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Abraham Lincoln authored some of the greatest American presidential prose. We all know that. It’s also worth remembering where much of his inspiration came from — in particular how he deeply loved the theater, his teacher from the rugged prairie to raging, war-torn Washington. It is not without a little irony that he was assassinated, 150 years ago this week, while enjoying the stage.

Lincoln’s meteoric rise from the frontier was fueled by his skills as a performer. Drama, jokes, stories, courtroom arguments, outdoor debates — he could go on for hours and exhaust rivals such as Senator Stephen Douglas. The enthralling young Lincoln thrived on his rough stages in Springfield, Ill., much as an Elizabethan actor might at the uproarious, open-air Globe. As best we know, Lincoln’s voice was not a rumbling bass, but a tenor with a drawl, a trained instrument for penetrating across rooms, lyceum halls and distances.

The plays of Shakespeare loomed large in Lincoln’s imagination and quest for self-improvement. It’s said he could recite his favorite, “Macbeth,” from memory, playing all parts. That suggests the Bard and his influence on Lincoln’s language was not just for private enjoyment. The surpassingly elegant English was preparation for Lincoln’s own public role, as leading man of the people. It gave him, an unschooled young man, a beacon on the prairie. (Years later, Lincoln named some Shakespeare plays he had “gone over.” They were “King Lear,” “Richard III,” “Hamlet” and, he added, “especially ‘Macbeth.’ I think nothing equals ‘Macbeth.’ It is wonderful.” Three are among Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies. None end well. “Macbeth,” of course, is the tale of a good king’s bloody murder.)

In 1860, the East got its first look at the tall lawyer who could talk so well. Lincoln viewed his invitation to speak in New York, at Cooper Union, in a very real way as an audition for the presidency. He excused himself from society early the night before, saying he did not want to make a “failure” of his speech. Hardly. Lincoln brought down the house with his closing: “Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.” The speech against the spread of slavery flew across the city and country the next day.

At 52, when Lincoln stepped off the train in wintry Washington in 1861 as president-elect, the man from Illinois had developed into a master of dramatic timing, scene and delivery before an audience. Even his early speeches as a lawyer and politician show Lincoln cut through Victorian verbiage to get to his meaning in unusually stark sentences. A revolution of simplicity emerged. While Lincoln admired the antebellum high-flown oratory of Senators Daniel Webster and Henry Clay, he addressed the American people in a voice all his own.

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He came across “in character,” as actors say, his own leveling one, stripped of Eastern flourish and Southern finery. The democratic shift in tone broke from all past presidents, none of whom possessed Lincoln’s powerful stage presence. The lofty Virginian Thomas Jefferson famously mumbled his first Inaugural Address.

Except for the Emancipation Proclamation, a long legal document, President Lincoln polished his prose for the ear: “Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this might scourge of war may speedily pass away,” he declared in his Second Inaugural Address, in a poetic burst.

In fact, Lincoln brought the first modern sensibility to political speech. Scholars call his style “middling speech,” Professor Allen Guelzo, director of the Civil War Era Studies program at Gettysburg College, said. The other great practitioner of this 19th century tradition was Mark Twain, he said, who came after Lincoln. Take, for example, the president-elect’s parting words to Springfield friends on an early February morning: “To this place, and the kindness of these people, I owe everything. Here I have lived for a quarter of a century and have passed from a young to an old man. Here my children have been born and one is buried.” Whether he will ever return is unknown, he said. The “task” he faces is greater than George Washington’s. The Farewell to Springfield Address was hauntingly intimate, yet somber and elegiac in its sense of destiny. Delivered at the train station, where many shed tears, it was a perfect set piece for a country being torn apart, with young men leaving home, writ large.

The Civil War president only got better performing on the stage of national tragedy. Presiding over the worst of times brought out the best in the man. His melancholy blue-gray eyes sunk into the craggy face — colors of the Union and Confederacy.

An avid theatergoer, President Lincoln found it an escape from the fog and sorrow of war. One place the 16th president frequented was the new Ford’s Theatre on 10th Street, not far from the White House. Now and then he rode over in his carriage, unannounced, and wandered in to watch rehearsals in the back. Somehow, his spirits were refreshed. “His presidency was so intense,” the director of Ford’s Theatre, Paul R. Tetreault, said. “This was going into another world. He loved Shakespeare, and he loved language.”

Lincoln and his wife, Mary, attended 10 performances at Ford’s between 1863 and 1865. On Nov. 9, 1863, 10 days before the Gettysburg Address, the Lincolns saw a play at Ford’s, “The Marble Heart,” about the ancient Athenian sculptor Phidias. The star actor, with flashing eyes and a Baltimore accent, glared at the president after the show. “He does look pretty sharp at me, doesn’t he?” Lincoln said. The actor was John Wilkes Booth, 25, the youngest in America’s foremost family of actors.

In autumnal Gettysburg, Lincoln knew that the place, a battlefield with thousands of freshly dug Union graves, was absolutely critical. The theater of war was where he had to impart his message; it would not have the same impact in Washington. As president, he had to stand in front of those graves — after the Harvard president, Edward Everett, concluded his lengthy ramble. Then Lincoln stood, spoke briefly and infused their deaths with new meaning: human rights and freedom. To this day, the address still sounds more like a theatrical soliloquy as it gains force, with perhaps the most profound passages of our cultural memory.

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As it happened, in 1864, Lincoln was treated to six command performances by Edwin Booth — John’s older brother — with whom he was friendly. Edwin, the most famed actor in New York, lived in a townhouse in Gramercy Park. A Union man, Edwin was honored to fulfill Lincoln’s request to perform “Hamlet” on March 2, 1865. Edwin was far superior to his brother John, that much was clear. The president’s demeanor had changed since November, which was evident that bright evening. Out in the field, it was clear the war would be won.

On Good Friday, April 14, 1865, the victorious capital was in tumult. The Civil War had been won days earlier, but Washington was also home to legions of Southern sympathizers in a black mood. President Lincoln took Mary on a carriage ride. They enjoyed each other’s company and talked of California. That evening, they were engaged to go to Ford’s Theatre. The man who loved tragedy came to see a comedy, “Our American Cousin.” When they arrived in the draped presidential box, the audience gave the Lincolns a standing ovation. Lincoln bowed, but the young doctor who would rush to treat him, Charles Leale, said he looked “peculiarly sorrowful.”

A brutal conspiracy was bearing down at that moment. John Wilkes Booth, who knew the contours of the balcony as well as the play, cunningly timed his move with a laugh line to muffle the noise. Firing a derringer pistol, he shot Lincoln once, in the back of the head, then leapt to the stage, holding a dagger. The fall was at least a dozen feet.

President Lincoln’s life was snuffed out like a light, a brief candle.

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Sources: David Bromwich, “Shakespeare, Lincoln and Ambition,” The New York Review of Books, April 11, 2014; Harold Holzer, ed., “Abraham Lincoln, The Writer: A Treasury of His Greatest Speeches and Letters”; Joshua Wolf Shenk, “Lincoln’s Melancholy”; Nora Titone, “My Thoughts Be Bloody.”

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Jamie Stiehm is a Washington-based syndicated columnist.