Booth went into his dressing room to comfort his wife, Mary, who was in a state of great distress after hearing the shots. Before walking off of the stage and into the audience, Booth pointed to the left hand upper gallery and men around the assailant grabbed at the man with the revolver, preventing him from firing again. When a second shot rang out about three seconds later, Booth arose (or was in the process of rising when the second shot happened) and proceeded to walk calmly towards the direction of the shots. While speaking onstage, Booth heard a shot ring out.īooth and the audience remained unmoved the audience thinking the anachronistic gunshot was the result of an error backstage and Booth thinking an accident prone cowboy had discharged his gun by mistake. He followed along with Booth’s soliloquy, waiting for the right time to act. In his left hand, he was said to be holding a copy of the play. Meanwhile, a man who sat in the second balcony about 30 feet from Booth, was removing a pistol he had concealed in his sleeve. Booth, as Richard, was sitting on stage soliloquizing of his isolation. The stage is darkened during this scene, with little more than a pale light masquerading as moonlight shining through a small grated window on the prison flat. The last scenes of the act are set in the prison of Pomfret castle where King Richard is shown cut off from the world. As always, the accounts of the day differ somewhat regarding what happened during the final act of Richard II. She was backstage during that night’s performance. McVicker, the step-father of Edwin’s second wife, Mary McVicker. In April of 1879, Edwin Booth was at McVicker’s Theatre in Chicago for an engagement. Nevertheless, what follows is a look at the aftermath of the attempt on Edwin’s life and the fate of his assassin.įirst allow me to summarize the scene of the assassination ttempt, this time pulling from newspaper sources, rather than the books mentioned above. We all know that newspapers take liberties with the truth from time to time and that we cannot trust them with certainly. The coverage on it all quickly reminded me of how talented and celebrated Edwin Booth truly was. This attempt on Edwin’s life was a national story. I decided to look at the newspaper sources of the day, and it is from those that I was deluged with information. These sources gave about a page to the incident. While looking for a bit more background I read about the incident in Eleanor Ruggles’ Prince of Players and Stanley Kimmel’s The Mad Booths of Maryland. My inspiration for this post was Nora Titone’s Edwin/John Wilkes biography, My Thoughts Be Bloody which devotes a paragraph to the incident. The more I looked into it however, the more I found myself quickly engulfed in a huge amount of information that is available far beyond what I have read in books. Since two days ago was the anniversary of the attempt, I wanted to put up a quick post highlighting what I considered a mere piece of historical trivia. As I wrote two days ago, Edwin Booth was the target of an assassination attempt on Apwhile he was performing Richard II at McVicker’s Theatre in Chicago.
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