Booth's Body

[Cliff Roberts]

The attached is a clipping from the DC Evening Star in 1903. The article is in reference to the age old story that Booth escaped and lived on as David E. George. Booth's disinterment and his identification by family members proved otherwise.

My only skepticism of the article is did they really pass the head around, hand to hand as it states? Kind of weird.

"Alas poor Yorick, I knew him ...." The scene is a graveyard, and the speaker is Hamlet, fondly reminiscing about a long deceased friend whose moldering skull he holds in his hands. Several published accounts mention the handling of Booth's detached head at Harvey & Marr in Washington, and there's no reason to doubt the truth of it - or be surprised by it. From Shakespeare's time through the mid-1900's, people weren't as squeamish about death or dead bodies as we are today, which probably accounts for the less than reverent way Booth's head was passed around. Booth's mother and sister were among family members who viewed the body in Baltimore, but whether Edwin Booth ever viewed the body or held the head of his brother is unknown. Had he done so, Edwin might have recalled with irony the many times he'd played the title role of Hamlet and held poor Yorick's skull in his hands. Incidentally, the human skull Edwin always used on stage had originally been bequeathed to his father Junius Brutus Booth by a criminal he'd met in jail. Edwin kept the skull until he died, and it is now on display at the Players in New York.