Hamlet as Edwin Booth

Since Edwin Booth was so generally considered the best American actor of his time (some say of all time), and since Hamlet was his best known and most frequently performed role, our interest in it is more than academic. Booth knew Hamlet as well as any man in his century. His particular illumination of the role—an intellectual, neurotic, romantic Hamlet—has become a part of our own understanding of the character and has been reflected in the recent interpretations of Burton, O'Toole, and Plummer.Booth first played Hamlet in California, at the suggestion of his father, Junius Brutus Booth, and it quickly became his most celebrated role. When Edwin joined with John (Sleeper) Clarke and William Stuart in the management of the Winter Garden Theatre in New York, Hamlet was his first production. It had a phenomenal run of one-hundred nights, setting a record which was not eclipsed for some time.