The Legend Of John Wilkes Booth

[maharba]

Well, blending the two (and several more alias names) St. Helen and David George, some narratives have "JWBooth" as stone sober excepting on the day of Lincoln's assassination, when he would supposedly drink himself into a stupor. Some other narratives have St.John/George as a hard drinking and often drunken character, most all the time. How many countless thousands of Civil War veterans were in constant physical and emotional pain, since Lincoln 'invaded to save the Union'. And how many of these needed relief in opiates, alcohol, etc for how many decades of their tortured existence? The official JWBooth, in my opinion, was nearly become an alcoholic, even as a young man "when he officially died". So, if the aspect of being a hard-drinker were diagnostic in itself, that would be a point of agreement which matched in both cases.

But looking at the feature of John St.Helen having familiarity with Shakespeare and stage craft. He must have been in opera houses and theaters in the larger cities of Texas, maybe New Orleans, possibly Washington, Baltimore, New York? Was he a leading Shakepearean actor? Was he a stage hand or a bit player? If an investigator of the day, say 1870-1890, had soon stopped at Texas opera houses and talked to stage folks there and did some checking. If he'd asked, "Do you know of a man looks a bit like JWBooth and who is very familiar with Shakepeare's plays, have you come across such a man, did he do any work here"?