forms of art, asking its audience to believe that people are in places, as strange as a boat or a log cabin, when they are in fact just steps away. If viewers stop suspending their disbelief for a moment, they become aware of the untruth of it all, of the actors in costumes who actually share the same reality as the ticket rippers, the lighting system, and all of the rest of the trappings.

It seems that playwrights should count themselves lucky enough when their audiences are willing to pretend that the people they are seeing are real people, in real situations. The playwright who wants viewers to believe that the people on stage are in fact reproducing actions and situations that have actually occurred before in the world is really stretching credibility thin. The Abe Lincoln in Carl Sandburg’s three-part biography is likely to resemble how Lincoln really was, his essence captured in the poet’s words. William Herndon’s biography of Lincoln has been praised for being less likely than the writings of the president’s other friends to hide his unsavory characteristics, achieving a level of truth greater than the sugar-coated version. Robert Sherwood’s Lincoln, however, will always be whoever is portraying him—Raymond Massey, in the case of the Broadway production and the subsequent film.

Drama lacks accuracy—it cannot record events, but only reproduce them. Biography is, though, at its core an accurate record. At its best, drama can give its audience some sense of the essence of a person, a truer philosophical feel for personality than simple, recorded historical fact. Audiences understand things that are not shown outright, like an optical illusion that arranges black dots on a white page to make the viewer see another dot that is not really there. With Abe Lincoln in Illinois, it is not enough to present a series of events from Lincoln’s life. The question that every reviewer has to ask when considering Sherwood’s script is whether it at least gives a complete portrait of who Lincoln might have been.

The straightforward chronological structure of Abe Lincoln in Illinois is the first clue that Sherwood may have allowed his play to be ruled by reality as readers know it, rather than his artistic reality. In common reality, childhood is followed by adolescence, which is followed by adulthood, then old age. There is no reason why a narrative has to follow such a structure, though. It depends on what point the writer is trying to make. In the case at hand, Sherwood’s point might be to examine how the cumulative weight of events built, year after year, to make Lincoln into the man he was when he boarded the train out of Illinois, shown in the last act. The chronological structure, though, is reason enough for at least suspecting that Sherwood might lack imagination and/or an artistic vision.

This is not to say that Sherwood, or anyone involved in the original Broadway production, did not do the best job possible, only that the thing they were trying to do may have been self-defeating. By all accounts, Abe Lincoln in Illinois was not something that Robert E. Sherwood dashed off quickly. According to his biographer, John Mason Brown, Sherwood worked the structure repeatedly in his mind, cutting scenes, adding, struggling to turn his Lincoln into an American archetype. The supplemental notes that are usually printed with the play should be sufficient indication that this play is no sloppy piece of work. It is, however, stiff, the sort of presentation that has audiences leaving the theater feeling more like they have been taught a lesson than that they have been entertained.

This question of whether Sherwood might have given his audience too much historical record at the expense of offering up an actual play has been a point of contention since Abe Lincoln in Illinois was first produced. The play did win the Pulitzer when it debuted, and it basked in the glow of critical support, overall, although some critics found it too stifled by the greatness and familiarity of the subject to ever take on a personality of its own.

It is either ironic or a sign that Sherwood worked the issue to the finest balance that could be achieved to see that both sides, cheering and dismissing his achievement, have been supported by one writer—John Mason Brown, the aforementioned biographer. In his original review of the play, Brown was one of the few critics to stray from the consensus, which was that Sherwood had done the country a great service with his portrayal of Lincoln. His original review complained that the play wasn’t really Sherwood’s at all, or at least wasn’t solely Sherwood’s accomplishment: to be honest, he would, according to Brown, have to give half of the credit to Lincoln himself, or, more specifically, to the text of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, from which he had taken so much of his dialog. He also commented on how much the play relied, not on its own dramatic situation, but on the audience’s knowledge of events that were to happen in Lincoln’s life after the events presented on stage.

In future years, though, Brown came to reverse his judgment. In The Worlds of Robert E. Sherwood: Mirror to His Times, he looked back on his old review and wrote, ‘‘I was rotten, and wrong, though not entirely so. I had some points to make which were not without their validity, though they now seem to me academic, ungrateful, and carping.’’ Having had access to Sherwood’s diaries while working on his biography, Brown had come to realize how much effort Sherwood had put into controlling the incredible amounts of information he had compiled, how he struggled to keep the process from being ‘‘too much reading, too much homework, and too little playwriting by Sherwood himself.’’

The background information may have helped Brown understand his subject and how his subject, Sherwood, understood his own subject, Lincoln. Still, it is almost impossible to take seriously a reviewer who takes back what he has said on the grounds of having been ‘‘ungrateful.’’ Reviewers owe authors nothing more than an honest appraisal. One gets the sense that Brown felt he had been an ungrateful citizen for not appreciating the service done for the American populace with this portrayal of a president. But this is not a standard for artistic criticism, any more than a work of art can be judged by how ‘‘nice’’ its main character is.

If this country’s citizens can get beyond national pride for Abraham Lincoln, who historians (Northern ones, at least) constantly rank among the two or three greatest American presidents, it does in fact seem that Sherwood’s play is too focused on Lincoln as a historical figure, turning Lincoln the human being into an emblem. It could use some firmer control. Lincoln needs to be more of a character in the play, less of a caricature. This is what Shakespeare did with his histories, and England’s national honor was in no way compromised by his decision to let go of some of ‘‘the truth’’ in order to better present the spirits of his subjects. Drama relies on the human thought processes and interactions that may not have been part of the public record, but are necessary for the playwright to really convey the nature of his subject. Abe Lincoln in Illinois retells old stories about the great man, and Sherwood certainly put his heart into arranging those old tales in a way that would make a larger point, but it makes for a clumsy play, so uncomfortable with itself that even readers and viewers who aren’t familiar with the legends can pick out the lines that come from Lincoln himself, because they are so unevenly worked into the story.

There is no way for a play to function as a documentary, because theater, of all visual media, works on an abstract level that does not allow the use of original material. Documentary films can show viewers actual participants, or play their voices, or at least show locations where events occurred. Books have been used for conveying information for so long that most readers have a sense of how much reality to expect from them. On stage, the subject of a biography cannot speak for him- or herself, which leaves the playwright with the awful responsibility of choosing just what parts of reality to include and how to organize the facts. No one has ever raised the charge that Robert E. Sherwood was anything less than diligent in his duties as an author, but still Abe Lincoln in Illinois suffers from not having its own individual identity as a work of art, even though it does provide a fine overview of the most interesting facts of Lincoln’s life.

Source: David Kelly, in an essay for Drama for Students, Gale Group, 2001. Kelly is an instructor of Creative Writing and Script Writing at two colleges in Illinois.

Why Abe Lincoln? Had Sherwood been a small man, he said he might, instead, have written a play about Napoleon. But Lincoln was a tall man outside and a giant within, and Sherwood a taller man who was growing inside year by year. This inner growth readied him for Abe—this plus the fact that, with the challenges to freedom multiplying throughout the world, Lincoln moved into the present with a new timeliness as ‘‘a man of peace who had had to face the issue of appeasement or war.’’

We say much about ourselves in our choice of heroes. They are the mirrors not only of what we would like to be but a reflection in part of what we are. From his youth Lincoln had occupied a special place among Sherwood’s idols. As early as 1909, when he was twelve, he submitted an essay to a nationwide school children’s contest commemorating the centennial of the President’s birth. For some weeks he haunted the Fifth Avenue jeweler’s window in which the prize medals were on display, confident that one of them would be his. He was genuinely surprised to learn when the awards were announced that he had not received even an honorable mention.

He saw Lincoln then and for many years thereafter through the usual fog of reverence, saw him as the myth not the man, as a statue that had somehow been alive. No other hero in our history reached so deep into Sherwood’s heart as this figure of sadness, suffering, homely humor, and compassion. There was a kinship between them of temperament and beliefs, of bafflement and courage, and loneliness and eloquence. Like many another, Sherwood had been stirred by John Drinkwater’s Abraham Lincoln, which he saw several times in 1920 and admired greatly as a ‘‘beautiful play.’’ Two years later even the newsreel pictures of the opening of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington moved him, he confessed in Life, to a ‘‘state of maudlin lachrymosity.’’

He had read much on Lincoln, first learning the details of his early life from Ida M. Tarbell and of his period from Albert Bushnell Hart. His love for him grew as his knowledge increased. It was not, however, until he read Carl Sandburg’s The Prairie Years that Sherwood ‘‘began to feel the curious quality of the complex man who, in his statement of the eternal aspirations of the human race, achieved a supreme triumph of simplicity.’’ Sandburg introduced him to a new and human Lincoln and made him eager to know more about the forces, interior and external, which ‘‘shaped this strange, gentle genius.’’

For some fifteen years Sherwood had talked vaguely of writing a play about Lincoln’s early life. The Prairie Years (1926), which he reread again and again during the next decade, eventually strengthened his determination to do so. ‘‘Can’t open this wonderful book without feeling a rush of emotion to the imagination.’’ Sandburg gave him an understanding he had not had before of the intricacies and contradictions of Lincoln’s character and served as an invaluable guide to ‘‘the main sources of Lincoln lore.’’

This copious lore cracked for him the marble of Lincoln as a public statue, thereby permitting the man to emerge, flesh, blood, and fallibility, and all the greater for being human. Sherwood came to see, and state conqueringly in his episodic drama, the importance of Lincoln’s frailties to his virtues. More and more he realized that, however heretical any admission of Lincoln’s faults might seem to those who saw him only in Daniel Chester French or Gutzon Borglum terms, these faults were a part of his size. As he put it, the doubts and fears that tormented Lincoln ‘‘could not have occurred to a lesser man’’ and his ultimate triumph over them was ‘‘in many ways the supreme achievement of his life.’’

In the winter of 1936 Sherwood began to write a play on Lincoln. At a Child’s Restaurant on 48th Street he wrote the prayer for the recovery of a sick boy (really a prayer for America) which Lincoln speaks in the seventh scene. But he could get no further. His play had not formed in his mind nor his Lincoln come into focus. He needed more time in which to brood and plan and absorb. And greater and more intimate knowledge, too. Accordingly, led by Sandburg, he went to work in earnest.

Earnest in his case meant furious application. Never a decent student at school or college, Sherwood was always a painstaking researcher when, as a writer, he dealt with history. Before taking the license to which he was entitled as a dramatist, he had to know the facts from which he was departing. Hannibal, Richard Coeur de Lion and the Crusades, and Periclean Athens—all these he had read about with a scholar’s zeal before handling them in his own unscholarly way. But never, until he wrote Roosevelt and Hopkins, did he immerse himself so deeply in history as when preparing to write Abe Lincoln in Illinois.

His supplementary notes, wisely printed not as an introduction but as a postscript to the play, are staggering in their thoroughness. Stephenson, Beveridge, Barton, Lord Charnwood, Evans, Baringer, the Dictionary of American Biography, Herndon and Weik (especially Herndon), and, above all, Lincoln himself as revealed in Nicolay and Hay’s compilation of his Complete Works were among the sources upon which Sherwood drew with easy familiarity. He knew there were hundreds of other books which he could mention but did not, because, as he said in typical Sherwood fashion, ‘‘I haven’t read them.’’

He had no desire in his notes to set himself up as a ‘‘learned biographer.’’ But he was learned about Lincoln, drawn to his knowledge not only by the instinctive understanding he felt for him but by his theory of what a play about Lincoln should be. No one was more aware than Sherwood that ‘‘the playwright’s chief stock in trade is feelings, not facts.’’ A dramatist, he believed, was ‘‘at best, an interpreter, with a certain facility for translating all that he has heard in a manner sufficiently dramatic to attract a crowd.’’ He felt, however, that in a play about the development of Lincoln’s character a strict regard for the plain truth was both obligatory and desirable. ‘‘His life as he lived it was a work of art, forming a veritable allegory of the growth of the democratic spirit, with its humble origins, its inward struggles, its seemingly timid policy of ‘live and let live’ and ‘mind your own business,’ its slow awakening to the dreadful problems of reality, and its battles with and conquest of those problems.’’

His conviction was that, just as Lincoln’s life needed no adornments to make it pertinent, his character needed ‘‘no romanticizing, no sentimentalizing, no dramatizing.’’ To a reporter he said that, before he began, he made up his mind ‘‘not to have a line of hokum in the play. I love hoke in the theatre,’’ he went on, ‘‘but this time I decided that, while they might say the play was dull, they couldn’t say it was ‘theatre.’’’

To his Aunt Lydia he confided that he was ‘‘not concerned with Abraham Lincoln’s position in history— because no one needs to elaborate on that. It was his remarkable character. It seems to me that all the contrasted qualities of the human race—the hopes and fears, the doubts and convictions, the mortal frailty and superhuman endurance, the prescience and the neuroses, the desire for escape from reality, and the fundamental, unshakable nobility— were concentrated and magnified in him as they were in Oedipus Rex and in Hamlet. Except that he was no creation of the poetic imagination. He was a living American, and in his living words are the answers—or the only conceivable answers—to all the questions that distract the world today.’’

Sherwood’s shadowing of Lincoln when he was pondering his play did not stop with history or biography. Language, Lincoln’s language public and private, the language of his period and of the authors who, having fed the hungers of his mind, helped to shape his style, became Sherwood’s natural concern. To give authenticity to the dialogue in his scenes about the young Lincoln, he bought an English grammar of 1816. For periods flavor he savored the Pickwick Papers and, to catch the swing and phraseology of common speech along the Mississippi, he reread Huckleberry Finn. Again and again he searched the Bible, Shakespeare, Jefferson, and Whitman for an appropriately somber passage with which the student Lincoln could conclude the opening scene. Finding none, he used Keats’ ‘‘On Death’’ as being right in spirit even if there was no record of Lincoln’s having read it. The poem contained a phrase in ‘‘his rugged path’’ which stuck in Sherwood’s mind, For a while he considered The Rugged Path for the title of his Lincoln play, which earlier he had thought of calling The First American, then An American.

Source: John Mason Brown, ‘‘Bob Sherwood in Illinois,’’ in The Worlds of Robert E. Sherwood, Harper & Row, 1965, pp. 367–71.

Abe Lincoln in Illinois says what all Sherwood’s other serious plays and serious prefaces have tried to say, and says it so well and so convincingly that audiences rise to their feet to applaud it. Much of Abe Lincoln is in Lincoln’s own words—his homely phrases, his anecdotes, his famous speeches; but the play is none the less Sherwood’s creation. He has so immersed himself in Lincoln’s style of simple, direct, rugged speech that you pass from Sherwood’s words to Lincoln’s with no sense of change. Every speech is in character as Sherwood has recreated Lincoln, and within that character a great man, a national hero with all of a nation’s legend behind him, lives and moves as a man among men. To create such a figure out of history may seem an easier task than to mold a character out of a dramatist’s own fresh clay. Indeed it is far harder, as the whole history of such endeavor shows. Great historic figures already live double lives, one of which is in the minds of their audience, and a dramatist who tries to put his own portrait of the man into words stands constantly at the edge of a precipice. Raymond Massey, who plays the part of Lincoln with a devotion to the character he represents almost equal to Sherwood’s, and with a surprising personal likeness, deserves all the acclaim he has had for his performance. But you have only to read Sherwood’s script before seeing the play to know that it is the dramatist who has given this Lincoln the spark of life.

Abe Lincoln in Illinois carries through three periods of Lincoln’s life—in and about New Salem, Illinois, in the 1830’s; in and about Springfield, Illinois, in the 1840’s; the years 1858 to 1861 to the day when Lincoln, as President-Elect, parted with his neighbors at the railroad station to go on his honored and lonely way:

‘Let us live to prove that we can cultivate the natural world that is about us, and the intellectual and moral world that is within us, so that we may secure an individual, social and political prosperity, whose course shall be forward, and which, while the earth endures, shall not pass away.’

Which is a good speech for a dramatist to end on.

Source: Edith J. R. Isaacs, ‘‘Man of the Hour,’’ in Theatre Arts, Vol. 23, 1939, pp. 31–40.