In Regency England, the hottest ticket in the country was a man so bad at acting that theatres sold out to watch him fail. When he died on stage, audiences demanded that he get up and die again. He did.

His name was Robert Coates, heir to an Antigua sugar fortune and a chest of family diamonds. In 1807 he arrived in Bath, rich, unshakeable, and convinced beyond argument that he was the finest actor in Britain. He designed his own costumes: a sky blue silk cloak covered in spangles, crimson pantaloons, diamonds at every button, and a plumed hat roughly the size of a swan. He drove through town in a custom carriage shaped like a shell, crested with a crowing cockerel over his personal motto: While I live, I'll crow.

Then he began to perform. His Romeo forgot the lines, invented better ones, and added entire new scenes mid-play. He prised open the Capulet family tomb with a crowbar. Before dying, he took off his hat, and carefully spread a silk handkerchief on the stage floor, so the death would not dirty the costume. The house came apart. The laughter was so loud the other actors could not hear their cues. And when he finally expired, gorgeously, at full length on his handkerchief, the audience roared for an encore of the death itself. He obliged. He died again. He was rising to die a third time when his Juliet, still officially a corpse, sat up and stopped him. In London, crowds fought for seats and thousands were turned away. It was said that doctors sent melancholy patients to see him, as a cure.

Everyone laughed. Here is what the laughers missed. A great many of those performances were charity benefits, staged and paid for out of his own pocket, and the takings built real relief for real people. The fortune eventually dwindled, and the peacock of Bath grew old quietly, modestly, and contentedly married. Then, in February 1848, at seventy five, leaving Drury Lane theatre after an evening as a spectator, Robert Coates was struck by a hansom cab, and died of his injuries. The man who had died nightly on stage, to the loudest applause in England, was caught by death at the theatre door. Nobody who saw him ever forgot him. Nobody who mocked him ever matched him for happiness.

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