised one of six children in Philadelphia, and life was hard for the family who struggled financially. His schooling was irregular, but at fourteen he appeared in a play at the Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia, and from then on ardently pursued a career as an actor. At 20 in Albany, he worked with the great English actor Edmund Kean. He loved Kean's fire, the way, as Moody writes, he "penetrated the inner life of the characters." Kean valued Forrest's work, too, and encouraged him.

One year later, in 1826, at the age of 21, Forrest made his important New York debut at the Bowery Theatre, playing Othello, and was a great success from then on. This is a portrait of him by Thomas Sully. "Forrest," writes Mr. Siegel, "generally stood for passion in the art of acting."

Something that made Forrest's life large was his feeling that there should be plays by American authors. In 1828 he posted a notice in the press offering $500, "To the author of the best Tragedy, in five acts, of which the hero...shall be an aboriginal of this country."

The winner was Metamora by John Augustus Stone, about the chief of the Wampanoag tribe and his desperate attempt to stave off being overrun by the white man. Audiences were thrilled by a new sight of a native American man—his size and depth. There was Forrest as Metamora, "poised like a bronze statue on a rocky crag, the ships on fire in the harbor," and the firm, wide way the Indian chief speaks. When he is confronted by the council of Englishmen who have ill-will, Metamora says:

Metamora. Ye had been tossed about like small things upon the face of the great waters, and there was no earth for your feet to rest on...The red man took you as a little child and opened the door of his wigwam. The keen blast of the north howled in the leafless wood, but the Indian covered you with his broad right hand...Your little ones smiled when they heard the loud voice of the storm, for your fires were warm and the Indian was the white man's friend.

But Metamora's men are overrun, and in a heart-rending scene near the end, he embraces his lovely wife Nahmeeokee, tells her to look to the sky, and then stabs her so she will never know "white man's bondage...free as the air she lived—pure as the snow she died." In the final scene Metamora is shot. So effective was Forrest's acting that once, when many Indian-Americans were in the audience, they were:

...so convinced of its reality that they rose and chanted a dirge in honor of the great chief who was dying on the stage.

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