To understand how Shakespeare provoked a massacre, you need to understand what theater meant in 1849. It was not high culture reserved for the educated. Gold rush miners in California acted out Shakespeare's plays from memory around campfires. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his journal that beings on other planets probably called the Earth "Shakespeare." Theaters were mass entertainment, the main gathering places in most cities, and audiences treated them as arenas to make their feelings known -- not just about the performers, but about class, politics, and national identity. Theater riots were not unusual in New York. What made Astor Place different was the scale.

The rivalry between Forrest and Macready ran along three fractures in American society. First, a personal grudge: the two had once been friends, but Forrest became convinced Macready was sabotaging his career in London, and on one visit he stood up during a performance of Hamlet and loudly hissed the Englishman from the audience. Second, a cultural divide: working-class Americans and Irish immigrants, though hostile to each other in most contexts, found common cause in their resentment of the British. Third, a class war: Forrest's fans were the laborers and gang members of the Five Points and the Bowery, while Macready's supporters were the wealthy Anglophile elite who built the Astor Opera House as a temple to refined taste. The question of who played Shakespeare better had become a proxy for the future of American culture itself.

On May 7, three nights before the riot, Forrest's supporters bought hundreds of tickets to the upper gallery of the Astor Opera House. When Macready took the stage as Macbeth, they pelted him with rotten eggs, potatoes, lemons, shoes, and bottles of foul-smelling liquid. They ripped up their seats and hurled the pieces. The performers tried to continue but were drowned out by hissing, groans, and cries of "Down with the codfish aristocracy!" Meanwhile, a few blocks away, Forrest's own audience roared with approval when he delivered Macbeth's line: "What rhubarb, senna or what purgative drug will scour these English hence?" Macready announced he would leave for England on the next ship. But a petition signed by 47 prominent New Yorkers -- including Herman Melville and Washington Irving -- persuaded him to stay and perform again.

On the night of May 10, Macready returned to the stage under heavy police guard. Outside, a mob gathered. Ned Buntline, a nationalist agitator, had distributed handbills rallying working-class New Yorkers to the scene. The crowd tore up cobblestones and hurled them through the opera house windows. The New York Tribune reported that "the Opera House resembled a fortress besieged by an invading army rather than a place meant for the peaceful amusement of civilized community." Rioters tried to set the building on fire. Police fought running battles in the streets. When the violence overwhelmed them, the state militia was called. Soldiers fired into the crowd. Between 22 and 31 people were killed -- the largest number of civilian casualties from military action in the United States since the Revolutionary War. Forty-eight rioters were wounded. Up to 70 policemen were injured, along with 141 militiamen struck by flying stones and debris.

The next day, thousands gathered at City Hall Park, demanding revenge against the authorities. During the confrontation, a young boy was killed. An angry crowd marched up Broadway toward Astor Place and fought mounted troops from behind improvised barricades. The riot's consequences extended far beyond the dead and wounded. It led directly to the militarization of New York's police force: larger batons, riot control training, a new understanding that crowd violence in an industrial city required a different kind of response. The Astor Opera House never recovered. It closed and was eventually demolished. Today, Astor Place is a subway stop and a public plaza in the East Village, a quiet intersection where the deadliest clash of class and culture in nineteenth-century New York left no visible trace.