Most Americans know the name of John Wilkes Booth, assassin of President Abraham Lincoln, but do they know that of his elder brother, Edwin Thomas Booth? The latter is the subject of the biographical Prince of Players (1955), and tells the story, no doubt somewhat fictionalized, of one of the finest Shakespearean actors of his era, starting with his youth, when his father was also a noted Shakespearean actor, dissolute, drunken, and perhaps a bit mad. One night, when his father could not fulfill his contract with a theater, Edwin goes on and succeeds magnificently.
From there on in, he works the little venues, even labor camps, building a reputation, moving on to bigger and bigger venues until his is a name that comes to mind whenever anyone mentions a Shakespearean production. But lurking in the background are two curses. The first is the same as his father’s, a predilection to angst and drink, the deep black hole in everyone’s lives. This is stayed when he meets the love of his life, Mary Devlin, who gives him purpose.
The second? The Mason-Dixon line, the line dividing the slave-holding South from the abolitionist North. His brother, John, is forever the second fiddle to Edwin, and while John is popular in the South, Edwin is popular in the South, and then in the North, and finally England. This grinds away at John as the Civil War commences, slowly embittering him.
Mary, sadly, contracts tuberculosis, the slow fatality of which leads Edwin back to the edge of drunken madness. Sometimes unable to go on the stage, his manager is frantic and writes to Mary, whose attempt to come to her husband’s aid ends badly. Upon her eventual death, Edwin is bereft. And then?
Of course. The assassination of the President, part theater itself, and the subsequent death of John. So is the family of Booth cursed.
In the consequent crescendo, the name ‘Booth’ becomes a curse, and when Edwin returns to the stage, he’s met with riot and rage. But when the rest of the company retreats, under fire from the traditional rotten vegetable cannonade, from their staging of Hamlet, Edwin sits in a chair on the stage, silently suffering the slings and arrows of an unjust fate, until, won over by his steely resolve, they gradually transform from the enraged beast to the adoring audience.
Sorry about the purple prose.
Having been released in 1955, Prince of Players has a different, flatter pacing than do today’s crop of movies, but don’t let that throw you. It’s a peek into the life of a family once at the center of the American experience, for the theater is as much a place of learning as it is of entertainment, and the Booths were, in that sense, supreme, if inadvertent, teachers. The great hole of madness around which they revolved not only threatened them, but the nation, changing it in ways never to be corrected.
It’s worth a look.
