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EPILOGUE TO THE HOLLOW CROWN: Lincoln and Shakespeare

Four days after his heated interview with Duff Green, Lincoln sat aboard another boat, the River Queen, heading back to Washington. With him on deck were Senator Charles Sumner and the Marquis de Chambrun, who had accompanied his wife on her whirlwind tour of Richmond. At that very moment, Ulysses S. Grant was negotiating the final conditions of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, although the presidential party would not hear that news for several hours. As they steamed up the Potomac, the chief executive took a quarto volume from his pocket and began to read lines from Shakespeare. It was a favorite pastime, which charmed some and set others to nodding, as the President indulged himself, repeating beloved lines into the wee hours. This day he read for several hours, mainly passages from Macbeth, which he thought the best of the plays. “Treason has done his worst,” recited Lincoln, from a scene after Duncan’s death: “nor steel, nor poison, / Malice domestic . . . nothing / Can touch him further.” He read the lines twice for emphasis. Those listening later thought the passages about Duncan’s serene, eternal sleep prophesied the President’s impending murder. There were other reasons Lincoln was drawn to these words, however. Without foreknowledge of the assassination, the lines seem more like a description of his tortured relation with the South’s “malice domestic,” and the terrible toll it had taken on him personally. The rebellion was very nearly exhausted, but he was not yet certain of the ending.¹

Lincoln encountered William Shakespeare’s majestic writing on sparsely filled bookshelves in the Indiana backcountry. He most likely saw it first in William Scott’s Lessons in Elocution, a popular textbook, containing thoughtfully selected excerpts from the major tragedies and history plays. These texts remained Lincoln favorites. He regarded Scott’s book highly enough to purchase a copy in Springfield and to borrow it from the Library of Congress during his presidency. He publicly praised many of the passages or committed them to memory, including Claudius’s soliloquy from Hamlet.² The enduring image of Lincoln relaxing at the theater is perhaps overblown; he attended performances less often than portrayed and remarked to more than one person that he would rather read the scripts than watch players onstage. Still, we know that as president he saw Henry IV, Part 1 and The Merry Wives of Windsor, and friends claimed to have accompanied him to The Merchant of Venice and King Lear. On October 17, 1863, Lincoln, his wife, and their son Tad attended a benefit performance of Macbeth for the United States Sanitary Commission at Grover’s Theatre in Washington. He liked to critique the performances, held a spirited discussion with actor James Hackett about lines from Hamlet and Henry IV, and showed considerable insight into the meaning behind some of Shakespeare’s notable speeches. (He did not always get it right: Lincoln believed the stirring opening of Richard III—“Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer. . . .”—should be spoken with bitter cynicism, for he held that Richard was a traitor, intending from the start to undermine his brother Edward, an interpretation rigorous historians have now persuasively overturned.) He read his favorite works many times, lingering over the beautiful words, and scrutinizing nuances in the stories. By his own admission, the plays that galvanized him were “Lear, Richard Third, Henry Eighth, Hamlet, and especially Macbeth.” Others mentioned his passion for Richard II, Henry VI, and portions of King John. His interest in these dramas went beyond mere entertainment. For Lincoln, Shakespeare was not a shallow amusement but a route to deeper understanding of power, politics, and human folly.³

The words themselves were part of the enjoyment, and Lincoln freely appropriated language from these plays. He could use Saxon expressions like “wen” with effect, and paraphrased or copied Shakespearean lines such as “cancel and tear to pieces” or “the heavens are hung in black.” Even the famous opening to the Gettysburg Address, “Four score and seven years ago,” was arguably borrowed from the Bard of Avon.⁴ At times one can feel Shakespeare’s rhythm and wordplay in Lincoln’s writing, and at least one acquaintance from his New Salem days thought Lincoln’s natural skepticism and sense of irony were sharpened by the plays. It also seems likely that the sixteenth president appreciated—or identified with—Shakespeare’s modest educational base and ability to juggle low comedy, probing intellect, and lofty lyricism. His love of dramas that featured Falstaff’s clowning yet moved to trenchant issues of loyalty and leadership probably reflected this. Nonetheless, clear reflections of the great poet are hard to see in Lincoln’s evolution as a writer. The nine volumes of Lincoln papers show a gradual development from early, self-conscious prose that struggled to impress, through the sharp logic of his prewar debates, and finally to a handful of masterly, poetically drawn works. Two of these, the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural, have rightly earned literary laurels. (A third that is often cited, the poignant letter to Mrs. Bixby, who had “laid such a costly sacrifice upon the altar of freedom,” was likely written by Lincoln’s private secretary, John Hay.)⁵ Lincoln could also agilely employ clear, decisive prose to sway opinion or silence public rage—as in his August 1862 letter to Horace Greeley. Other works contain some famously felicitous turns of phrase, such as his 1862 admonition that “the fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.”⁶ But the vast majority of his papers are banal or workmanlike, unusually so for the expressive nineteenth century. In some cases they are so clumsily phrased as to be obtuse. There is also little to indicate Lincoln possessed Shakespeare’s sustained genius. The soaring words of the Second Inaugural, for example, were followed by a rambling and defensive speech made a month later, just after Lee’s surrender. Those remarks, essentially a reaction to Salmon Chase’s criticism of his reconstruction agenda, unfortunately were Lincoln’s last public words. The audience, hoping for a ringing victory address, wandered away from the podium, bored and disappointed.⁷

What strikes one most about Lincoln’s interest in Shakespeare are his identification with character and circumstance, and the almost startling pertinence of the tragedies for the challenges of his presidency. The histories are so apt, and so starkly descriptive of Lincoln’s impasse with the South, that an essay could easily be written by tacking quotations together like beads on a string. It is hard to believe that his preference for these works, especially during his presidency, was a coincidence. Lincoln admitted he read little for recreation beyond Shakespeare, and it was not Love’s Labour’s Lost that he chose. The midnight revelries, amusing mix-ups, and sweet sonnets of the lighter works were passed over for the full tragedies—the tales of insurrection, treachery, and knife-sharp political contests—the very story of his own struggle with factionalism and strife. How could he not identify with the Bishop of Carlisle’s prediction in Richard II that “if you raise this house against this house, / It will the woefullest division prove”; or McDuff’s lament that internal strife colored every day with terror as “each new morn / New widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows / Strike heaven on the face.”⁸ How could a president so unfairly smeared with loose talk and exaggerated characterizations not take comfort in a play that opened with the “blunt monster” “Rumor” as a character in its own right? Lincoln must have understood Ross precisely when he cried to Lady McDuff that “cruel are the times . . .”

when we hold rumour

From what we fear, yet know not what we fear,

But float upon a wild and violent sea. . . .⁹

The heavy burden of power is also a theme of these plays. Shakespeare’s rulers cannot sleep, as Lincoln could not, and mistrust and disappointment thwart their finely devised plans. Henry IV, “so shaken . . . so wan with care” that he had little time to “pant,” let alone devise “new broils,” must have seemed sadly familiar to Lincoln. Like Henry, he believed (largely erroneously) that his cabinet was disloyal, and knew that the war was exhausting his acuity. Then there was the irony of a ruler like Richard II, who, though legitimate, lost his authority because of ineptitude. This could not have been lost on someone like Lincoln as he watched his own managerial incompetence erode public confidence. Although well meaning, Richard was also seen as a thief, stealing the inheritance of his rival Bolingbroke, much as Southerners viewed Lincoln as robbing them of the future they had grounded in slavery. Lincoln liked the way Shakespeare used plays within plays to portray the perfidy of would-be allies, whose loyalty was determined by their own advantage, or to show the multiple roles a head of state must adopt to satisfy the fickle public. “Thus play I in one person many people / And none contented,” muses Richard II, likening his rule to a prison, where everyone is suspect and every act potentially treasonous. This was the isolation of power, which Lincoln felt keenly.¹⁰ Lincoln also knew the humiliation of being considered an impostor, a pretender to a position that should never have been his. When a segment of Henry IV, Part 1, in which Hal and Falstaff mockingly play at being king, was omitted from a production Lincoln attended in Washington, he protested. Shakespeare meant it as a comic interlude, but a revealing one, with the “monarch” sitting on a false throne, crowned with cushions. Hal struts like the spoiled prince he is, while Falstaff pleads that even though he acts the buffoon, he is kind and true and wants to be taken seriously. James Hackett, to whom Lincoln made his complaint, missed the point, thinking Shakespeare meant it as a device to mimic Henry. Instead, the scene was actually designed to reveal the folly of bogus rulers, by alternating Hal’s adolescent hubris with the lurching, leering “false staff”—a jester pretending to power without the wisdom or presence to rule—the very image Lincoln projected to the South.¹¹

Sleeplessness and anxiety in Shakespeare’s kings reflect disease and decay in the state—a blight caused by the accession of anyone not strong and tough enough to defend his realm. But if the government was ill, what was the sickness? Passion, jealousy, treachery, and greed were all subjects of Shakespeare’s tragedies. In the plays Lincoln loved, ambition and the struggle for power were most often the maladies. This struck a chord with the sixteenth president, whose outsized personal aspiration—akin to Macbeth’s “vaulting ambition”—had been apparent from his youth. A number of people who knew him in Indiana, including cousins who lived with the family, recalled that even as a boy he proclaimed he would someday be president of the United States, using the boast to taunt his father and others who wondered where his aversion to labor and sarcastic wit were taking him.¹² One of Lincoln’s earliest writings shows his admiration, an attribute he thought placed men in the company of lions and eagles. “Towering genius disdains a beaten path,” he proclaimed. “It thirsts and burns for distinction.” His own thirst did not abate with the years. Instead, as he admitted, it was like the persistent sting of a horsefly on his neck. “No man knows what that gnawing is,” he commented, “till he has had it.” He was quick to qualify his yearning, saying he would never let it interfere with the greater good. Yet in the same breath he did his best to undermine rival political parties and cast doubts on alternative candidates for office. Lincoln tried to understand his craving for public acclaim and at times deprecated it. But, as his law partner William Herndon noted, it never abated. “He was,” remarked Herndon, “the most ambitious man I ever saw or expect to see.”¹³

What Shakespeare cautioned was that ambition could prove a bad master as well as a good servant. Those who sought their goals ruthlessly, or took power without heeding consequences, were destined to wear a hollow crown: void of legitimacy, empty of glory. The passages Lincoln read over and over were those that described the self-induced hell of rulers who usurped authority, only to find themselves impotent and unfulfilled. “Nought’s had, all’s spent / Where our desire is got without content,” moaned Lady Macbeth. It was a powerful thought to a man who faced daily frustration with a half-nation that would not recognize his leadership. Lincoln was particularly taken with the speech of Claudius in the third act of Hamlet, in which the king had murderously seized the “wicked prize” of crown and consort only to face horrific consequences with no way to redress or atone for them.¹⁴ Then there was Richard II, a man who told his devastating tale with sorrow, summing it up in a speech that affected Lincoln strongly. “The terrible outburst of grief and despair into which Richard falls in the third act had a peculiar fascination for him,” recalled John Hay. “I have heard him read it at Springfield, at the White House, and at the Soldiers’ Home.” It was a story of what it was to rule a kingdom and then lose it; to have won the right to lead and have it disappear, at least partly by personal incompetence; of a crown so hollow it encircled nothing but a mocking death’s head. Henry IV, Part 2 also speaks of the transience of power, of the crown as a “troublesome bedfellow.” Henry had bested Richard by questionable means, but he is emotionally shattered by the victory and now must guard his position carefully, because his hold on power is fragile. “Where is the crown? who took it from my pillow?” he anxiously cries, seeing his once coveted realm, now “sick with civil blows,” disintegrating into rebellion. He is not only forced to watch the dismantling of his country but to face responsibility for it. No matter how he tries to rationalize his problematic ascension to power, Henry cannot redeem himself, either by a show of force or by avoiding bloodshed. A secretary who went with Lincoln to see this play was surprised that the President laughed so little at Falstaff’s slapstick, and “appeared even gloomy, although intent upon the play,” closely studying the characters. Henry’s despair must have seemed profoundly familiar to Lincoln. He knew just how precarious a king’s position was when he faced either triumph or disaster. There were no other options.¹⁵

Like Macbeth, all of these men have the blood of ambition on their hands, blood that cannot be wished or washed away. Claudius wails that his “cursed hand” was covered with “brother’s blood,” and rants: “Is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens / To wash it white as snow?” Sin and irresponsibility have cast these characters into a state of perpetual guilt, robbing them of sleep. This was what Lincoln emphasized to his fellow travelers on the River Queen, when he played out the envy Macbeth felt for Duncan’s sweet rest. “How true” it was, Lincoln reportedly said, that once a questionable goal was achieved, the “tortured perpetrator came to envy the sleep of his victim.”¹⁶ Just how close to Lincoln’s bone such passages rubbed is hard to know. Publicly, he often tried to deny responsibility for the war, describing events in the passive tense (“And the war came”), or blaming Southern demagogues, the long suffering slaves, or even God for the misfortune. But on some level he must have known that the war had been very much about him personally: about his provocative words, his audacity in running for president without executive or military experience, and his uncertain performance in the crisis of 1861. It was clearly perceived this way in the South and in much of the North as well. “Mr. Lincoln’s election precipitated the rebellion,” wrote Hugh McCulloch, whom Lincoln appointed treasury secretary, adding that it had forced the issues of slavery and states’ rights to be resolved “sooner than had been expected and in a different way” than many statesmen desired. Whether Lincoln was trying to understand, expiate, or atone for his role by studying Shakespeare’s historical tragedies is not certain. That he perused them with such intent, however, indicates a notable willingness to come to terms with the colossal ego that formed a part of his character.¹⁷

There on the River Queen, steaming away from the conquered rebel capital, Lincoln reflected on the costliness of even just ambition. This was not an easy thing to do: as Macbeth observed, “To know my deed / ’Twere best not know myself.” Lincoln could be self-effacing at times, but despite his historical reputation he was not a humble man. Yet he had been humbled by the South’s defiance, by his inability to close the war swiftly and efficiently, and by the staggering bloodshed stemming from his easy assertion that the “house divided” could not long stand. Of the terrible consequences his ascent to power produced, the most personal for Lincoln was the way inner peace eluded him. This was the trauma of King Lear who so abused the authority of his position that he lost his realm, his family—and even his sanity. It was the agony of Macbeth, who found that the word “amen” stuck in his throat, just when he “had most need of blessing”; and the shattering inner knowledge of Richard III, who groaned that “no soul shall pity me / Nay, wherefore should they, since that I myself / Find in myself no pity to myself?” Instead of being exhilarated by the power he had acquired, Lincoln was chastened by his inability to exercise it effectively. “Now I don’t know what the soul is,” he reportedly said, “but whatever it is, I know that it can humble itself.” The deep furrows in Lincoln’s face, the late-night hand wringing in the War Department telegraph office, and even the beautiful words of the Gettysburg Address, with its plea that the great democratic experiment not perish from the Earth, all bespeak a man who, like Henry IV, had to face his outsized aspirations, and stand by, while the nation he had hoped to lead disintegrated before him.¹⁸

The grail of legitimate authority and respect had been so tantalizingly close. Yet he never completely grasped it, for he was killed before the final reunion of the nation. And we are left soberly to imagine the kind of desperation Abraham Lincoln must have felt, knowing that for all his aspiration, he was never, within his lifetime, truly president of the entire United States.