Hamlet was first presented in the city of New York on the evening of the 26th of November, 1761, and at the “New Theatre in Chappel Street”—now Beekman Street—near Nassau, the younger Lewis Hallam, the original Hamlet in America (at Philadelphia, in the autumn of 1759), playing the titular part. Hallam was a versatile actor, who was on the stage in this country for over fifty years, and always popular. Concerning his Hamlet very little is now known, except the curious statement in the Memoirs of Alexander Graydon, published in 1811, that Hallam once ventured to appear as Hamlet in London—“and was endured!” He was the acknowledged leading tragedian of the New York stage until his retirement in 1806, and he is known to have played Hamlet as late as 1797, when he must have been close upon sixty years of age. Mr. Ireland is of the impression that John Hodgkinson, a contemporary of Hallam’s, who appeared as Hamlet in Charleston, South Carolina, early in the present century, conceded Hallam’s rights to the character in the metropolis, and never attempted it here.
The first Hamlet in New York in point of quality, and perhaps the second in point of time, was that of Thomas Abthorpe Cooper, who played the part at the John Street Theatre on the 22d of November, 1797, although Mr. Ireland believes that he was preceded by Mr. Moreton at the theatre on Greenwich Street, in the summer of the same year, as he had played the Ghost to Moreton’s Hamlet in Baltimore a short time before. William Dunlap speaks in the highest terms of Cooper’s Hamlet, and John Bernard ranks it with the Hamlet of John Philip Kemble himself.
James Fennell, a brilliant but uncertain English actor, who came to America in 1794, was the next Hamlet worthy of note to appear in New York. He was at the John Street Theatre as early as 1797, but he does not seem to have undertaken the character of the Dane until 1806, when he was at the Park for a few nights. He was an eccentric person, who figures in all of the dramatic memoirs of his time, and who published in 1841 a very remarkable book, called an Apology for his own life. Educated for the Church, he became in turn—and nothing long—an actor in the provinces of England, a teacher of declamation in Paris, a writer for the press in London, and a salt-maker, a bridge-builder, a lecturer, an editor, a school-master, and again and again an actor in America. John Bernard speaks of him as that “whirligig-weathercock-fellow Fennell,” and as “the maddest madman I ever knew.” He was excellent as Othello and Iago, and, according to Mr. Ireland, “beyond all competition as Zanga,” but concerning his Hamlet history is silent.
WILLIAM AUGUSTUS CONWAY.
John Howard Payne enjoys the distinction of being the first American Hamlet who was born in America, and he had been born but seventeen years when he played Hamlet at the Park Theatre in May, 1809. Two years later, on the 5th of April, 1811, he introduced the tragedy to Albany audiences, and his Hamlet, naturally, was as immature and as amateur as it was premature.
Other juvenile tragedians followed Master Payne upon the stage when they should have been in bed, notably Master George F. Smith, who played Hamlet at the Park Theatre on the 28th of March, 1822, and, very notably, Master Joseph Burke, who played in Dublin in 1824, when he was five years old, and who was recognized as a star in Hamlet in the United States when he was twelve.