Page "Hamlet" Paragraph 102

From around 1810 to 1840, the best-known Shakespearean performances in the United States were tours by leading London actors — including George Frederick Cooke, Junius Brutus Booth, Edmund Kean, William Charles Macready, and Charles Kemble.

Of these, Booth remained to make his career in the States, fathering the nation's most notorious actor, John Wilkes Booth ( who later assassinated Abraham Lincoln ), and its most famous Hamlet, Edwin Booth.

Edwin Booth's Hamlet was described as " like the dark, mad, dreamy, mysterious hero of a poem ... in an ideal manner, as far removed as possible from the plane of actual life ".

Booth played Hamlet for 100 nights in the 1864 / 5 season at The Winter Garden Theatre, inaugurating the era of long-run Shakespeare in America.