Days before his assassination in April 1865, President Abraham Lincoln stood on a steamer headed from Virginia to Washington, D.C. reading passages aloud from his favorite play: Macbeth. Senator Charles Sumner and the Marquis de Chambrun, a French nobleman, were struck by the way Lincoln lingered over Macbeth's lines about Duncan, which, they report, he read twice:
Duncan is in his grave.
After Life's fitful fever he sleeps well.
Treason has done his worst. Nor steel, nor poison,
Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing
Can touch him further. (III.ii.24-28)
Ironically, Edwin Booth, brother of John Wilkes, became one of the greatest Shakespearean actors of his generation.