Acting in the Night

Macbeth and the Places of the Civil War

Alexander Nemerov

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780520251861
• eBook ISBN: 9780520947443
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Literature

What can the performance of a single play on one specific night tell us about the world this event inhabited so briefly? Alexander Nemerov takes a performance of Macbeth in Washington, DC on October 17, 1863—with Abraham Lincoln in attendance—to explore this question and illuminate American art, politics, technology, and life as it was being lived. Nemerov's inspiration is Wallace Stevens and his poem "Anecdote of the Jar," in which a single object organizes the wilderness around it in the consciousness of the poet. For Nemerov, that evening's performance of Macbeth reached across the tragedy of civil war to acknowledge the horrors and emptiness of a world it tried and ultimately failed to change.

Table of contents

• Cover
• CONTENTS
• Introduction: A Drop That Dyes the Seas
• 1. A Stone’s Throw: Charlotte Cushman
• 2. The Flame of Place: Abraham Lincoln
• 3. The Glass Case: Interior Life in Washington, D.C.
• 4. Acoustic Shadows: The Battle of Bristoe Station
• 5. Center of Echoes: Castle Murray, Fauquier County, Virginia
• 6. Ghosts: The Death of Colonel Thomas Ruffin, October 17, 1863
• 7. Sound and Fury: Nature in Virginia
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• NOTES
• SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
• LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
• INDEX