But Fuseli’s work was in the British Museum, which Louisa had not yet visited, and unless she had seen a reproduction of it somewhere, she probably had transposed her own vision of the sleepwalking queen into a net of words.[20]

            The vision was of course an outcome of Louisa Alcott’s lifelong fascination with the theater; the theme of theatricality in general, and of Shakespeare in particular, run markedly through nearly all these tales.

            The plays the young Louisa had co-authored and coproduced with her sister Anna for performance in the barn before the Concord neighbors were published after her death as Comic Tragedies.[21] She dramatized one of her early stories, “The Rival Prima Donnas,” and wrote a farce, “Nat Bachelor’s Pleasure Trip” that actually saw a single performance at the Howard Athenaeum in i860. In addition, Louisa Alcott’s addiction to the footlights was reflected in her amateur acting in Walpole, New Hampshire, in Concord, and in Boston, and though her major role was that of the Dickensian Mrs. Jarlev of the waxworks, she elocuted her way through a variety of popular parlor comedies.

            She was, in short, stagestruck. In 1855, on her twenty-third birthday, she wrote to her father from Boston: “I go to the theatre once or twice a week.”[22] Three years later she mentioned in her journal: “Saw Charlotte Cushman, and had a stagestruck fit. . . . Worked off mv stage fever in writing a story, and felt better.” And when that renowned American actress descended upon Concord, Louisa was lost in admiration.[23]

 

[20.] For the Fuseli suggestion I am grateful to Charles Colbert of Newton, Massachusetts. See also Caroline Keay, Henry Fuseli (New York: St. Martins Press, 1974), p. 29, No. 24: Lady Macbeth sleepwalking. Alcott's interest in art persisted. See, for example, Louisa May Alcott, Diana & Persis, ed. Sarah Elbert (New York: Arno Press, 1978). In that "art novel," Persis, modeled upon May Alcott, is the young woman painter, while the character of Diana is based upon the sculptor Harriet Hosmer.

[21.] Comic Tragedies Written by fo" and "Aleg' and Acted by the "Little Women" (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1893).

[22.] Louisa Mav Alcott to Amos Bronson Alcott, 28 November [1855], The Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott, eds. Joel Myerson and Daniel Shealy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1987).

[23.] Cheney, pp. 99 and 113. As late as 1886, in her last domestic novel, Jo’s Boys, Alcott created in the actress Miss Cameron "a near-translation" of Charlotte Cushman. See Joseph Leach, Bright Particular Star: The Life & Times of Charlotte Cushman (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Universitv Press, 1970), p. 283.

 

            Charlotte Cushman was of course a famous Lady Macbeth, and Louisa Alcott was becoming a connoisseur of Macbeth performers. Of Edwin Forrest she commented: “Tho Forrest does not act Shakespere well the beauty of the play shines thro the badly represented parts, & imagining what I should like to see, I can make up a better Macbeth . . . than Forrest with his gaspings & shoutings can give me. ' [24] Alcott confined her own greenroom roles to those in comedies and farces. In her sensational stories she also indulged in melodrama and tragedy, and even attempted to “make up a better Macbeth.”

            Macbeth pervades much of Alcott’s “A Pair of Eyes.” That story opens in the theater where the artist Max Erdmann and the woman who is to mesmerize him are both watching a performance of that tragedy. The painting of Lady Macbeth that Erdmann finally completes, haying used Agatha Eure as his model, crashes from the w all during the second and last installment — a symbolic omen of the tragedy that is to follow.

            In place of Macbeth, The Tempest provided Alcott with suggestions for her “Ariel. A Legend of the Lighthouse,”[25] the only one of these five tales in which setting is more important than plot, character, or theme. Indeed, as in The Tempest itself, an enchanted island surrounded by “deep water, heavy surf and a spice of danger” dominates all three.