Acting in the Night : Macbeth and the Places of the Civil War

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.

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.

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. - Publisher. Introduction: a drop that dyes the seas A stone's throw : Charlotte Cushman The flame of place : Abraham Lincoln The glass case : interior life in Washington, D.C. Acoustic shadows : the Battle of Bristoe Station Center of echoes : Castle Murray, Fauquier County, Virginia Ghosts : the death of Colonel Thomas Ruffin, October 17, 1863 Sound and fury : nature in Virginia. "Alexander Nemerov is one of the greatest readers of American visual culture. This book has the revelatory power that only wide-ranging curiosity and true independence of mind can achieve." Richard H. Brodhead President of Duke University and author of Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America What can the performance of a single play on one specific night tell us about the world this event inhabited so briefly? This title explores this question.