Macready also was, as was Dickens, a complex, sensitive, and paradoxical man. As outwardly certain of everything as the Inimitable himself, Macready was—according to those who knew him best—also privately in doubt much of the time. Proud of his profession in the same way that Dickens was of his, he also was insecure (just as Dickens sometimes was) that such a profession could allow him to be a true gentleman. But from the late 1830s on, the rising star Dickens and his friends Macready, Forster, Maclise, Ainsworth, Beard, and Mitton composed an inner circle of talent and ambition rarely equalled in our little island’s history.

Of all these men, William Charles Macready was—until Dickens’s ultimate ascendency—by far the most famous.

For many years (decades actually), the Inimitable Boz wrote admiring reviews from the sidelines, especially cheering on (along with his co-writer and editor John Forster) such theatrical innovations as Macready’s production of Lear—which restored Shakespeare’s true and tragic vision after more than a century and a half in which audiences had no choice but to suffer through Nahum Tate’s abysmal “happy ending” adaptation. Macready had also reintroduced the Fool to the cast of Lear, an act of inspired salvage to which Charles Dickens’s sensibilities had resonated as if he had been a bell struck by a hammer. I once looked up Dickens’s writing on this particular matter, and beyond Dickens’s referring to the renewed presence of the Fool as “singular and masterly relief” to the overwhelming presence of the Lear character, the ecstatic Boz had called Macready’s production “magnificent” and had elaborated—

The heart, soul, and brain of the ruined piece of nature, in all the stages of its ruining, were laid bare before us.… The tenderness, the rage, the madness, the remorse, and sorrow, all come of one another, and are linked together in one chain.

In 1849, the upstart American Shakespearean actor named Edwin Forrest—who had once been good friends with Macready and who had benefitted from his largesse—visited England and insulted Macready’s interpretation of Hamlet, going so far as to say that our great English Tragedian minced his way across the stage and delivered his lines like an effeminate fop. Forrest was not treated well by the entirety of English audiences during the remainder of his tour here. Englishmen laughed at his Macbeth delivering the Bard’s immortal lines in that atrocious American accent. Then, in May of that same year, Macready did his own tour of America—he had been there before and been welcomed warmly for the most part—and the gangs of Boston and New York, serious Shakespeare aficionados, theatre-goers, and vicious hooligans all, had pelted Macready, during his performances, with rotten eggs, chairs, dead cats, and even more disgusting items. Many American theatre-goers attempted to defend our Eminent Tragedian. More of the hooligan gang members organised to strike a blow against Macready and the English ascendancy and hegemony in all things Shakespearean. The result, on 10 May, 1849, had been one of the bloodiest riots in the history of New York City. Before it was over, fifteen thousand people had turned into either a pro- or anti-Macready mob near the theatre called Astor Place, the mayor and governor panicked and called out a militia which the Americans called the National Guard, the crowd was fired into, and somewhere between twenty and thirty citizens lay dead on the street.

Through this all, Dickens had sent encouraging and congratulatory telegrams to Macready, as if he were the manager with the towel and smelling salts in a pugilist’s corner.

Over the years, Dickens had quietly written and shyly submitted many short plays and theatre comedies to the great actor, but Macready had tactfully rejected all of them (although Dickens was involved in mounting such memorable performances for Macready as his 1838 presentation of Henry V). Somehow these rejections had not antagonised or alienated the Inimitable, who—in my experience—could tolerate no such rejection from anyone else, including the Queen.

So their friendship had endured and matured for three decades now. But as friends in common had fallen by the wayside—either falling out of Dickens’s favour or dying—I had sensed from the Inimitable’s comments in recent years that his prominent reaction to Macready was now one of sadness.

Life had not treated the Eminent Tragedian gently. The Astor Place riot had convinced the ageing actor to retire, but even as he hit the road for his farewell tour, his beloved oldest child, nineteen-year-old Nina, died. Macready, always a soul-searching man of faith, literally locked himself away to confront his newly powerful doubts about both the universe and himself. His wife, Catherine, was in confinement at the time with their tenth child. (The parallels between the Dickenses and the Macreadys were more than superficial—the couples were so close that when Charles Dickens took his own Catherine on his first American tour in the early 1840s, it was the Macreadys to whom he entrusted their own children at the time—but William Charles Macready never fell out of love with his Catherine.)

Macready’s last performance was at Drury Lane on 26 February, 1851. Macbeth—the role he had been most identified with and the play he had been booed and attacked during in New York two years before—was, of course, his choice for his farewell. There was the inevitable grand banquet as a footnote to this farewell, this one so large that it had to be held in the echoing old Hall of Commerce. Bulwer-Lytton lisped his way through a sincere speech. John Forster read an abysmally bad verse written for the occasion by Tennyson. Thackeray, whose only task was to toast the health of the ladies in attendance, almost passed out from nerves. Dickens, of course, who had organised the entire night and who was wearing a bright blue coat with astounding brass buttons and shiny black satin waistcoat, gave a moving and sad and humourous and heartfelt speech that was truly memorable.

Catherine Macready died in 1852. As had been the case with their daughter Nina, Macready’s wife succumbed after a long, terrible battle with tuberculosis. Dickens had told me about his last visit to her bedside and how he had written a friend shortly after that—“The tremendous sickle certainly does cut deep into the surrounding corn, when one’s own small blade has ripened.” The next year, both of Macready’s sons, Walter and Henry, also died, followed immediately after by their sister Lydia. None of his children had gotten out of their teens.

After eight years of mourning in seclusion in his gloomy Sherbourne retreat, in 1860, at the age of sixty-seven, Macready had remarried—the twenty-three-year-old Cecile Louise Frederica Spencer became the second Mrs Macready—and moved to a handsome new home in Cheltenham, only four or five hours from London. Soon after that they had a son.

Dickens was delighted. The Inimitable loathed, feared, and despised the idea of getting older (it was the reason that Mary Angela, his oldest grandchild, Charley and Bess’s daughter, this very evening was calling Dickens “Venerables,” as the writer had insisted—he would not allow the word “grandfather” to be used around him) and he did not wish to see or acknowledge signs of age or decay in those closest to him.

But the William Charles Macready at our table this Christmas Day night of 1865, at age seventy-two, showed every possible sign of age and decay.

The same features that so many had found interesting in an actor—the powerful chin, massive forehead, large nose, sunken eyes, pursed and budlike lips—now conveyed the sense of some once-proud bird of prey collapsed into itself.

As an actor, Macready had developed a technique, still taught at theatrical schools, called “the Macready pause.” I had heard it on stage myself. Essentially it was nothing more than a hesitation, an odd pause or ellipsis put into a line of dialogue where no punctuation existed, and it’s true that it could add impact or emphasis to a line, to the point of changing the meaning of the words on either side of the pause. Macready had incorporated this pause into his regular speech decades ago and his dictatorial ways as a director of plays had been parodied by many—“Stand—er—er—still, damn your eyes!” or “Keep your—er—er—eye on me, sir!”