George Washington |
Like many Virginians of his day, George Washington enjoyed going to plays. As a young man, he probably saw plays by Shakespeare and other playwrights in Williamsburg, and he continued to note “a play” or a ticket purchase in his diary in the years that followed. Records of the specific productions he attended are sketchy, but we know he went to a production of Hamlet during a trip to New York in May 1773 and an opera of The Tempest during the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.
As president, Washington lived in Philadelphia, the nation’s temporary capital. There he once hosted an amateur Shakespeare production, probably in the winter of 1790. William Duer, assistant to the treasury secretary, wrote that Duer “had the honor of appearing before him as one of the dramatis personae in the tragedy of Julius Caesar... in the garret of the Presidential mansion, wherein before the magnates of the land and the elite of the city, I performed the part of Brutus to the Cassius of my old school-fellow, Washington Custis.”
Washington rarely quoted from the plays. He did so, however, in an October 1778 letter he wrote as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army. In the letter, he responded confidently to reports that the British might be planning to seize more towns. “They will know, that it is our Arms, not defenceless Towns, they have to Subdue,” he wrote. “Till this end is accomplished, the Superstructure they have been endeavouring to raise, ‘like the baseless fabric of a vision’ falls to nothing.” Washington’s image of a possible British defeat is from Act 4, scene 1, of The Tempest:
These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve...
Library of Congress