ry different than the battlefield of Richard III. (Williams 578) In his career, Booth died a dramatic death hundreds of times. Many scholars have voiced the opinion that the assassination was, perhaps, Booths greatest "performance". In 1899, Joel Chandler Harris, a contemporary of Booth's who would become famous for his Uncle Remus folk tales, wrote that Booth "had all the elements of genius but seemed powerless to focus them...He was as mad as Hamlet was: no more or less... There was nothing real to him but that which is most unreal, the theatrical and the romantic. He had a great variety of charming qualities, and his mind would have been brilliant but for the characteristics which warped it."John Wilkes along with his other nine brothers and sisters were born in a log cabin just outside Bel Air, Maryland, twenty-five miles south of the Mason-Dixon line. Their mother and father were not married until 1852, fourteen years after Wilkes was born. So naturally, the children grew up with the concealed fact that they were all illegitimate. With their father away for extended periods of time on theatre engagements, the Booth children were often left to fend for themselves. And even with the discouragement of their father, Wilkes and his older brother Edwin still pursued a career in theatre. Chris Mynk71567Two key events occurred in Wilkes' childhood, which, no doubt, affected his thinking for the rest of his life. According to T. Harry Williams, Wilkes' younger sister Asias memoir entitled The Unlocked Book, describes an account were their mother had a nightmare when Wilkes was a baby "in which she imagined that the foreshadowing of his fate had been revealed to her". Asia went on to describe an event took place when she and her mother went to visit the young Wilkes at the end of his school year in June of either 1850 or 1851 at the Milton Boarding School for Boys near Cockeysville, Maryland.At the conclusion of a picnic for the stude...
