William Shakespeare and the American People: A Study in Cultural Transformation Author(s): Lawrence W. Levine Source: The American Historical Review, Vol. 89, No. 1 (Feb., 1984), pp. 34-66 Published by: on behalf of the American Historical Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1855917 . Accessed: 17/03/2014 16:43

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LAWRENCE W. LEVINE

THE HUMOR OF A PEOPLE AFFORDS IMPORTANT INSIGHTS into the nature of their culture.Thus Mark Twain's treatmentof Shakespearein his novelHuckleberry Finn helps us place the Elizabethanplaywright in nineteenth-centuryAmerican culture. Shortlyafter the two rogues,who pass themselvesoff as a duke and a king,invade the raftof Huck and Jim,they decide to raise funds by performingscenes from Shakespeare's Romeoand Julietand RichardIII. That the presentationof Shake- speare in snmallMississippi River towns could be conceivedof as potentiallylucrative tells us nmch about the positionof Shakespeare in the nineteenthcentury. The specificnature of Twain's humortells us even more. Realizingthat they would need materialfor encores, the "duke" startsto teach the "king"'s soliloquy, which he recitesfrom memory: To be, or not to be; thatis the bare bodkin T hatmnakes calamity of so longlife; For who would fardelsbear, tillBirnam Woodldo come to Dunsinane, But thatthe fear of somethingafter death Murders the innocentsleep, Great nature'ssecond course, And makes us rathersling arrows of outrageous fortune Thanl flyto othersthat we know not of.'

Twain's humLnorrelies on his audience's familiaritywith Hamlet and its abilityto recognizetl-he duke's improbablecoupling of lines froma varietyof Shakespeare's plays. Twaiin was employing one of the most popular forms of humor in nineteenth-centuryAmyierica. Everywhere in the nationburlesques and parodies of Shakespear-econstituted a promiinentform of entertainment.

This essay was begun while I was a Regents Fellow at the SmithsoniianInstitution's National Museum of' Ameiican History and was completed in its present fhrrindulring my f'ellowshipat the Woodrow Wilson InterniationalCenter for Scholars. 'I'he splenididfacilities and atrnosphereprovided by both of these instittLitions greatly enhancetl my work oni this and related projects. Ani early version of' this essay was presented to a meetirngof Americaniand Hungariani historianssponsored by the Amer-icanCounicil of Learnied Societies and the Hunigarian Acatlemiyof Scienices, held in Budapest, August 1982. 1 anmgratetul to the scholars at that conferenicefor their encouragernent and c-riticismsas I am to those itianycolleagues who commented on later versiorisI presented in senminarsand lectures at Johns Hopkinis University,Yale University,the Universityof' Mirnniesota,the State University of at Stony Brook, the Wilsoni Center, and the Universityof' . Twain, The Adventuresof IIiucklebensyFinn (New York, 1884), 190. 34

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Hamletwas a favoritetarget in numerous travestiesimported from England or craftedat home. Audiences roared at the sightof Hamlet dressed in furcap and collar,snowshoes and mittens;they listened with amused surpriseto his profanity whenordered by his father'sghost to "swear??and to his commandingOphelia, "Get thee to a brewery";they heard him recitehis lines in black dialector Irishbrogue and sing his most famous soliloquy,"To be, or not to be," to the tune of "Three Blind Mice." In the 1820s the Britishcomedian Charles Mathewsvisited what he called the "Nigger's(or Negroe's) theatre"in New York, where he heard "a black tragedianin the characterof Hamlet" recite "To be, or not to be? That is the question;whether it is noblerin de mind to suffer,or tak' up arms againsta sea of trouble,and by opossumend 'em." "No sooner was the word opossumout of his mouth,"Mathews reported,"than the audience burst forth,in one general cry, 'Opossum!opossum! opossum!'"-prompting the actor to come forwardand sing the popular dialect song "Opossum up a Gum Tree." On the nineteenth-century American stage, audiences often heard Hamlet's lines intricatelycombined with thoseof a popular song: Oh! 'tisconsummation Devoutlyto be wished To end yourheart-ache by a sleep, Whenlikely to be dish'd. Shuffleoff your mortal coil, Do just so, Wheelabout, and turnabout, Andjump Jim Crow.2

No Shakespeareanplay was immuneto thissort of mutilation.Richard I7I, the most popular Shakespearean play in the nineteenthcentury, was lampooned frequently in such versionsas Bad Dicky.In one New York productionstarring first-rank Shakespeareanactors, a stuttering,lisping danced whileDesdemona played the banjo and lago, complete withIrish brogue, ended theirrevelries with a fire hose. Parodiescould also embodya seriousmessage. In KennethBangs's versionof The Tamingof theShrew, for example, Kate ended up in control,observing that, although"Shakespeare or Bacon, or whoeverwrote the play ... studieddeeply the shrewsof his day.. . , the modern shrew isn'tbuilt that way,"while a chastened Petruchioconcluded, "Sweet Katharine,of your remarksI recognizethe force:/ Don't striveto tame a woman as you would a horse." Serious or slapstick,the punning was endless. In one parody of the famous dagger scene,

2 Laurence Hutton,Curiosities of theAmerican Stage (New York, 1891), 157, 181-86; StanleyWells, ed., Nineteenth-CenturyShakespeare Burlesques, 5 (, 1978): xi-xii;Charles Mathews, Trip to America (Baltimore, 1824), 9, 25; CharlesHaywood, "Negro Minstrelsyand ShakespeareanBurlesque," in BruceJackson, ed., Folkloreand Society: Essays in Honor of Benj. A. Botkin(Norwood, Pa., 1976),88; and RayB. Browne,"Shakespeare in America:Vaudeville and NegroMinstrelsy," American Quarterly, 12 (1960): 381-82. Forexamples of parodies of Hamlet,see An Old Play in a New Garb:Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, in Wells,Nineteenth-Century Shakespeare Burlesques;and Hamletthe Damnty, in Gary D. Engle,ed., ThisGrotesque Essen:e: Plays from the Minstrel Stage (BatonRouge, 1978).For thepopularity of parodiesof Hamlet in theUnited States, see RalphLeslie Rusk, The LiteratureoftheMidle Westrn Frontier, 2 vols. (New York, 1925), 2: 4n; LouisMarder, His Exits and His Entrances: The Stoy of Shakespeare'sRep ion (Philadelphia,1963), 295-96, 316-17; and EstherCloudman Dunn, Shakespearein America(New York,1939), 108-12, 215-16.

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continuesto put off his insistentwife by asking, "Or is that dagger but a false Daguerreotype?"Luckily, Desdemona had no brother,or Othello"might look both blackand blue,"a characterin Othelloremarked, while one in TheMerchant of Venice observed of Shylock,"This craftyJew is full of Jeux d'esprit!"Throughout the century,the numberof parodies withsuch titlesas JuliusSneezer, Roamy-E-Owe and Julie-Ate,and Desdemonumwas impressive.3 These full-fledgedtravesties reveal only part of the story.Nineteenth-century Shakespearean parody most frequentlytook the formof shortskits, brief refer- ences, and satiricalsongs insertedinto other modes of entertainment.In one of theirroutines, for example, the Bryants'Minstrels playfully referred to the famous observationin Act II of Romeoand Juliet: AdolphusPompey is myname, But thatdon't make no difference, For as MassaWm. Shakespeare says, A name'sof no signiforance.

The minstrelsloved to invoke Shakespeare as an authority:"you know what de Bird of Avon says 'bout 'De black scandal an' de foul faced reproach!"And they constantlyquoted him in appropriatelygarbled form: "Fust to dine own self be true, an' it must follownight an' day, dou den can be false to any man." The significanceof this national penchantfor parodyingShakespeare is clear: Shake- speare and his drama had become by the nineteenthcentury an integralpart of Americanculture. It is difficultto take familiaritieswith that which is not already familiar;one cannotparody that which is not well known.The minstrels'character- isticconundrums would not have been funnyto an audience lackingknowledge of Shakespeare'sworks: Whenwas Desdemonalike a ship? Whenshe was Moored.4

IT IS NOT SURPRISING THAT EDUCATED AMERICANS in the eighteenthand nineteenth centuriesknew theirShakespeare. What is more interestingis how widelyShake- speare was known to the public in general. In the last half of the eighteenth century,when the reading of Shakespeare'splays was stillconfined to a relatively small,educated elite,substantial numbers of Americanshad the chance to see his plays performed.From the firstdocumented American performance of a Shake- spearean play in 1750 until the closing of the theatersin 1778 because of the AmericanRevolution, Shakespeare emerged as the mostpopular playwrightin the

3 For examples, see Wells, Nineteenth-CenturyShakespeare Burlesques; and Engle, ThzisGrotesque Essence. For a contemporaryview of nineteenth-centuryparodies, see Hutton,Curiosities ofthe American Stage, 145-204. Also see Marder, His Exits and His Entrances,316-17; Alice I. Perry Wood, The Stage Historyof Shakespeare'sKing Richardthe Third (New York,1909), 158; Browne,"Shakespeare in America,"380, 385-90; David Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled:American Theater and Culture,1800-1850 (Chicago, 1968), 240; and Constance Rourke, Troupersof theGold Coast (New York, 1928), 221. 4 Haywood,"Negro Minstrelsy and ShakespeareanBurlesque," 80, 86-87; and Browne,"Shakespeare in America,"376-79.

This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Mon, 17 Mar 2014 16:43:19 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions WilliamShakespeare and theAmerican People 37 colonies.Fourteen or fifteenof his playswere presentedat least one hundred and eighty-and one scholar has estimatedperhaps as many as fivehundred-times. Followingthe Revolution,Shakespeare retained his positionas the most widely performeddramatist, with five more of his plays regularlyperformed in an increasingnumber of citiesand towns.5 Not untilthe nineteenthcentury, however, did Shakespearecome intohis own- presentedand recognized almost everywherein the country.In the citiesof the Northeastand Southeast,Shakespeare's plays dominatedthe theater.During the 1810-11-season in Philadelphia,for example, Shakespearean plays accounted for twenty-twoof eighty-eightperformances. The followingseason lasted 108 nights, of which again one-quarter-27-were devoted to Shakespeare. From 1800 to 1835, Philadelphianshad the opportunityto see twenty-oneof Shakespeare'sthirty- seven plays. The Philadelphia theater was not exceptional; one studentof the Americanstage concluded thatin citieson the EasternSeaboard at leastone-fifth of all playsoffered in a season were likelyto be by Shakespeare.6George Makepeace Towle, an Americanconsul in England, returnedto his own countryjust afterthe Civil War and remarked with some surprise,"Shakespearian dramas are more frequentlyplayed and more popular in America than in England." Shakespeare's dominance can be attestedto by what Charles Shattuckhas called "the westward flow of Shakespearean actors" from England to America. In the nineteenth century,one prominent English Shakespearean actor after another-George Frederick Cooke, Edmund Kean, Junius Brutus Booth, Charles and Fanny Kemble, Ellen Tree, William Charles Macready-sought the fame and financial rewardsthat awaited them in theirtours of the United States.7 It is importantto understandthat their journey did not end withbig citiesor the Eastern Seaboard. According to John Bernard, the English actor and comedian who workedin the United Statesfrom 1797 to 1819, "If an actorwere unemployed, want and shame were not before him: he had merelyto visitsome town in the interiorwhere no theatreexisted, but 'readings'were permitted;and givinga few

5JohnQuincy Adams, who was bornin 1767,wrote of Shakespeare,"at ten years of age I was as familiarly acquaintedwith his loversand his clowns,as withRobinson Crusoe, the Pilgrim'sProgress, and the Bible.In lateryears I have leftRobinson and the Pilgrimto theperusal of thechildren; but have continued to read the Bibleand Shakespeare."Adams to James H. Hackett,printed in Hackett,Notes and Comments upon Certain Plays andActors of Shakespeare, with CritJcisms and Correspondence(New York,1864), 229. See AlfredVan Rensselaer Westfall,American Shakespearean Criticism, 1607-1865 (New York,1939), 45-46, 50-55; Wood,The Stage History ofShakespeare's King Richard the Third, 134-35; CharlesH. Shattuck,Shakespeare onthe American Stage: From the Hallamsto (Washington, 1976), 3, 15-16; and Hugh Rankin,The Theater in ColonialAmerica (Chapel Hill, 1960), 191-92. 6Arthur Hobson Quinn,A His" of theAmerican Drama (New York, 1943), 162; Dunn, Shakespearein America,133, 171-72; and Carl Bode, TheAnatomy of American Popular Culture, 1840-1861 (Berkeleyand Los Angeles,1960), 16-17. For thereception of Shakespearein specificEastern and Southerncities, the following are useful:T. AllstonBrown, A Historyof the New York Stage from the First Performance in 1732 to1901, 3 vols. (New York,1903); James H. Dorman,Jr., Theater in theAnte-Bellum South, 1815-1861 (Chapel Hill, 1967); W. StanleyHoole, TheAnte-Bellum Charleston Theatre (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1946); ReeseDavis James, Cradle of Culture, 1800-1810: ThePhiladelphia Stage (Philadelphia, 1957); MartinStaples Shockley, The Richmond Stage, 1784- 1812 (Charlottesville,Va., 1977); Eola Willis,The Charleston Stage in theXVIII Century(Columbia, S.C., 1924); and JosephPatrick Roppolo, "Hamlet in New Orleans,"Tulane Studies in English,6 (1956): 71-86. For tables showingthe popularityof playsin the firsthalf of the nineteenthcentury, see Grimsted,Melodrama Unveiled, apps. 1-2. 7Towle,American Society, 2 (London, 1870): 22. The migrationof Englishstars to Americais demonstrated throughoutShattuck's Shakespeare on theAmerican Stage.

This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Mon, 17 Mar 2014 16:43:19 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 38 LawrenceW. Levine recitationsfrom Shakespeare and Sterne,his pocketsin a nightor twowere amply replenished."During his travelsthrough the United States in the 1830s, Tocque- villefound Shakespeare in "the recessesof the forestsof the New World. There is hardlya pioneer'shut thatdoes not containa few odd volumesof Shakespeare. I rememberthat I read the feudaldrama of HemnyV forthe firsttime in a log cabin."8 Five decades later,the German visitorKarl Knortzmade a similarobservation:

Thereis, assuredly, no othercountry on theface of this earth in which Shakespeare and the Bibleare heldin suchgeneral high esteem as in America,the very country so muchdecried forits lust for money. If you were to enter an isolatedlog cabin in the Far West and even if its inhabitantwere to exhibit many of the traces of backwoods living, he willmost likely have one smallroom nicely furnished in whichto spendhis few leisure hours and in whichyou will certainlyfind the Bible and in mostcases also somecheap edition of theworks of thepoet Shakespeare.9

Even if we discountthe hyperboleevident in such accounts,they were far from inventions.The abilityof the illiterateRocky Mountain scout Jim Bridger to recite long passages fromShakespeare, which he had learned by hiringsomeone to read the playsto him, and the formativeinfluence that the playshad upon young Abe Lincolngrowing up in Salem, ,became part of the nation'sfolklore.'0 But if books had become a more importantvehicle for disseminating Shakespeare by the nineteenthcentury, the stage remainedthe primaryinstrument. The theater,like the church, was one of the earliest and most importantcultural institutions established in frontiercities. And almost everywherethe theater blossomed Shakespearewas a paramountforce. In his investigationof the theaterin Louisville, Cincinnati,St. Louis, ,and Lexington,Kentucky, from 1800 to 1840, Ralph Leslie Rusk concluded that Shakespeare'splays were performedmore frequently than those of any other author. In Mississippibetween 1814 and the outbreakof the Civil War, the towns of Natchez and Vicksburg,with only a few thousand inhabitantseach, put on at least one hundred and fiftyperformances of Shake- speare featuringsuch Britishand American stars as Ellen Tree, , Junius Brutus Booth, J. W. Walleck, Charles Kean, J. H. Hackett,Josephine Clifton,and T. A. Cooper. Stars of thisand lessercaliber made theirway into the interiorby boat, along the and Mississippirivers, stopping at townsand cities on theirway to New Orleans. Beginningin the early 1830s, the riversthemselves became the site of Shakespearean productions,with floating theaters in the form firstof flatboatsand then steamboatsbringing drama to small rivertowns."

8 Bernard,Retrospections of America, 1797-1811 (New York, 1887), 263; and Tocqueville,Democracy in America,pt. 2 (Vintageedn., New York,1961), 58. 9 Knortz, Shakespearein Amerika:Eine LiterarhistorischeStudie (Berlin, 1882), 47. 10James G. McManaway, "Shakespeare in the United States,"Publicatiom of the Modern Language Associationof American,79 (1964): 514; and BernardDeVoto, Mark Twain's America (Boston, 1932), 142-43. 11Rusk, The Literatureof the Middle WestemFrontier, 1: 398-400, 411-14; William Bryan Gates, "Performances of Shakespearein Ante-BellumMississippi," Jounal ofMississippi History, 5 (1943): 28-37; AshleyThorndike, "Shakespearein America,"in L. Abercrombieet al., eds., Aspects of Shakespeare (Oxford, 1933), 116-17; Westfall, AmericanShakespearean Criticism, 59; William G. B. Carson, The Theatreon theFrontier: The Early Years of theSt. Louis Stage (1932; reprint edn., New York, 1965); West T. Hill, Jr., The Theatrein Early Kentucky,1790-1820 (Lexington, Ky., 1971); Sol Smith, TheatricalManagement in theWest and Southfor ThirtyYears (New York, 1868); and Noah Ludlow, DramaticLife as I Found It (St. Louis, 1880).

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By mid-century,Shakespeare was taken across the Great Plains and over the RockyMountains and soon became a stapleof theatersin the Far West.During the decade followingthe arrival of the Forty-niners,at least twenty-twoof Shake- speare's plays were performedon Californiastages, with Richard III retainingthe predominance it had gained in the East and South. In 1850 the Jenny Lind Theatre, seating two thousand, opened over a saloon in San Franciscoand was continuouslycrowded: "Miners... swarmedfrom the gamblingsaloons and cheap fandango houses to see Hamletand Lear " In 1852 the Britishstar Junius Brutus Booth and two of his sons playedHamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and RichardIII fromthe stage of theJenny Lind and packed the house for the two weeks of theirstay. In 1856 Laura Keen broughtSan Franciscansnot onlyold favoritesbut such relatively uncommonproductions as Coriolanusand A MidsummerNight's Dream. Along with such eminent stars from abroad, American actors like McKean Buchanan and James Starkkept the hunger for Shakespeare satisfied.'2 But Shakespeare could not be confinedto the major populationcenters in the Far West any more than he had been in the East. If minerscould not alwayscome to San Franciscoto see theater,the theatercame to them.Stark, Buchanan, Edwin Booth, and theirpeers performedon makeshiftstages in miningcamps around Sacramentoand crossedthe borderinto Nevada, wherethey brought characteriza- tionsof Hamlet,lago, Macbeth,Kate, Lear, and Othelloto minersin VirginiaCity, Silver City,Dayton, and Carson City. Walter M. Leman recalled the dearth of theatersin such towns as Tod's Valley, Chip's Flat, Cherokee Flat, Rattlesnake,Mud Springs,Red Dog, Hangtown,Drytown, and Fiddletown,which he toured in the 1850s. In the Sierra town of Downieville,Leman performed RichardIII on the second storyof a clothand paper house in a hall withouta stage: "we had to improviseone out of the two billiardtables it contained,covering them withboards for thatpurpose." Such conditionswere by no means confinedto the West Coast. In earlier years, Leman had toured the towns of Bangor, Belfast,Orono, and Oldtown,not one of whichhad a proper theater,necessitating the use of church vestries and other improvisations.In 1816 in Lexington, Kentucky,Noah Ludlow performed The Tamingof the Shrew,Othello, and The Merchantof Venicein a room on the second floorof an old brewery,next door to a saloon,before an audience seated on backless,cushionless chairs. In the summerof 1833, Sol Smith'scompany performedin the diningroom of a hotel in Tazewell, Alabama, "on a sortof landing-placeor galleryabout six feetlong, and two and a halffeet wide." His "heavytragedian" Mr. Lyne attemptedto recitethe "Seven Ages of Man" fromAs You Like It while "Persons were passing fromone room to the other continuallyand the performerwas obliged to movewhenever any one passed."13 Thus Shakespeare was by no means automaticallytreated with reverence. Nor was he accorded universalacclaim. In Davenportand neighboringareas of Eastern

12 Rourke,Troupers of the Gold Coast 33, 44, 101-02; GeorgeR. MacMinn,The Theater of the Golden Era in California(Caldwell, Idaho, 1941),23-24, 84, 87-88; and MargaretG. Watson,Silver Theatre: Amusements ofthe Mining Frontierin Early Nevada, 1850-1864 (Glendale, Calif., 1964), 73. 13 Leman,Memories of an OldActor (San Francisco,1886), 212-13, 260-62, 276-77; Ludlow,Dramatic Life as I Found It, 89-90, 113, 116, 242-43, 256, 258, 303; and Smith, TheatricalManagement in theWest and Southfor ThirtyYears, 90-91.

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Iowa, where the theaterflourished in both Englishand German,Shakespeare was seldom performedand then usually in the form of short scenes and soliloquies ratherthan entireplays. As more than one theatermanager learned, producing Shakespearedid not necessarilyresult in profits.Theatrical lore oftenrepeated the vow attributedto Robert L Place that he would never again produce a play by Shakespeare"no matterhow manymore he wrote."But theseand similarincidents were exceptionsto the general rule: fromthe large and oftenopulent theatersof major citiesto the makeshiftstages in halls, saloons, and churchesof small towns and mining camps, wherever there was an audience for the theater, there Shakespeare's plays were performedprominently and frequently.Shakespeare's popularityin frontiercommunities in all sections of the countrymay not fit FrederickJackson Turner's image of the frontieras a crucible,melting civilization down intoa new amalgam,but it does fitour knowledgeof human beingsand their need for the comfortof familiarthings under the pressureof new circumstances and surroundings.James Fenimore Cooper had thisfamiliarity in mind when he called Shakespeare"the greatauthor of America"and insistedthat Americans had 'just as good a right"as Englishmento claim Shakespeareas theircountryman.'4 Shakespeare's popularitycan be determined not only by the frequencyof Shakespeareanproductions and the size of the audiences forthem but also by the nature of the productions and the manner in which they were presented. Shakespearewas performednot merelyalongside popular entertainmentas an elite supplhmentto it; Shakespearewas performedas an integralpart of it Shakespeare was popular entertainmentin nineteenth-centuryAmerica. The theaterin the first halfof the nineteenthcentury played the role thatmovies played in the firsthalf of the twentieth:it was a kaleidoscopic,democratic institution presenting a widely varyingbill of fare to all classes and socioeconomicgroups. During the firsttwo-thirds of the nineteenthcentury, the playmay have been the thing,but it was not the onlything. It was the centerpiece,the main attraction,but an entireevening generally consisted of a long play,an afterpiece(usually a farce), and a varietyof between-actspecialities. In the springof 1839, a playbilladvertising the appearance of William Evans Burton in As You Like It at Philadelphia's American Theatre announced, "II Diavolo Antonio And His Sons, Antonio, Lorenzo, Augustus And Alphonzo will present a most magnificentdisplay of positionin the Science of Gymnastics,portraying some of the most grand and imposinggroups fromthe ancientmasters . . . to conclude witha grand Horizontal Pyramid."It was a characteristicallyfull evening. In addition to gymnasticsand Shakespeare, "Mr. Quayle (by Desire)" sang "The Swiss Drover Boy," La Petite Celeste danced "a New Grand Pas Seul," Miss Lee danced "La Cachuca," Quayle returnedto sing "The Haunted Spring,"Mr. Bowman told a "Yankee Story,"and "the Whole" concluded "withElla Rosenbergstarring Mrs. Hield."15 Thus Shakespeare was presentedamid a full range of contemporaryentertain-

14 Place, as quoted in Dormon,Theater in theAnte-Bellum South, 257n; Cooper,Notions of theAmericans, 2 (London, 1828): 100, 113. For the theaterin , see JosephS. Schick,The Early Theater in EasternIowa: CulturalBeginnings and the Rise of the Theater in Davenport and Eastern Iowa, 1836-1863 (Chicago,1939). Schick's appendixescontain a listof all playsperformed in eitherEnglish or Germanin Iowa duringthese years. 15 PlaybIll,American. Theatre, Philadelphia,May 13, 1839, Folger ShakespeareLibrary, Washington [hereafter,FSL]. For theprevalence of thisformat in theeighteenth century, see Rankin,The Theater in Colonial

This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Mon, 17 Mar 2014 16:43:19 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions WilliamShakespeare and theAmerican People 41 ment. During the Mexican War, a New Orleans performanceof RichardIII was accompaniedby "A NEW and ORIGINAL PatrioticDrama in 3 Acts,... (founded in part on eventswhich have occurred during the Mexican War,) & called: Palo Alto! Or, Our Armyon the Rio Grande! . . . TRIUMPH OF AMERICAN ARMS! Surrenderof Gen. Vega to Capt. May! Grand MilitaryTableau!" It would be a mistaketo conclude thatShakespeare was presentedas the dry,staid ingredient in thisexciting menu. On the contrary,Shakespearean plays were often announced as spectaclesin their own right.In 1799 the citizensof Alexandria,, were promisedthe followingin a productionof Macbeth:"In Act 3d-A Regal Banquet in whichthe Ghostof Banquo appears. In Act 4th-A Solemn incantation& dance of Witches.In Act 5th-A grand Battle,with the defeat & death of Macbeth."At mid-century,a presentationof HenryIV in Philadelphia featuredthe "Armyof Falstaffon the March! . .. Battlefield,Near Shrewsbury,Occupying the entire extentof the Stage, Alarms! Grand Battle! Single Combat! DEATH OF HOT- SPUR! FINALE-Grand Tableau." 16 Shakespeare'sposition as part and parcel of popular culturewas reinforcedby the willingnessof Shakespeareanactors to take part in the concludingfarce. Thus Mr. Parsons followed such roles as Coriolanus, Othello, Macbeth,and Lear by playingRalph Stackpole,"A Ring-TailedSquealer & Rip-Staverfrom Salt River,"in Nickof theWoods. Even Junius Brutus Booth followedhis celebratedportrayal of RichardIII withthe role ofJerry Sneak in TheMayor of Garrat.l7 In the postbellum years Edward L. Davenport referredto this very abilityand willingnessto mix genres when he lamented the decline of his profession:"Why, I've played an act fromHamlet, one fromBlack-Eyed Susan, and sung 'A Yankee Ship and a Yankee Crew' and danced a hornpipe,and wound up witha 'nigger'part, all in one night. Is thereany one you knowof todaywho can do that?"'"8It is clear that,as much as Shakespeareanroles were prizedby actors, they were not exalted;they did not unfit one forother roles and other tasks;they were not elevatedto a positionabove the culturein whichthey appeared. Most frequently,the finalword of the eveningwas not Shakespeare's.Hamlet might be followedby Fortune'sFrolic, The Merchantof Veniceby TheLottery Ticket, Richard III by TheGreen Mountain Boy, by Chaos Is ComeAgain on one occasion and by Love'sLaughs at Locksmiths:or, The Guardian Outwittedon another,and, in California,Romeo andJuliet by Did YouEver Send Your Wifeto San Jose?.'9

America,150, 193-94; Kenneth Silverman, A CulturalHistory of theAmerican Revolution (New York, 1976), 62; and GarffB. Wilson, ThreeHundred Yearsof American Drama and Theatre(Englewood Cliffs,N.J., 1973), 19-27 16 Playbills,St. CharlesTheatre, New Orleans,November 30, 1846,Alexandria, Virginia, July 12, 1799,and ArchStreet Theatre, Philadelphia, March 2, 1857,FSL. 17 Playbills,American Theatre, Philadelphia, August 30, 31, September1, 11, 1838,June 24, 1839,FSL. 18 Davenport,as quotedin LloydMorris, Curtain Time: The Storyof the American Theater (New York, 1953), 205. 19Playbills, Walnut Street Theater, Philadelphia, November 30, 1821,Military Hall, Newark,NJ., August 15, 1852, MontgomeryTheatre, Montgomery, Alabama, March 21, 1835,and AmericanTheatre, Philadel- phia, June 25, 1839, December 14, 1837, FSL; and MacMinn, The Theatreof theGolden Era in California,90. Nevertheless,it was not uncommon for Catharineand Petruchio,an abridged version of The Tamingof theShrew, to serveas an afterpiece;see playbills,American Theatre, New Orleans,April 20, 1827,American Theatre, Philadelphia,September 26, 1838,and St. CharlesTheatre, New Orleans,March 25, 1864,FSL. Catharineand Petruchioalso servedas an afterpiecewhen playsother than Shakespeare'swere presented;see playbills, AmericanTheatre, New Orleans, April 20, 1827, and AmericanTheatre, Philadelphia,September 26, December8, 1838,FSL.

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These afterpiecesand divertissementsmost often are seen as having diluted or denigratedShakespeare. I suggestthat they may be understoodmore meaningfully as havingintegrated him into Americanculture. Shakespeare was presentedas part of thesame milieuinhabited by magicians,dancers, singers, acrobats, minstrels, and comics. He appeared on the same playbillsand was advertisedin the same spirit. This does not mean that theatergoerswere unable to make distinctionsbetween Shakespearean productionsand the accompanyingentertainment. Of course they were. Shakespeare, after all, was what most of them came to see. But it was a Shakespearepresented as partof the culturethey enjoyed, a Shakespearerendered familiarand intimateby virtueof his context.

IN 1843 THE CURTAIN OF THE REBUILT ST. CHARLES THEATRE featuredan arrestingbit of symbolism:it depicted Shakespeare in a halo of lightbeing borne alofton the wings of the American eagle.20Shakespeare was not only domesticated;he was humanized. Henry Norman Hudson, the period's most popular Shakespearean lecturer,hailed Shakespeare as "the prodigyof our race" but also stressedhis decency,his humility,his "true gentlenessand lowlinessof heart"and concluded that "he who looks the highestwill always bow the lowest."2' In his melodrama Shakespearein Love, Richard Penn Smith pictured the poet not as an awesome symbolof culture but as a,poor, worried,stumbling young man in love with a woman of whose feelingshe is not yetcertain. In the end, of course,he triumphs and proclaimshis joy in wordsthat identify him as a well-roundedhuman being to whom one can relate: "I am indeed happy. A poet, a lover,the husband of the woman I adore. What is there more for me to desire?"22Nineteenth-century Americaswallowed Shakespeare, digested him and his plays,and made them part of the culturalbody. If Shakespeare originallycame to America as Culturein the librariesof the educated, he existed in pre-Civil War America as culture.The natureof his receptionby nineteenth-centuryaudiences confirmsthis conclusion. Whilehe was performingin Natchez,Mississippi, in 1835, the Irishactor Tyrone Power observed people on the road hurryingto the theater.Their fine horses, ornateand oftenantique saddles,and picturesqueclothing transported him back to ElizabethanEngland and "the palmydays of the Globe and Bear-garden."Power's insightwas sound; there weresignificant similarities between the audiences of Shakespeare's own day and those he drew in America. One of Shakespeare's contemporariescommented that the theaterwas "frequentedby all sortsof people old and younge,rich and poore, mastersand servants,papists and puritans,wise men etc.,churchmen and statesmen."The nineteenth-centuryAmerican audience was equally heterogeneous.In both eras the variousclasses saw the same playsin the same theaters-thoughnot necessarilyfrom the same vantagepoint. Until mid- century,at least,American theaters generally had a tripartiteseating arrangement:

20 JohnS. Kendall,The Golen Age of theNew Orleans Theater(Baton Rouge, 1952),210. 21 Hudson,Lectures on Shakespeare,1 (New York,1848): 1-41. 22 Smith,The Sentinel and Other Plays, ed. RalphH. Wareand H. W. Schoenberger(Bloomington, Ind., n.d.), 101-14.

This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Mon, 17 Mar 2014 16:43:19 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions WilliamShakespeare and theAmerican People 43 the pit(orchestra), the boxes, and the gallery(balcony). Although theater prices fell substantiallyfrom 1800 to 1850, seatingarrangements continued to dovetailwith class and economicdivisions. In the boxes sat,as one spectatorput it,"the dandies, and people of the firstrespectability and fashion."The gallerywas inhabitedlargely by those-apprentices,servants, poor workingmen-who could not affordbetter seats or by those-Negroes and often prostitutes-whowere not allowed to sit elsewhere.The pitwas dominatedby what were rathervaguely called the "middling classes"~-a "mixed multitude"that some contemporariespraised as the "honest folks"or "the sterlingpart of the audience."23 All observersagreed thatthe nineteenth-centurytheater housed under one roof a microcosmof Americansociety. This, the actorJoseph Jefferson maintained, was whatmade drama a more difficultart than painting,music, or writing,which "have a directfollowing, generally from a class whose tasteand understandingare pretty evenly balanced,-whereas a theater is divided into three and sometimesfour classes."Walt Whitman warmly recalled the BoweryTheatre around the year 1840, where he could look up to the firsttier of boxes and see "the facesof the leading authors,poets, editors,of those times,"while he sat in the pit surroundedby the "slang, wit, occasional shirt sleeves, and a picturesque freedom of looks and manners,with a rude good-natureand restlessmovement" of cartmen,butchers, firemen,and mechanics.Others spoke of the mixed audience withless enthusiasm. WashingtonIrving wrote a series of lettersto the New York MorningChronicle in 1802 and 1803 describinghis theaterexperiences. The noise in the galleryhe found "is somewhatsimilar to thatwhich prevailed in Noah's Ark; forwe have an imitationof the whistlesand yellsof everykind of animal."When the "gallerygods" were roused for one reason or another,"they commenced a dischargeof apples, nuts & ginger-bread,on the heads of the honestfolks in the pit."24 Littlehad changed by 1832 when the Englishvisitor Frances Trollope attended the theaterin severalAmerican cities. In Cincinnatishe observedcoatless men with theirsleeves rolled up, incessantlyspitting, reeking "of onions and whiskey."She enjoyed the Shakespeare but abhorred the "perpetual" noises: "the applause is expressedby cries and thumpingwith the feet,instead of clapping; and when a patrioticfit seized them,and 'Yankee Doodle' was called for,every man seemed to thinkhis reputationas a citizendepended on the noise he made." Things were no betterin Philadelphiaand, if anything,worse in New York theaters,where she witnessed"a lady performingthe mostmaternal office possible ... and a generalair of contemptfor the decencies of life."25When he publishedhis reminiscencesin

23 Power,Impressions ofAmerica, 2 vols. (London, 1836),2: 189-92. Shakespeare'scontemporary is quoted in AlfredHarbage, Shakespeare'sAudience (New York, 1941), 84-85. For an excellentdiscussion of theater audiencesin thefirst half of the nineteenthcentury, see Grimsted'sindispensible Melodrama Unveiled, chap. 3. Fora comparisonwith audiences in eighteenth-centuryEngland, seeJames T. Lynch,Box, Pit, and Gallery: Stage andSociety injohnson's London (New York,1971). Claudia Johnson deals witha neglectedpart of theAmerican audiencein "That GuiltyThird Tier: Prostitutionin Nineteenth-CenturyTheaters," American Quarterly, 27 (1975): 575-84. 24 Alan S. Downer,ed., TheAutobiography ofJoseph Jefferson (Cambridge, Mass., 1964), 286; Whitman,"The Old ,"in JustinKaplan, ed., WaltWhitman: Poetry and Prose(New York, 1982), 1189-90; and Irving, Lettersof Jonathan Oldstyle, ed. Bruce I. Grangerand MarthaHartzog (Boston, 1977), 12-25. 25 Trollope,Domestic Manners of the Americans, 2 vols. (London, 1832), 1: 179-84,and 2: 87-88, 194-95.

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1836, Tyrone Power tried to counter such accounts by praisingthe attentiveness and intelligenceof his Americanaudiences, but it appears thatwhat differedwas less the audience than Power'stolerance for it. For instance,in hailingthe "degree of repose and gentilityof demeanour" of the audience he performedfor in New Orleans in 1835, he wrote: The leastprolonged tumult of approbation even is stilledby a wordto order: and whenit is consideredthat here are assembledthe wildestand rudestspecimens of the Western population,men owning no controlexcept the laws, and notviewing these over submissively, andwho admit of no arbiterelegantiarum or standard of fine breeding, it confers infinite credit on theirinnate good feeling,and thatsense of propriety which here forms the sole check on theirnaturally somewhat uproarious jollity.26

Evidenceof thissort makes it clear thatan understandingof the Americantheater in our own time is not adequate grounding for a comprehensionof American theaterin the nineteenthcentury. To envision nineteenth-centurytheater audi- ences correctly,one mightdo well to visita contemporarysporting event in which the spectatorsnot onlyare similarlyheterogeneous but are also-in the mannerof boththe nineteenthcentury and the Elizabethanera-more thanan audience; they are participantswho can enter into the action on the field,who feel a sense of immediacyand at timeseven of control,who articulatetheir opinions and feelings vocallyand unmistakably.Washington Irving wryly observed, "The good folksof the galleryhave all the trouble of ordering the music." When the orchestra's selectiondispleased them,they stamped, hissed, roared, whistled, and groaned in cadence untilthe musiciansplayed "Mollin thewad, Tally ho thegrinders, and several other airs more suited to their tastes."The audience's vociferousnesscontinued during the play itself,which was punctuatedby expressionsof disapprovalin the formof hisses or groans and of approval in the formof applause, whistles,and stampingto the pointthat a Virginiaeditor felt called upon to remindhis readersin 1829 that it was not "a duty to applaud at the conclusionof everysentence." A Frenchreporter, attending a productionof Shakespearein Californiain 1851, was fascinatedby the audience's enthusiasm:"the more theylike a play,the louder they whistle,and when a San Franciscoaudience burstsinto shrillwhistles and savage yells, you may be sure they are in raptures of joy." Audiences frequently demanded-and got-instant encores from performerswho particularlypleased them. "Perhaps,"a New York editor wrotesarcastically in 1846, "we'll flatterMr. Kean by makinghim take poison twice."27 Like the Elizabethans,a substantialportion of nineteenth-centuryAmerican audiences knew theirShakespeare well. Sol Smithreported that in 1839, when he wantedto put on an eveningof acts fromvarious Shakespearean plays in St. Louis, he had "no difficultyin findingHamlets, Shylocks and Richardsin abundance,very glad of the opportunityto exhibittheir hidden powers." Constance Rourke has

26 Power,Impressions ofAmerica, 2: 171-74. Also see ibid,1: 62-66, 87-89, 123-26,210-11. 27 Irving,Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle, 14; the Virginiaand New York editorsare quoted in Grimsted, MelodramaUnveiled, 63-64; and the Frenchreporter's account is reprintedin BarnardHewitt, Theatre U.S.A., 1665 to1957 (New York,1959), 164-66.

This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Mon, 17 Mar 2014 16:43:19 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions WilliamShakespeare and theAmerican People 45 shownthat as far westas California,from miners' camps to the galleriesof urban theaters,there were many who knew large parts of the plays by heart.28This knowledgeeasily became an instrumentof control,as more than one hapless actor foundout. In the winterof 1856 Hugh F. McDermott'sdepiction of RichardIII did not meet the criticalexpectations of his Sacramento audience. During the early scenes of Act I "a few carrotstimely thrown, had made theirappearance," but the full ardor of the audience was roused only when Richard's killingof Henry includeda "thrusta posteriori,after Henry had fallen."Then, the SacramentoUnion reported,"cabbages, carrots, pumpkins, potatoes, a wreathof vegetables,a sack of flourand one of soot,a dead goose, withother articles, simultaneously made their appearance upon the stage."The barrage woke the dead Henry,who fledfollowed by Richard, "his head enveloped in a halo of vegetable glory."Pleas from the managerinduced the audience to allow the playto go on-but not forlong. Earlyin Act II, McDermott'sineptness brought forthfirst a stormof shouts and then a renewalof the vegetableshower accompanied thistime by Chinese firecrackers.As poor Richard fled for the second time,"a well directedpumpkin caused him to stagger;and withstill truer aim, a potato relievedhim of his cap, which was left upon the fieldof glory,among the cabbages."29 Scenes like this account for the frequentassurance on playbillsthat "proper officersare appointed who willrigidly enforce decorum."30 Proper officersor not, such incidentswere common enough to prompta nineteenth-centurygentleman to note in his diary,"The egg as a vehicleof dramaticcriticism came intoearly use in thisContinent."3' Nevertheless, the same Californiaaudiences capable of driving King Richardfrom the stage could pay homage to a performancethey recognized as superior. Irish-bornMatilda Heron's portrayalof Julieton New Year's night 1854 "so fascinated and entranced" the "walnut-crackingholiday audience," accordingto the San FranciscoChronicle, that "theysat motionlessand silentfor some momentsafter the scene was done; and thensuddenly recovering themselves fromthe thraldomunder whichthey had been placed, theycame down in a shower of applause thatshook the house."32 These freneticdisplays of approval and disapprovalwere signsof engagementin whatwas happeningon the stage-an engagementthat on occasioncould blur the line between audience and actors. At a performanceof RichardIII withJunius Brutus Booth at New York's in Decemer 1832, the holiday audience was so large thatsome three hundred people overflowedonto the stage and entered into the spirit of things, the New York Mirrorreported. They examined Richard'sroyal regalia withinterest, hefted his sword,and triedon his crown;they moved up to get a close look at the ghostsof King Henry,Lady Anne, and the childrenwhen these charactersappeared on stage; theymingled with the

28 Smith, TheatricalManagement, 137-38; and Rourke, Troupersof theGokl Coast, 149-50, 209-10. 29 Sacramento Union, as quoted in MacMinn, The Theatreof theGolden Era in California,90-91. 30 Playbill,Walnut Street Theatre, Philadelphia, November 30, 1821, FSL. 3' As quoted in Nancy Webb and Jean Francis Webb, Will Shakespeareand His America(New York, 1964), 84. 32 San Francisco Chronicle,January 1854, as quoted in MacMinn, The Theaterof theGolden Era in California, 100.

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soldiersduring the battle of BosworthField and respondedto theroll of drumsand blastof trumpetsby racingacross the stage. When Richardand Richmondbegan theirfight, the audience "made a ringaround the combatantsto see fairplay, and keptthem at it fornearly a quarterof an hour by 'Shrewsbury'sclock.' This was all done in perfectgood humor,and withno intentionto make a row."When Dan Rice came on to dance his famousJim Crow, the on-stageaudience made him repeat it some twentytimes, "and in the afterpiece,where a supper-table[was] spread, some among the most hungry very leisurely helped themselvesto the viands."33 Frequently,members of the audience became so involvedin the actionon stagethat theyinterfered in order to dispense charityto the sickand destitute,advice to the indecisive,and, as one man did during a Baltimoreproduction of Coriolanusand anotherduring a New York productionof Othello,protection to someone involved in an unfairfight.34

THESE DESCRIPTIONS SHOULD MAKE IT CLEAR how difficultit is to draw arbitrarylines betweenpopular and folkculture. Here was professionalentertainment containing numerous folkishelements, including a knowledgeable,participatory audience exertingimportant degrees of control.The integrationof Shakespeare into the cultureas a wholeshould bringinto serious question our tendencyto see cultureon a verticalplane, neatlydivided into a hierarchyof inclusiveadjectival categories such as "high,""low, pop, "mass,""folk," and the like. If the phenomenon of Shakespearewas not an abberation-and the diverseaudiences forsuch art forms as Italian opera, such performersas singer Jenny Lind, and such writersas Longfellow,Dickens, and Mark Twain indicate it was not-then the study of Shakespeare'srelationship to the Americanpeople helps reveal the existenceof a shared public culture to which we have not paid enough attention.It has been obscured by the practiceof employingsuch categoriesas "popular" aesthetically ratherthan literally.That is, the adjective"popular" has been utilizedto describe not only those creationsof expressiveculture that actuallyhad a large audience (whichis the way I have triedto use it in thisessay), but also, and oftenprimarily, those that had questionableartistic merit. Thus, a banal play or a poorlywritten romanticnovel has been categorized as popular culture,even if it had a tiny audience, while the recognized artisticattributes of a Shakespearean play have preventedit frombeing included in popular culture,regardless of itshigh degree of popularity.The use of such arbitraryand imprecisecultural categories has helped obscure the dynamic complexityof American culture in the nineteenth century. Our difficultyalso proceedsfrom the historicalfallacy of readingthe presentinto the past. By the middle of the twentiethcentury, Shakespearean drama did not occupy the place it had in the nineteenthcentury. As a Shakespearean scholar wrote in 1963, "the days when a Davenport and a Barry could open rival productionsof Hamleton the same night,as in 1875; whenMacbeth could be seen at

3" New YorkMirror, December 29, 1832,reprinted in Hewitt,Theatre U.S.A., 122. 34 Grimsted,Melodrama Unveiled,60; and Harper'sNew MonthlyMagazine, December1863, p. 133.

This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Mon, 17 Mar 2014 16:43:19 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions WilliamShakespeare and theAmerican People 47 threedifferent theatres in New York in 1849; when ten Hamletscould be produced in a single season, as in New York in 1857-58; ... these days are unfortunately gone."35Although in the mid-twentiethcentury there was no more widelyknown, respected,or quoted dramatistin our culturethan Shakespeare,the natureof his relationshipto the Americanpeople had changed: he was no longertheir familiar, no longerpart of theirculture, no longerat home in theirtheaters or on the movie and televisionscreens that had become the twentieth-centuryequivalents of the stage. If Shakespeare had been an integralpart of mainstreamculture in\the nineteenthcentury, in the twentiethhe had become part of "polite"culture-an essentialingredient in a complex we call, significantly,"legitimate" theater. He had become the possessionof the educated portionsof societywho disseminatedhis plays for the enlightenmentof the average folkwho were to swallowhim not for theirentertainment but fortheir education, as a respitefrom-not as a normalpart of-their usual culturaldiet. Recallinghis youthfulexperiences with Shakespeare, the columnistGerald Nachman wrote in 1979 that in the schools of America "Shakespearebecomes theatricalspinach: He's good foryou. If you digestenough of his plays,you'll grow up big and strongintellectually like teacher." The effortsof such youngproducers and directorsas JosephPapp in the late 1950s and the 1960s to liberateShakespeare fromthe genteelprison in whichhe had been confined,to restorehis playsto theiroriginal vitality, and to disseminatethem among whatPapp called "a great dispossessed audience" is a testamentto what had happened to Shakespeareandrama since the mid-nineteenthcentury.36 Signs of this transformationappear throughoutthe twentiethcentury. In his 1957 treatiseon how to organize communitytheaters, John WrayYoung warned, "Most organizationswill find it difficultto please withthe classics.... Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekhov,the Greeks,and the other mastersare hard to sell in the average communitysituation." Shakespeare had become not only a hard-to-sellclassic to averagemembers of the communitybut even an alienatingforce. In a 1929 episode of the popular comic strip "BringingUp Father,"the neighborhoodbartender, Dinty Moore, suddenly goes "high hat" when he meets and courts a wealthy woman.The symbolsof his attemptto enter"society," which alienate him fromhis friends,are his fancyclothing, his poodle dog, his horsebackriding and golf,his pretentiouslanguage, and his reading of Shakespeare'sRomeo and Juliet, which so infuriateshis friendJiggs that he seizesthe volumeand throwsit at Moore.37In one of his wonderfulmonologues on politics,published in 1905, George Washington Plunkitt,ward boss of the fifteenthassembly district in New York Cityand one of the powersof , admonished aspiringpoliticians: Ifyou're makin' speeches in a campaign,talk the language the people talk. Don't try to show howthe situation is byquoting Shakespeare. Shakespeare was all rightin hisway, but he didn'tknow anything about Fifteenth District politics.... go outand talkthe language of the

35 Marder,His Exitsand His Entrances,317-18. 36 Nachman,"Break a Leg, Willy,"San FranciscoChronicle, November 30, 1982; and Papp, as quoted in Gerald M. Berkowitz,New Broadways:Theatre across America, 1950-1980 (Totowa, N.J., 1982), 37. 37 Young,The Community Theatre and How It Works(New York, 1957), 126; and GeorgeMcManus, Bringing Up Father,ed. Herb Galewitz(New York, 1973),37.

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Fifteenthto the people. I knowit's an awfultemptation, the hankerin'to showoff your learnin'.I've feltit myself,but I alwaysresist it. I knowthe awful consequences.38

For Plunkitt,and obviouslyfor his constituents,Shakespeare symbolized "learning," irrelevant,impractical, pretentious-fit only for what Plunkittcalled "the name- parted-in-the-middlearistocrats." Similarly, in her account of her lifeas a worker, DorothyRichardson deplored the maudlin yellowbacknovels thatdominated the reading habitsof workingwomen at the turnof the centuryand pleaded for the wide disseminationof betterliterature: Only,please, Mr. or Mrs.Philanthropist, don't let it be Shakespere,or Ruskin,or Walter Pater.Philanthropists have triedbefore to reformdegraded literary tastes with heroic treatment,and theyhave failed every time. That is sometimesthe trouble with the college settlementfolk. They forget that Shakespere, and Ruskin,and all therest of the really true and greatliterary crew, are infinitebores to every-daypeople.39

Culture is a process, not a fixed condition; it is the product of unremitting interactionbetween the past and the present.Thus, Shakespeare'srelationship to the American people was always in flux,always changing.Still, it is possible to isolate a period during which the increasingseparation of Shakespeare from "every-daypeople" becomes more evident.The AmericanTheatre in San Francisco advised those attendingits May 29, 1855, productionof A MidsummerNight's Dream that"owing to the lengthof the play therewill be NO FARCE." Similarly,in 1869 the VarietiesTheatre in New Orleans announced in its playbilladvertising Mrs. ScottSiddons in As YouLike It, "In consequenceof the lengthof thiscomedy, it will constitutethe Evening'sEntertainment." In followingdecades it became less and less necessaryfor theaters to issue such explanations. In 1873 the California Theatre in San Francisco advertisedCoriolanus with no promise of a farce or between-actentertainment-and no apologies. This became true in cityafter city. There is no precise date, but everywherein the United States during the final decades of the nineteenthcentury the same transformationwas evidentlytaking place; Shakespearewas being divorcedfrom the broaderworld of everydayculture. Gone were the entre-actdiversions: the singers,jugglers, dancers, acrobats, orators. Gone, too, was the purple prose trumpetingthe sensationalevents and pageantry that were part of the Shakespearean plays themselves.Those who wanted their Shakespeare had to take him alone, lured to his playsby starkplaybills promising no frillsor enhancements.In December 1890 Pittsburgh'sDuquesne Theatre advertisedproductions of TheMerchant of Venice, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, and Julius Caesarby announcingsimply, "Engagement of Mr. LawrenceBarrett, supported by Miss Gale And a -Competent Company of Players." Significantly,the frequent admonitionsrelating to audience behaviorwere now missingas well. By the early twentiethcentury, playbills of thistype became the normeverywhere.40 Once again, WilliamShakespeare had become Culture.

38 Plunkitt,Plunkitt of Tammany Hall: A Seriesof VeryPlain Talkson VeryPractical Politics, recorded by William L. Riordon(1905; reprintedn., New York,1963), 52, 71. 39 Richardson,The Long Day: TheStory of a NewYork Working Girl (1905), reprinted in itsentirety in WilliamL. O'Neill,ed., Womenat Work(Chicago, 1972), 300, chap. 6. 40 Playbills,American Theatre, San Francisco,May 29, 1855,Varieties Theatre, New Orleans,December 30, 1869,California Theatre, San Francisco,April 4, 1873,Mechanics Hall, Salem,Mass., February 12, 1868,San

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It is easier to describethis transformation than to explain it,since the transforma- tionitself has clouded our visionof the past. So completelyhave twentieth-century Americanslearned to accept as naturaland timelessShakespeare's status as an elite, classicdramatist, to whose plays the bulk of the populace do not or cannot relate, thatwe have found it difficultto comprehend nineteenth-centuryconceptions of Shakespeare.Too frequently,modern historiansof the theaterhave spentless time and energy understandingShakespeare's nineteenth-centurypopularity than in explainingit away. The formula is simple: how to account for the indisputable popularityof a great master in a frontiersociety with an "overwhelmingly uneducated"public. The consensusseems to be thatShakespeare was popular for all the wrongreasons: because of the afterpiecesand divertissementsthat surrounded his plays; because the people wanted to see great actors who in turn insistedon performingShakespeare to demonstratetheir abilities;because his plays were presentedin altered, simplifiedversions; because of his bombast,crudities, and sexual allusionsrather than his poetryor sophistication;because of almostanything but his dramaticgenius. "Shakespeare,"we are told in a conclusionthat would not be importantif it were not so typical,"could communicatewith the unsophisticated at the levelof actionand oratorywhile appealing to the smallrefined element at the level of dramaticand poetic artistry."'4' Again and again, historiansand criticshave arbitrarilyseparated the "actionand oratory"of Shakespeare'splays fromthe "dramaticand poeticartistry?" with which they were, in reality,so intricatelyconnected. We are asked to believe that the average memberof the audience saw onlyviolence, lewdness, and sensationalismin such playsas RichardIII, Hamlet,King Lear, Othello,and Macbethand was incapable of understandingthe moraland ethicaldilemmas, the generationalstrains between parentsand children,the crude ambitionof Richard III or Lady Macbeth, the hauntingguilt of Macbeth,the paralyzingintrospection and doubtsof Hamlet,the envyof lago, the insecuritiesof Othello. We have been asked to believe thatsuch human conditionsand situationswere beyond the powersof mostof the audience and touched only a "refinedelement" who understood the "subtletiesof Shake- speare's art."

CERTAINLY, THE RELATIONSHIP OF AN AUDIENCE to the object of its focus-be it a sermon,political speech, newspaper,musical composition,or play-is a complex one and constitutesa problemfor the historianwho would reconstructit. But the problemcannot be resolvedthrough the use of such ahistoricaldevices as dividing

Jose Opera House, August 22, 1870, Roberts Opera House, Hartford, Conn., November 1869, Academy of Music, Providence, R.I., November 24, 1869, Leland Opera House, Albany, N.Y., September 27, 1880, April 15, 1882, Opera House, Albany, N.Y., January21, 22, 1874, Piper's Opera House, Virginia City, Nevada July 29, 1878, Walnut Street Theatre, Philadelphia, November 5, 1875, Duquesne Theatre, Pittsburgh,December 23, 24, 25, 1890, Murray Hill Fheatre, New York, May 4, 1903, Garden Theatre, ,December 24, 1900, Forty-fourthStreet Theatre, New York City, February 22, 1915, Schubert Memorial Theatre, St. Louis, November 9, 1914, Olympic TIheatre, St. Lotuis,January 6, 1902, May 6, 1907, and National Theatre, Washington, D.(C., October 2, 1939, FSL. Dormon, Theatrein theAnte-Bellurm South, 256-59. Esther Dunn studied the "indifferentand vulgar stuff' accompanying Shakespeare in the theater and coincluded that, "if the public could stand for this sort of entertainment,night in and nightout, theycould not have derived the fullestpleasure fromthe Shakespearean

This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Mon, 17 Mar 2014 16:43:19 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 50 LawrenceW. Levine both the audience and the object into crude categories and then coming to conclusionsthat have more to do withthe cultureof the writerthan that of the subject In fact,the wayto understandthe popularityof Shakespeareis to enterinto the spiritof the nineteenthcentury. Shakespeare was popular, firstand foremost, because he was integratedinto the culture and presented within its context. Nineteenth-centuryAmericans were able to fitShakespeare into theirculture so easilybecause he seemedto fit-because so manyof his values and tasteswere, or at least appeared to be, close to theirown, and were presentedthrough figures that seemed real and came to matterto the audience. Shakespeare'scharacters, Henry Norman Hudson insisted,were so vivid,so alive, thatthey assumed the shape "of actual persons,so thatwe knowthem as welland rememberthem as distinctlyas we do our most intimnatefriends." For the teenaged William Dean Howells, who memorizedgreat chunks of Shakespeare whileworking as an apprenticeprinter in his father'snewspaper officein the 1850s, the world of Shakespeare was one in whichhe feltas much "at home,"as much like"a citizen,"as he did in his smallOhio town.42 Both worlds enshrined the art of oratory.The same Americans who found diversionand pleasure in lengthypolitical debates, who soughtjoy and God in the sermonsof churchand camp meeting,who had, in short,a seeminglyinexhaustible appetitefor the spoken word, thrilledto Shakespeare'seloquence, memorizedhis soliloquies,delighted in his dialogues. Although nineteenth-centuryAmericans stressed the importance of literacyand built an impressivesystem of public education,theirs remained an oral worldin whichthe spoken word was central.In such a world,Shakespeare had no difficultyfinding a place. Nor was Shakespear- ean oratoryconfined to the professionalstage; it often was a part of life. Walt Whitman recalled that as a young man he rode in the omnibuses "declaimingsome stormypassage fromJulius Caesar or Richard"to passersby.In the 1850s MarkTwain workedas an apprenticeto the pilot-masterGeorge Ealer on the steamboatPennsylvania: "He would read Shakespeare to me; notjust casually, but by the hour, when it was his watch,and I was steering.... He did not use the book,and did not need to; he knewhis Shakespeareas wellas Euclid ever knewhis multiplicationtable." In Corpus Christi,Texas, in 1845, soldiers of the Fourth InfantryRegiment broke the monotonyof waitingfor the Mexican War to begin by stagingplays, including a performanceof Othellostarring young Lieutenant UlyssesS. Grant as Desdemona. Many of Lincoln's aides and associatesremem- bered his tendencyto recitelong, relevantpassages fromShakespeare during the troublingdays of the Civil War. Shakespeare was taught in nineteenth-century schoolsand collegesas declamationor rhetoric,not literature.For manyyoungsters

portion of the programme"; Shakespearein America, 133-35, 142-45, 175. In 1926 Poet Laureate Robert Bridges spoke for many on both sides of the Atlantic when he attributedthe "bad jokes and obscenities,""the mere foolish verbal trifling,"and such sensationalism in Shakespeare's plays as the murder of Macduffs child or the blinding of Gloucester to Shakespeare's need to make concessions "to the most vulgar stratumiof his audience, ... those wretched beings who can never be forgiventheir share in preventingthe greatest poet and dramatistof the world frombeing the best artist";Bridges, The Influenceof the Audience (New York, 1926), 3, 23. 12 Hudson, Lecturesoni Shakespeare, 1: 54; and KeninethS. Lynn, WilliamDean Howells:An AmericanLife (New York, 1971), 67-68.

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Shakespeare was firstencountered in schoolbooksas textsto be recitedaloud and memorized.Through such means, Shakespearean phrases,aphorisms, ideas, and language helped shape Amnericanspeech and became so integrala part of the nineteenth-centuryimagination that it is a futileexercise to separate Americans' love of Shakespeare's oratory from their appreciation for his subtle use of language.43 It was not merelyShakespeare's language but his stylethat recommended itself to nineteenth-centuryaudiences. In a period when melodrama became one of the mainstaysof the Americanstage, Shakespearean playseasily lent themselves to the melodramnaticstyle. Shakespearean drama featuredheroes and villainswho com- municateddirectly with the audience and leftlittle doubt about the natureof their characteror theirintentions. In a seriesof asides duringthe opening scenes of the firstact, Macbethshares his "horribleimaginings" and "vaultingamnbition" with the audience (I.iii-vii). Similarly,lago confides to the audience "I hate the Moor," rehearseshis schemesof "double knavery"to betrayboth Cassio and Othello,and confessesthat his jealousy of Othello "Doth, like a poisonous mineral,gnaw my inwards;/ And nothingcan or shall contentmny soul / Till I am evened withhim" (I.iii). As in melodrama,Shakespearean villains are aware not onlyof theirown evil but also of the goodness of theiradversaries. Thus lago, even as he plots against Othello, admits that "The Moor-howbeit that I endure him not- / Is of a constant,loving, noble natur-e"(II.i). Lines like these, which so easily fitthe melodramaticmode, were delivered in appropriatelymelodramatic style. The actorswho dominatedthe stage during the firsthalf of the nineteenthcentury were vigorous,tempestuous, emotional. To describe these men, contemporariesreached for words like "hurricane,""mael- strom,""avalanche," "earthquake," "monsoon," and "whirlwind."Edmund Kean's acting,one of themnoted, was 'just on the edge, sometimesquite over the edge of madness." It "blinded and stunned the beholders,appalled the imagination,and chilledtheir blood." Walt Whitman,who saw JuniusBrutus Booth performin the late 1830s,wrote of him,"He illustratedPlato's rule thatto the formingan artistof the very highest rank a dash of insanityor what the world calls insanityis indispensable."44The first great American-bornShakespearean actor, Edwin Forrest,carried thisromantic tradition to its logical culmination.William Rounse- villeAlger, who saw Forrestperform, described his portrayalof Lear afterGoneril rebuffshim: His eyesflashed and fadedand reflashed.He beathis breast as ifnot knowing what he did. His handsclutched wildly at theair as thoughstruggling with sonmething invisible. Then, sinkingon his knees,with upturned look and hands straightoutstretched towards his

Whitmnan,Specimen Davs, in Kaplan, Whitman:Poetry anzd Prose, 702-03; Twain, Is ShakespeareDead? (New York, 1909), 4-7; William S. McFeelv, (ranst:A Biography(New York, 1982), 29; Robert N. Reeves, "Abraham Lincolni'sKnowledge of Shakespeare," OverlandMonthly, 43 (1904): 336-42; Westfall,Americanl Shakespeal-ean Criticism,227-29; and Henry W. Simon, The Readinigof Shakespearein AmericanSchools and Colleges:An Historical Sunaey(New York, 1932). I4,Ludlow, Dramatic Life as I FounitdIt, 234, 690-91, 694-95; Richard Moody, America Takes the Stage: Romanticismin, American Drama antdTheatre, 1750-1900 (Bloomingtoni,Imid., 1955), 195-96; and Whitman,"The Old Bowery," in Kaplan, Whitmnan:Poetry asid Prose, 1187-88.

This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Mon, 17 Mar 2014 16:43:19 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 52 LawrenceW. Levine unnaturaldaughter, he poured out, in frenziedtones of mingledshriek and sob, his witheringcurse, half adjuration, half malediction.45

As in melodrama itself,language and stylein American productionsof Shake- speare were not utilizedrandomly; they were used to inculcatevalues, to express ideas and attitudes.For all of the complaintsof such as Whitmanthat the feudal plays of Shakespeare were not altogetherfitting for a democraticage, Shake- speare'sattraction for nineteenth-century audiences was due in no smallpart to the factthat he was-or at least was taken to be-in tune withmuch of nineteenth- centuryAmerican consciousness.From the beginning,Shakespeare's American admirersand promotersmaintained that he was pre-eminentlya moralplaywright. To overcomethe general prejudice againstthe theaterin the eighteenth-century, Shakespeare's plays were frequentlypresented as "moral dialogues" or "moral lectures."For Thomas Jefferson,"A livelyand lastingsense of filialduty is more effectuallyimpressed on the mind of a son or daughterby readingKing Lear, than by all the dryvolumes of ethicsand divinitythat ever were written."For Abraham Lincoln,Macbeth stood as "the perfectillustration of the problemsof tyrannyand murder."And John Quincy Adams concluded,even as he was waging his heroic fightagainst the power of the slave South in the House of Representativesin 1836, thatthe moral of Othellowas "thatthe intermarriageof black and whiteblood is a violationof the law of nature.That is the lesson to be learned fromthe play."46 Regardlessof specificinterpretations, writers of nineteenth-centuryschoolbooks and readers seemed to have agreed with Henry Norman Hudson that Shake- speare's works provided "a far betterschool of virtuousdiscipline than half the moral and religious books which are now put into the hands of youth" and reprintedlines fromShakespeare not only to illustratethe art of declamationbut also to disseminatemoral values and patrioticprinciples. As late as 1870 the playbill of a New Orleans theaterspelled out the meaningof TwelfthNight: "MORAL: In thisplay Shakespeare has finelypenciled the portraitsof Follyand Vanityin the persons of Aguecheek and Malvolio; and with a not less masterlyhand, he has exhibitedthe weaknessof the human mind when Love has usurped the place of Reason." The affinitybetween Shakespeare and the Americanpeople wentbeyond moral homilies;it extended to the basic ideologicalunderpinnings of nineteenth- centuryAmerica. When Cassius proclaimedthat "The fault,dear Brutus,is not in our stars,/ But in ourselves,that we are underlings"(, I.ii), and when Helena assertedthat "Our remediesoft in ourselvesdo lie,/ Which we ascribeto heaven: the fated sky/Gives us free scope" (All's Well ThatEnds Well,I.i), they

45Alger,Life ofEdwn Forrest: The American Tragedian, 2 (Philadelphia, 1877; reprintedn., New York,1972): 786. 46 For Whitman'smusings about the effects of Shakespeare's"aristocratic perfume," see his "A Thoughton Shakespeare"and "A BackwardGlance o'er Travel'dRoads," in Kaplan,Whitman: Poetry and Prose, 1150-52, 663-64. Eighteenth-centurydepictions of Shakespeareas a moral playwrightare describedin Bernard, RetrospectiomofAmerica, 270-71; Westfall,Ameran Shakespearean Crticism, 30-3 1; and Shattuck,Shakespeare on theAmerican Stage, 16. And see Jefferson,as quoted in LawrenceA. Cremin,Amenican Education: The Colnial Expeince, 1607-1783 (New York, 1970),438; Lincoln,as quoted in Alan Bloom,Shakespeare's Politics (New York,1964), 5; and Adams,"The Characterof Desdemona,"American Monthly Magazine, 1 (1836): 209-17, reprintedin Hackett,Notes and Comments,234-49, and "Misconceptionsof Shakespeareupon the Stage," reprintedin Hackett,Notes and Comments,217-28.

This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Mon, 17 Mar 2014 16:43:19 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions WilliamShakespeare and theAmerican People 53 articulateda beliefthat was centralto the pervasivesuccess ethos of the nineteenth centuryand thatconfirmed the developingAmerican worldview.47 Whatever Shakespeare's own designs, philosophy,and concept of humanity were,his playshad meaning to a nation thatplaced the individualat the centerof the universeand personalized the large questions of the day. The actor Joseph Jeffersonheld Shakespeare responsiblefor the star systemthat prevailed for so much of the nineteenthcentury since "'his tragedies almost withoutexception contain one great characteron whom the interestof the play turns,and upon whomthe attentionof the audience is centered."Shakespeare's characters-like the Davy Crocketts and Mike Finks that dominated American folklore and the Jacksons,Websters, Clays, and Calhouns who dominatedAmerican politics-were largerthan life: theirpassions, appetites, and dilemmaswere of epic proportions. Here were forceful,meaningful people who faced, on a larger scale, the same questionsas those thatfilled the pages of schoolbooks:the duties of childrenand parents,husbands and wives,governed and governorsto one another.In theirlives the problems of jealousy, morality,and ambitionwere all writ large. However flawedsome of Shakespeare's centralfigures were, theyat least acted-even the indecisiveHamlet-and bore responsibilityfor theirown fate. If theyfailed, they did so because ultimatelythey lacked sufficientinner control. Thus Othello was undone by hisjealousy and gullibility,Coriolanus by his pride, Macbeth and RichardIII by theirambition. All of themcould be seen as the architectsof their own fortunes,masters of theirown fate.All of them,Hudson taughthis audiences, "containwithin themselves the reason whythey are thereand not elsewhere,why theyare so and not otherwise."48 How importantthis quality of individual will was can be seen in the fate of Sophocles' Oedipusin nineteenth-centuryAmerica. The play was introducedtwice in the centuryto New York audiences and failedboth times,largely because of its subjectmatter. The New York Tribune'sreaction, after Oedipus opened in January 1882,was typical:"King Oedipus certainlycarries more woe to the square inchthan anybodyelse thatever walkedupon thestage. And itis woe of the veryworst kind- withoutsolace, and withouthope." Sophocles seemed guiltyof determinism-an ideological stance nineteenth-centuryAmericans rejected out of hand. "The overmasteringfates that broke men and women upon the wheel of torturethat destinymight be fulfilledare far away fromus, the gods thatlived and cast deep shadows over men's lives are turned to stone," the New York Herald's reviewer wrote."The helpfulhuman being-who pays his way throughthe world findsit hard to imagine the creaturekicking helpless in the traps of the gods." Similarly, criticsattacked the bloodshed and immoralityin Oedipus.The New York Mirror denounced "a plotlike this,crammed full of murder,suicide, self-mutilation, incest, and dark deeds of a similarcharacter."49 Shakespearean drama, of course,was no

HHudson, Lectures on Shakespeare,1: 79; and playbill,Varieties -Theatre, New Orleans,January 3, 4, 1870, FSL. Also see RtuthMiller Elson, Guardians of Traditioni:American Schoolbooks of the NineteenthCentury (Lincoln, Neb., 1964), 242, 283; and Sirnon, The Readintgof Shakespearein AmericanSchools and Colleges,19, 26, 44. 48 Downer, The Autobiographyof joseph Jefferson, 166-67; anid Huldson, Lectureson Shakespeare,1: 69. 49 For the New York reactionto Sophocles,see Doris M. Alexander,"Oedipus in VictorianNew York," AmericanQuarterly, 12 (1960): 417-21.

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less laced through with gore. But, while this quality in Sophocles seemed to Americansto be an end in itself,Shakespeare's thought patterns were eitherclose enough or were made to seem close enough so thatthe violencehad a point,and that point appeared to buttressAmerican values and confirmAmerican expecta- tions. This ideologicalequation, this ability of Shakespeare to connectwith Americans' underlyingbeliefs, is crucialto an understandingof his role in nineteenth-century America. Much has been made of the adaptationsof Shakespeare as instruments thatmade him somehow more understandableto Americanaudiences. Certainly, the adaptations did work this way-but not primarily,as has been so widely claimed,by vulgarizingor simplifyinghim to the pointof utterdistortion but rather by heighteningthose qualities in Shakespeare that American audiences were particularlydrawn to. The libertiestaken withShakespeare in nineteenth-century America were often similar to libertiestaken with folklore: Shakespeare was frequentlyseen as common propertyto be treatedas the user saw fit.Thus many smallchanges were made forpractical and moral reasons withoutmuch fanfareor fuss: minor roles were consolidatedto create richer acting parts; speeches and scenes, consideredoverly long or extraneous,were shortenedor omitted;sexual referenceswere rendered more palatable by shiftingsuch words as "whores"to "wenches"or "maidenheads"to "virtue";contemporary sensibilities were cateredto by makingJuliet eighteen rather than thirteenor by softeningsome of Hamlet's angriestdiatribes against Ophelia and his mother.Some of thealterations bordered on the spectacular,such as the flying,singing witches in Macbethand the elaborate funeralprocession that accompaniedJuliet's body to the tomb of the Capulets in Romeoand Juliet. On the whole,such limitedchanges were made withrespect for- and sensitivityto-Shakespeare's purposes.50 It is importantto realize that,while some of the alterationswere importedfrom England and otherswere made in America,none were adopted indiscriminately. Of the manydrastically revised editions of Shakespearethat originated in England, only three held sway in the United States during the nineteenthcentury: 'sCatharine and Petruchio(1756), Nahum Tate's revisionof KingLear (1681), and Colley Cibber'srevision of RichardIII (1700). For our purposes,the firstis the least significant,since it was largelya three-actcondensation of The Tamingof the Shrew,which retained the basic thrustof Shakespeare'soriginal and won consider- able popularityas an afterpiece.If brevitywas the chiefvirtue of Garrick'sCatharine andPetruchio, the attractionsof Cibber'sRichard and Tate's Lear were more complex and suggestthat those alterations of Shakespearethat became mostprevalent in the United Stateswere those thatbest fitthe values and ideologyof the period and the people. For most of the nineteenthcentury Colley Cibber's RichardIII held sway everywhere.5lCibber's revision, by cuttingone-third of the lines,eliminating half of

50Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled, chap. 6; GeorgeC. Branam,Eighteenth-Century Adapttiom of Shkespearean Tragedy(Berkeley and Los Angeles,1956), chap. 1; and Rankin,The Theater in Colonia Amrca, 83-84, 191-92. 51In 1909 Alice Wood reportedthat Cibber's version of Rihard III "is stillholding the stageand is still preferredby a largepart of thecommunity," and thus"the struggle for the 'Richard the Third' of Shakespeare

This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Mon, 17 Mar 2014 16:43:19 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions WilliamShakespeare and theAmerican People 55 the characters,adding scenes fromother Shakespearean plays and fromCibber's own pen, succeeded in mutingthe ambiguitiesof theoriginal and focusingall of the evil in the person of Richard. Thus, although Cibber retained Shakespeare's essentialplot and much of his poetry,he refashionedthe play in such a way that, while his work was done in the England of 1700, it could have been writtena hundred years later in the United States,so closelydid it agree with American sensibilitiesconcerning the centralityof the individual,the dichotomybetween good and evil, and the importanceof personal responsibility.Richmond's speech over the body of the vanquishedRichard mirrored perfectly America's moral sense and melodramatictaste: Farewel,Richard, and fromthy dreadful end Mayfuture Kings from Tyranny be warn'd; Had thyaspiring Soul butstir'd in Vertue Withhalf the Spirit it has dar'd in Evil, How mightthy Fame havegrac'd our EnglishAnnals: But as thouart, how fair a Page thou'stblotted.

If Cibber added lines making clear the fate of villains,he was no less explicit concerningthe destinyof heroes. Afterdefeating Richard, Richmond is informed that"the Queen and fairElizabeth, / Her beauteous Daughter,some fewmiles off, are / On their way to Gratulate your Victory."His reply must have warmed America's melodramaticheart as much as it confirmedits ideological underpin- nings:"Ay, there indeed my toil'srewarded."52 Tate's altered King Lear, like Cibber's RichardIII, virtuallydisplaced Shake- speare'sown versionfor almost two centuries.Tate, who distortedShakespeare far more than Cibber did, devised a happy ending forwhat was one of the mosttragic of all of Shakespeare'splays: he created a love affairbetween Edgar and Cordelia and allowed Cordelia and Lear to live. Althoughthere were certainlycritics of this fundamentalalteration, it proved popular with theatergoers.When in 1826 James H. Hackettchided his fellowactor Edmund Kean about his choice of Tate's ending ratherthan Shakespeare's,Kean replied thathe had attemptedto restore the original,"but when I had ascertainedthat a large majorityof the public-whom we live to please, and must please to be popular-liked Tate betterthan Shake- speare, I fellback upon his corruption;though in my soul I was ashamed of the prevailingtaste, and of myprofessional condition that required me to ministerunto it."53Still, many Americans defended the Tate version on ideological grounds. "The moral'snow more complete,"wrote a contemporary,"for although Goneril, Regan, and Edmond were deservedlypunished for their crimes,yet Lear and

is still'on'"; The Stage Historsof Shakespeare'sKing Richard the Third, 133, 165. As late as 1930, Arthur Colby Sprague attended a performance of RichardIII in Boston and was treated to "the Cibber text,practically in its entirety"although Cibber's name was nowhere mentioned; Sprague, ShakespearianPlayers and Performances (1953; reprint edn., New York, 1969), 151, 212 n. 3. 52 Cibber, The Tragical HistoryoJ King RichardIII, in Christopher Spencer, ed., Five RestorationAdaptations of Shakespeare(Urbana, III., 1965), 275-344. For an excellent discussioinof Cibber's adaptation, see Wood, The StageHistory of Shakespeare's King Richard the Third, chaps. 4, 6; also see Frederick W. Kilbourne, Alterationsand Adaptationsof Shakespeare(Boston, 1906), 107-12. 53 Hackett, Notesand Comments,227ni. For John Quincy Adams's critique of Tate, see ibid.,226-28.

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Cordelia were killedwithout reason and withoutfault. But now theysurvive their enemies and virtueis crowned with happiness."54That virtuebe "crowned with happinesss" was essential to the beliefs of nineteenth-centuryAmericans. Thus audiences had the pleasure of having theirexpectations confirmed when Edgar concludesthe play by declaimingto "Divine Cordelia": Thybright Example shall convince the World (WhateverStorms of Fortunieare decreed) That Truthand Vertueshall at lastsucceed.55

The profound and longstandingnineteenth-century American experience with Shakespeare, then, was neitheraccidental nor aberrant. It was based upon the language and eloquence, the artistryand humor, the excitementand action,the moral sense and worldviewthat Americansfound in Shakespearean drama. The more firmlybased Shakespeare was in nineteenth-centuryculture, of course, the more difficultit is to understandwhy he lost so much of his audience so quickly.

A COMPLETE EXPLANATION would requirea separateresearch project of itsown, but it is appropriatehere to probe tentativelyinto the factorsunderlying Shakespeare's transformation.Some of these were intricatelyconnected to the internalhistory of the theater.So long as the theaterwas under attackon moral grounds,as it was in the eighteenthand early nineteenthcenturies, Shakespeare, because of his im- mense reputation,could be presentedmore easilyand could be used to help make the theateritself legitimate. Shakespearean drama also lent itselfto the prevalent starsystem. Only the existenceof a small repertoryof well-knownplays, in which Shakespeare'swere central,made it feasiblefor the toweringstars of England and Americato travelthroughout the United Statesacting with resident stock compa- nies whereverthey went. The relativedearth of nativedramatists and the relative scarcityof competing forms of theatricalentertainment also figured in Shake- speare's popularity.As theseconditions were altered,Shakespeare's popularity and centralitywere affected.As importantas factorspeculiar to the theaterwere, the theaterdid not existin a vacuum; it was an integralpart of Americanculture-of interestto the historian precisely because it so frequentlyand so accurately indicatedthe conditionssurrounding it. A fullerexplanation must thereforebe soughtin the largerculture itself.56 Among the salient cultural changes at the turn of the centurywere those in language and rhetoricalstyle. The oratorical mode, which so dominated the nineteenthcentury and whichhelped make Shakespeare popular, hardlysurvived into the twentiethcentury. No longer did Americanstolerate speeches of several hours'duration. No longerwas theirattention riveted upon such politicaldebates as

54 As quoted in Grirnsted,Melodrama Unveiled, 119-20. 53 Tate, The Historyof King Lear. in Spencer,Five RestorationAdaptatio5 of Shakespeare,201-74. Also see Kilbourne,Alterations and Adaptationsof Shakespeare,157-72. 56 For a first-handaccount of the changesthe theaterunderwent, see ,Footlights and Spotlights: Recollectionsof Mv Life on theStage (Indianapolis,1924), esp. chap. 23.

This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Mon, 17 Mar 2014 16:43:19 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions WilliamShakespeare and theAmerican People 57 thatbetween Webster and Hayne in 1830, whichconsumed severaldays. It is true thatin the closingyears of the centuryWilliam Jennings Bryan could stillrise to nationalpolitical leadership through his superboratorical skills, but itis equallytrue thathe livedto see himselfbecome an anachronism,the bearer of a styleredolent of an earlierculture. The surprisinglyrapid decline of oratoryas a forcein national lifehas not receivedthe studyit deserves,but certainlyit was affectedby the influx of millionsof non-English-speakingpeople. The more than one thousandforeign- language newspapersand magazinespublished in the United Statesby 1910 testify graphicallyto the existenceof a substantialgroup forwhom Shakespeare, at leastin his originallanguage, was less familiarand less accessible.57These immigrantfolk helped constitutea ready audience for the rise of the more visual entertainments such as baseball,boxing, vaudeville, burlesque, and especiallythe new silentmovies, whichcould be enjoyed by a largerand oftenmore marginalaudience less steeped in the language and the culture. If what Reuel Denney called the "deverbalizationof the forum" weakened Shakespeare among some segments of the population, the parallel growth of literacyamong othergroups also underminedsome of the props thathad sustained Shakespeare'spopularity. Literacy encroached upon the pervasiveoral culturethat had created in nineteenth-centuryAmerica an audience more comfortablewith listeningthan withreading. Thus the generationsof people accustomedto hearing and recitingthings out loud-the generationsfor whom oral recitationof the King James version of the Bible could well have formed a bridge to the English of Shakespeare-were being depleted as Americaentered a new century.58 These language-relatedchanges were accompaniedby changesin tasteand style. JohnHigham has argued thatfrom the 1860s throughthe 1880s romanticidealism declined in the United States.59The melodramaticmode, to which Shakespeare lent himselfso well and in which he was performedso frequently,went into a relateddecline. Edwin Booth, the mostinfluential Shakespearean actor in America during the closing decades of the nineteenthcentury, played his roles in a less ferocious,more subtleand intellectualizedfashion than his fatherand mostof the otherleading actorsof the firsthalf of the centuryhad. When asked how his acting compared to his father's,Booth replied simply,"I think I must be somewhat quieter." The younger Booth's quietness became the paradigm.6"' The visceral, thunderousstyle fell into such disfavorthat by 1920 the criticFrancis Hackett not

57 Joshua A. Fishman, Language Loyaltyin the UnitedStates (1966; reprinitedni., New York, 1978), 59. 58 For Denney's phrase, see his essay, "The Discovery of Popular Culture," in Robert E. Spiller and Eric Larrabee, eds., AmericanPerspectiVes: The National Self-Imagein theTwentieth CenturN (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), 164-65. The relationshipsbetween recitationof the King James Bible and performances of Shakespeare and between the transformationof nineteenth-centuryreligious styleand the transformationof Shakespeare need furtherthought and research. 59 Higham, "The Reorientationof American Culture in the 1890's," in JohnWeiss, ed., The Originsof Modern Consciousness(Detroit, 1965), 25-48. 60 The questioner was the youLngactor Otis Skinner; see his autobiography,Footlights and Spotlights,93. As he was preparing for his firstportrayal of Shylock in 1893-the year of Booth's death-Skinner discovered the extent of Booth's influence: "I found myself reading speeches with the Booth cadence, using the Booth gestures,attitudes and facial expressions, in short, giving a rank imitation.The ghost of the dead actor rose between me and the part." Ibid., 213. For other evidence of Booth's influence, see Hutton, Curiositiesof the AmericanStage, 293-94; Henry Austin Clapp, Reminiscencesof a DramaticCritic (1902; reprint edn., Freeport, N.Y., 1972), chap. 15; and Charles H. Shattuck, The Hamlet of Edwin Booth (Urbana, Ill., 1969).

This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Mon, 17 Mar 2014 16:43:19 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 58 LawrenceW. Levine only beratedJohn Barrymorefor his emotionalportrayal of Richard III but also tookShakespeare himself to taskfor the "unsophisticated"manner in whichhe had craftedthe play-the play thatnineteenth-century audiences had enjoyed above all others:"the plot, the psychology,the history,seem to me infantile.... Are we led to understandRichard? No, onlyto moralizeover him.Thus platitudemakes cowards of us all.''61 These gradual and decisivechanges in language, style,and tasteare important but by themselves do not constitutea totally satisfyingexplanation for the diminishedpopularity of Shakespeare. As importantas changes in language were, theydid not preventthe developmentof radio as a centralentertainment medium at the beginningof the 1920s or the emergenceof talkingmovies at the end of that decade. Nor was thereanything inherent in the new popular media thatnecessarily relegatedShakespeare to a smaller,elite audience; on the contrary,he was quite wellsuited to the new formsof presentationthat came to dominance.His comedies had an abundance of slapstickand contrivedhappy endings, his tragedies and historicalplays had more than their share of action. Most importantly,having writtenfor a stage devoid of scenery,Shakespeare could and did incorporateas much spatial mobilityas he desired into his plays-twenty-fivescene changes in Macbeth,one of his shortestplays, and forty-twoin Antonyand Cleopatra,where the action gravitatedfrom Alexandria to such locales as Rome, Messina,Athens, and Syria.This fluidity-whichcaused innumerableproblems for the stagecraftof the nineteenthcentury-was particularlyappropriate to the movies, which could visuallyreproduce whatever Shakespeare had in mind,and to radio,which, like the Elizabethanstage itself,could relyupon the imaginationof itsaudience. That these new media did not take full advantage of so recentlya popular source of entertainmentas Shakespearean drama demands furtherexplanation.62

SHAKESPEAREDID NOT, OF COURSE, DISAPPEAR fromAmerican culture after the turn of the century;he was transformedfrom a playwrightfor the general public into one for a specificaudience. This metamorphosisfrom popular culture to polite culture,from entertainment to erudition,from the propertyof "Everyman"to the possessionof a more elite circle needs to be seen with the perspectiveof other transformationsthat took place in nineteenth-centuryAmerica. At the beginningof the century,as we have seen, the theaterwas a microcosm;it housed both the entire spectrumof the population and the complete range of entertainmentfrom tragedy to farce,juggling to ballet,opera to minstrelsy.The theaterdrew all ranksof people to one place where theyconstituted what Erving Goffmanhas called a "focused gathering"-a set of people who relate to one another through the medium of a common activity.The term is useful in remindingus that, in the theater, people not only sat under one roof, they

titHackett, "After the Play,"New, Republic, March 24, 1920,p. 122. 62 For the su-itabilityof Shakespeare to modernmedia, see RogerManvell, Shake.speare and theFiitt (New York,1971), 9-10; Jan Kott,Shakespeare, Our Contemporamy, tranis. Boleslaw Taborski (Gardeni City, N.Y., 1964), 231-35; and JohnWain, The LivingWorld of Shakespeare (London, 1978), 2-7.

This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Mon, 17 Mar 2014 16:43:19 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions WilliamShakespeare arnd the American People 59 interacted.In this sense, the theaterin the firsthalf of the nineteenthcentury constituteda microcosmof stillanother sort: a microcosmof the relationsbetween the varioussocioeconomic groups in America.The descriptionsof such observersas WashingtonIrving and Mrs. Trollope make it clear thatthose relationswere beset bytensions and conflicts.Even so convinceda democratas Whitmancomplained by 1847 thatthe New York theaterswere becoming"'low' places wherevulgarity (not onlyon the stage,but in frontof it) is in the ascendant,and bad-tastecarries the day withhardly a pleasantpoint to mitigateits coarseness." Whitman excepted only the Park Theatre "because the audiences there are always intelligent,and there is a dash of superioritythrown over the Performances."Earlier in the centurythe Park Theater had received the patronage of the entire public; by the 1830s it had become more exclusive,while the Bowery,Chatham, and othertheaters became the preservesof gallerygods and groundlings.This developmentwas not exclusiveto New York. "I have discoveredthat the peopleare withus," Tyrone Power reported from Baltimorein 1833, since the Front Theatre, at which he was performing, drew "the sturdydemocracy of the good city,"while its rival,the Holiday Theatre, was "consideredthe aristocratichouse." 3" Not onlywas therean increasingsegregation of audiences but ultimatelyof actors and stylesas well.On a winterevening in 1863, George WilliamCurtis, the editorof Harper's,took a "rusticfriend" to two New York theaters.First they went to see Edwin Forrestat Niblo's Gardens. "It was crammedwith people. All the seats were full,and the aisles,and the steps. And the people sat upon the stairsthat ascend to the second tier, and they hung upon the balustrade,and they peeped over shoulders and between heads." Forrest'sacting, Curtis wrote,was "a boundless exaggerationof all the traditionalconventions of the stage."Still he conceded that Forrest "move[d] his world nightly.... There were a great many young women around us crying.... They were not refinednor intellectualwomen. They were, perhaps,rather coarse. But theycried good heartytears." After one act his friend whispered,"1 have had as much as I can hold,"and theywent up the streetto the WinterGarden, where Edwin Booth was portrayinglago. "The differenceof the spectaclewas striking.The house was comfortablyfull, not crowded.The air of the audience was thatof refinedattention rather than of eager interest.Plainly it was a more cultivatedand intellectualaudience." And just as plainlythey were seeing a verydifferent type of acting."Pale, thin,intellectual, with long black hair and dark eyes,Shakespeare's lago was perhaps never more articulatelyrepresented ... ; all thatwe saw of Booth was admirable."96 In 1810 john Howard Payne complained, "The judicious few are very few indeed. They are alwaysto be found in a Theatre, like flowersin a desert,but they are nowheresufficiently numerous to ill one." By the second half of the century this was evidentlyno longer the case. Separate theaters,often called legitimate

63 Goffman,Encounters: Two Studie.sin theSociologv of Interaction(Indianapolis, 1961); Whitman, "Miserable State of the Stage," BrooklytnEagle. February 8, 1847, reprinted in Montrose l. Moses and john Masoni Brown, eds., Ameri'aniTheatre a.5 Seen byIt C'ritics(New York, 1934), 7(0-72;and Power, ImpressionsojfAmerica, 1: 141. tit(urtis, "Editor's Easy Chair," Harper's Neu AlonthlvMagazine, December 1863, pp. 131-33. For the contrastbetweeni the two actors portraying Hamlet, see Huttoni,Curiosities ()f the American Stage, 281.

This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Mon, 17 Mar 2014 16:43:19 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 60 LawrenceW. Levine theaters,catering to the 'judicious," appeared in cityafter city, leaving the other theatersto those whom Payne called "the idle, profligate,and vulgar."365The psychologistRobert Somer has shown the connectionsbetween space and status and has argued that "societycompensates for blurred social distinctionsby clear spatial ones." Such scholars as Burton J. Bledstein and William R. Taylor have noted the Victorian urge to structureor rationalizespace.66 As the traditional spatial distinctionsamong pit, gallery,and boxes withinthe theaterwere under- mined by the aggressive behavior of audiences caught up in the egalitarian exhuberanceof the period and freedin the atmosphereof the theaterfrom many of the demands of normativebehavior, this urge graduallyled to the creationof separate theaters catering to distinct audiences and shattered for good the phenomenonof theateras a social microcosmof the entiresociety. This dramatic split in the American theater was part of more important bifurcationsthat were takingplace in Americanculture and society.How closelythe theaterregistered societal dissonance can be seen in the audiences' volatilereaction to anythingthey considered condescending behavior, out of keeping with a democraticsociety. The tensioncreated by hierarchicalseating arrangements helps explain the periodicrain of objectsthat the galleryunleashed upon those in more privilegedparts of the theater.When WashingtonIrving was "saluted aside [his] head witha rottenpippen" and rose to shake his cane at the gallerygods, he was restrainedby a man behind him who warnedthat this would bringdown upon him the fullwrath of the people; the only course of action,he was advised,was to "sit down quietlyand bend your back to it."67 Englishactors, who were ipsofacto suspected of aristocraticleanings, had to tread withparticular caution. Edmund Kean failedto do so in 1821 when he cancelledhis performanceof RichardIII in Boston because only twentypeople were in the audience. The nextday's papers denounced him forinsulting and dishonoringthe Americanpeople and suggestedthat he be taken "by the nose, and dragged ... before the curtainto make his excuses for his conduct." Four years later, when Kean returnedto Boston, he attemptedto make those excuses,but it was too late. The all-male audience that packed the theaterand overflowedonto the streets allowedhim neitherto performRichard III nor to "'apologizefor [his] indiscretions." A barrage of nuts, foodstuffs,and bottlesof odorous drugs drove him weeping fromthe stage and the theater,after which the anti-Keanitesin the pit and gallery turned on his supportersin the boxes and did grievousdamage to the theater. Kean performed in Philadelphia, New York, and Charleston but precipitated anotherriot in Baltimoreand finallyleft the countryfor good.68 In 1834 the Irishman Tyrone Power committedexactly the same error-he

65 Payne,as quoted in Grimsted,Melodrama Unveiled, 56-57. 66 Somer Persol Space:The Behavioral Basis of Design (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1969), chap. 2; Bledstein,The Cultureof Professionalism:The Middle Class and theDevelopment of HigherEducation in America(New York, 1976), 58-64, 80; and Taylor,"Public Space, PublicOpinion, and theOrigins of MassCulture," paper presented to a jointmeeting of theAmerican Council of LearnedSocieties and the HungarianAcademy of Sciences,held in Budapest,August 1982. 67 Irving,Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle, 12. 68 FrancisCourtney Wemyss, Twent-Si Years of theLife of an Actorand Manger (New York,1847), 97-99, 113-15; and Shattuck, Shakespeareon theAmerican Stage, 2-43.

This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Mon, 17 Mar 2014 16:43:19 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions WilliamShakespeare and theAmerican People 61 cancelleda performancein Albany,New York, when the audience numberedless thanten-and found thateven his outspokendemocratic sympathies could not save him froma similarfate. When he next performedtwo days later,he reported,"the house was filledwith men, and everythingforeboded a violentoutbreak.... On my appearance the din was mightydeafening; ... everyinvention for making the voice of humanitybestial was present and in full use. The boxes I observed to be occupied by well-dressedmen, who generallyeither remained neutral, or by signs soughtthat I should be heard." Upon the interventionof the manager,Power was allowed to explain himself, after which "the row was resumed with added fierceness:not a word of eitherplay or farcewas heard."69 The fullextent of class feelingand divisionsexisting in egalitarianAmerica was revealedon a bloodyThursday in May 1849 at and around the AstorPlace Opera House in New York City.The immediatecatalyst was a longstandingfeud between two leading actors,the EnglishmanWilliam Charles Macready and the American Edwin Forrest,who had become symbolsof antitheticalvalues. Forrest'svigorous actingstyle, his militantlove of his country,his outspokenbelief in itscitizenry, and his frequentarticulation of the possibilitiesof self-improvementand social mobility endeared him to the American people, while Macready'scerebral acting style, his aristocraticdemeanor, and his identificationwith the wealthygentry made him appear Forrest'sdiametric opposite. On May 7, Macready and Forrestappeared againstone anotherin separate productionsof Macbeth.Forrest's performance was a triumph;Macready's was never heard-he was silencedby a stormof boos and criesof "Down withthe codfisharistocracy," which drowned out appeals fororder fromthose in the boxes,and byan avalancheof eggs,apples, potatoes,lemons, and, ultimately,chairs hurled from the gallery,which forced him to leave the stagein the thirdact. Macreadywas now prepared to leave the countryas well,but he was dissuaded by persons of "highest respectability,"including Washington Irving and Herman Melville,who urged him not to encourage the mob by givingin to it and assured him "thatthe good sense and respectfor order prevailingin thiscommunity will sustainyou." Eighteenhundred people filledthe AstorPlace Opera House on the eveningof , withsome ten thousandmore on the streetsoutside. Assisted by the quick arrest of the most voluble opponents inside the theater,Macready completed his performanceof Macbeth,but only under great duress. Those outside-stirredby orators'shouts of "Burn the damned den of the aristocracy!" and "You can't go in there without. . . kid gloves and a whitevest, damn 'em!"- bombardedthe theaterwith paving stones,attempted to stormthe entrances,and were stopped onlyafter detachments of militiafired point blank intothe crowd. In theend at leasttwenty-two people were killed,and over one hundredand fiftywere wounded or injured.7"1

69 Power, Impressionsof America,1: 351-55. My account of the is based on Richard Moody, The AstorPlace Riot (Bloomington, Ind., 1958), 12, 172; William Toynbee, ed., The Diaries of WilliamCharles Macready, 2 (London, 1912), 404-29; and Peter G(. Buckley, "The Astor Place Riot and jenny Lind," paper presented at the Ninety-SixthAnnual Meeting of the American Historical Association, held in Los Angeles, December 28-30, 1981, and "'A Privileged Place': New York Theatre , 1817-1849," paper presented at the annual meetingof the Organization of American

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If the eighty-sixmen arrestedwere at all typical,the crowd had been composed of workingmen-coopers, printers,butchers, carpenters, servants,sailmakers, machinists,clerks, masons, bakers, plumbers, laborers-whose feelingswere proba- blyreflected in a speech givenat a rallythe nextday: "Fellowcitizens, for what-for whom was thismurder committed? . . . To please the aristocracyof the city,at the expense of the lives of unoffendingcitizens . . . , to revenge the aristocratsof this cityagainst the workingclasses." Although such observersas the New York Tribune saw the riotas the "absurd and incredible"result of a pettyquarrel, the role of class was not ignored.The HomeJournal viewed the riotas a protestagainst "aristocratiz- ing the pit"in such new and exclusivetheaters as the AstorPlace Opera House and warned thatin the futurethe republic'srich would have to "be mindfulwhere its luxuries offend."The New York Herald asserted that the riot had introduceda "new aspect in the mindsof many,... nothingshort of a controversyand collision betweenthose who have been styledthe 'exclusives,'or 'upper ten,'and the great popular masses."The New York correspondentfor the PhiladelphiaPublic Ledger lamented a few days after the riot, "It leaves behind a feeling to which this communityhas hithertobeen a stranger-an oppositionof classes-the rich and poor. .. , a feelingthat there is now in our country,in New York City,what every good patriothitherto has consideredit his dutyto deny-a highand a lowclass."'71

THE PURPOSE OF ACTING, Shakespeare had Hamlet say in his charge to the players, "was and is, to hold, as 'twere,the mirrorup to nature; to show virtueher own feature,scorn her own image, and the veryage and body of time his form and pressure"(III.ii). The functionsof the nineteenth-centuryAmerican stage were even broader. As a centralinstitution, the theaternot only mirroredthe sweep of events in the larger societybut presentedan arena in which those events could unfold. The Astor Place Riot was both an indicationof and a catalystfor the culturalchanges that came to characterizethe United States at the end of the century.Theater no longer functionedas a culturalform that embodied all classes withina shared public space, nor did Shakespeare much longer remain the common propertyof all Americans.The changes were not cataclysmic;they were gradual and took place in rough stages: physical or spatial bifurcation,with differentsocioeconomic groups becomingassociated with different theaters in large urban centers,was followed inevitablyby the stylisticbifurcation described by George WilliamCurtis and ultimatelyculminated in a contentbifurcation, which saw a growingchasm between"serious" and "popular" culture. Increasinglyin the second half of the nineteenthcentury, as public lifebecame everywheremore fragmented,the conceptof culturetook on hierarchicalconnota-

Historians,held in St. Louis,April 8-11, 1982.1 am extremelygrateful to Buckleyfor sharing with me notonly hisunpublished papers but also a chapterfrom his draft dissertation. Moody sets the number of dead at thirty- one-twenty-twoduring the riot itself and ninemore as a resultof woundsreceived during the riot; in hismore recentresearch Buckley has onlybeen able to accountfor a totalof twenty-twodead-eighteen during the riot and fourmore as a resultof woundsreceived. 71 New YorkTribune, May 12, 1849; New YorkHerald, May 12, 1849;HomeJournal, May 12, 1849,as quoted in MontroseJ. Moses, The FabulousForrest: The Recordofan AmenrcanActor (Boston, 1929), 262; and Philadelphia Public Ledger,May 16, 1849.

This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Mon, 17 Mar 2014 16:43:19 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Willi(amShakespeare and theAmerican People 63 tions along the lines of Matthew Arnold's definition-"the best that has been thoughtand knownin the world .. ., the studyand pursuitof perfection."Looking back on "the disgracefulscenes of the Astor Place Riot" some thirtyyears later, HenryJames pronounced it a manifestationof the "instinctivehostility of barba- rism to culture."7 This practiceof distinguishing"culture" from lesser formsof expressionbecame so common thatby 1915 Van WyckBrooks found it necessary to incorporatethe terms"highbrow" and "lowbrow"to expressthe chasm between which"there is no community,no genial middle ground.""What side of American life is not touched by this antithesis?"Brooks asked. "What explanation of Americanlife is more centralor more illuminating?"73Walt Whitmanunderstood the driftof eventsas early as 1871. "We findourselves abruptly in close quarters withthe enemy,"he charged in DemocraticVistas, with "this word Culture,or whatit has come to represent.""Refinement and delicatesse,"he warned,"threaten to eat us up, like a cancer." Whitmaninsisted that cultureshould not be "restrictedby conditionsineligible to the masses,"should not be created"for a singleclass alone, or for the parlors or lecture-rooms,"and placed his hopes for the creationof a classless,democratic culture in the leadershipof the new "middling"groups-"men and women withoccupations, well-off owners of houses and acres,and withcash in the bank."74 The groups to whichWhitman turned were neitherwilling nor able to fulfillhis expectations.The emergenceof new middle and upper-middleclasses, created by rapid industrializationin the nineteenthcentury, seems to have acceleratedrather than inhibitedthe growingdistinctions between elite and mass culture.When, in the waning years of the century,Thorstein Veblen constructedhis concept of conspicuousconsumption, he included not only the obvious materialpossessions but also "immaterial"goods-"the knowledge of dead languages and the occult sciences; of correct spelling; of syntax and prosody; of the various forms of domesticmusic ... ; of the latestproprieties of dress,furniture, and equipage"; of the ancient "classics"-all of which constituteda conspicuous culturethat helped conferlegitimacy on the newlyemergent groups.75 "Culture" became something refined,ideal, removed fromand elevated above the mundane eventsof everyday life.This helps explain the vogue during this period of manuals of etiquette,of private libraries and rare books, of European art and music displayed and performedin ornate-often neoclassical-museums and concerthalls.76

72 Arnold, Cultureand Anarchy(New York, 1875), 44, 47; and James,as quoted in Moses, The FabulousForrest, 246. 73 Brooks, America'sComing-of-Age (New York, 1915), 6-7. Brooks popularized rather than coined the terms. According to the Supplementto the OxfordEng;lish Dictiontary, "highbrow" was firstused in the 1880s to describe intellectual or aesthetic superiority,while "lowbrow" came to mean someone or something neither "highly intellectual"nor "aestheticallyrefined" shortlyafter 1900. The term "middlebrow" seems to have come into use in the 1920s. 71 Whitmani,Democratic Vistas, in Kaplani, Whitman:Poetry and Prose, 950-51, 961-62. For an excellent discussion of Whitman aind culture after the Civil War, see Alan 1 'rachtenberg,The Incorporationof America: Cultureand Societvin theGilded Age (New York, 1982), 158-60. 75 Veblen, The Theorvof theLeisure Class (1899; Penguiniedn., New York, 1979), 45, 397-98. 76 My sense of late nineteenth-centuryAmerican cultuLrewas enhanced by the following:Trachtenberg, The Incorporationof America;Lewis A. Erenberg, Steppin'Out: New YorkNightlife and the Transformatilonof American Culture,1890-1930 (Westport, Conn., 1981); Daniel Walker Howe, "American Victorianism as a Culture," AmericanQuarterlv, 27 (1975): 507-32; John F. Kasson, Ammsitgthe Million: ConeyIsland at theTurn of/theCentury (New York, 1978); John C. Spi-oat, "The Be.stMen": LiberalReforlers int the Gilded Age (New York, 1968); Arthur

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It also helps explain the transformationof Shakespeare,who fitthe new cultural equation so well. His plays had survived the test of time and were therefore immortal;his language was archaicand thereforetoo complexfor ordinary people; his poetrywas sublimeand thereforeelevating-especially if his playscould be seen in a theaterand a styleof one's own choice,devoid of constantreminders that they containedearthier elements and more universalappeals as well. The point is not thatthere was a conspiracyto removeShakespeare fromthe Americanpeople but that a culturaldevelopment occurred which produced the same result-a result thatwas compounded by the factthat during theseyears American entertainment was shaped by many of the same forcesof consolidationand centralizationthat molded otherbusinesses.77 If the managers of the new theater chains and huge booking agencies ap- proached theirtasks with a hierarchicalconcept of culture,with the convictionthat an unbridgeablegulf separated the tastesand predilectionsof the varioussocioeco- nomic groups,and withthe beliefthat Shakespeare was "highbrow"culture, then we have isolatedanother decisive factor in his transformation. The transformationof Shakespeare is importantprecisely because it was not unique. It was part of a larger transformationthat Richard Sennetthas argued characterizedWestern European culture after the eighteenthcentury, in which public culturefractured into a seriesof discreteprivate cultures that had less and less to do withone another.The audience thathad been heterogenous,interactive, -and participatorybecame homogeneous, atomized, and passive-in Sennett's phrase,"a spectatorrather than a witness."78When George Makepeace Towle was rediscoveringhis nativeland shortlyafter the Civil War, opera was stillpart of the publicdomain. "LucretiaBorgia and Faust,The Barber of Seville and Don Giovanni,are everywherepopular," he wrotein 1870; "you may hear theirairs in the drawing rooms and concerthalls, as well as whistledby the streetboys and ground out on the hand organs."In the twentiethcentury, such scenesbecame increasinglyrare as grand opera joined Shakespeare in the elevated circlesof eliteculture.79 The journey could lead in the opposite directionas well. From 1840 to 1900, chromolithography-theprocess by which original paintingswere reproduced lithographicallyin color and sold in the millionsto all segmentsof the population-

M. Schlesinger, LearningHow to Behave: A HistoricalStudy of AmericanEtiquette Books (New York, 1946); John Tomisch, A GenteelEndeavor: American Culture and Politicsin theGilded Age (Stanford, 1971); T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernismand theTransformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (New York, 1981); Stow Persons,The Decline of American Gentility (New York,1973); RobertR. Roberts,"Gilt, Gingerbread, and Realism: The Publicand ItsTaste," in H. WayneMorgan, ed., TheGilded Age: A Reappraisal(Syracuse, N.Y., 1963),169- 95; Robert Wiebe, The Searchfor Order (New York, 1967); and George Frederickson, The Inner Civil War: NorthernIntellectuals and theCrisis of the Union (New York, 1965). 77 See AlbertF. McLean,Jr., American Vaudeville as Ritual(Lexington, Ky., 1965), 16-17; FosterRhea Dulles, A Historyof Recreation:America Learns to Play (New York, 1965), 219; Russel Nye, The UnembarrassedMuse: The Popular Artsin America(New York, 1970), 170; and Wilson, ThreeHundred Yearsof American Drama and Theatre, 301. 78 Sennett,The Fall ofPublic Man (New York,1978), esp. 261. Forthe argument that by the 1880sAmericans becamepreoccupied with the privaterather than the publictaste, also see RussellLynes, The Tastemakers: The Shaping ofAmerican Popular Taste (1955; reprintedn., New York, 1980), 117. 79 Towle,American Society, 4. For a discussionof opera as popularmusic in nineteenth-centuryAmerica, see Charles Hamm, Yesterdays:Popular Song in America(New York, 1983), chap. 4.

This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Mon, 17 Mar 2014 16:43:19 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions WilliamShakespeare and theAmerican People 65 was one of the most familiarart formsin the nation. It was hailed as a vehiclefor bringing art "within the reach of all classes of society" and praised as "art republicanized and naturalized in America." These very characteristicsmade chromolithographyanathema to E. L. Godkin of TheNation and the genteelgroup for whom he spoke. To Godkin, chromolithographysymbolized the packaged "pseudo-culture"that "diffused through the communitya kind of smatteringof all sortsof knowledge"and gave people the false confidenceof being "cultured.""A societyof ignoramuseswho know theyare ignoramuses,might lead to a tolerably happyand usefulexistence," he wrote,"but a societyof ignoramuseseach of whom thinkshe is a Solon, would be an approach to Bedlam let loose.... The resultis a kind of mentaland moral chaos." Godkin's view prevailed.By the 1890s the term "chromo"had come to mean "ugly"or "offensive."Thus, whileat the Philadelphia CentennialExposition in 1876 chromolithographswere exhibitedas "Fine Arts" along withsculpture, painting, and engravings,seventeen years later at Chicago's Columbian Exposition of 1893 they were classified as, and exhibited with, "Industrial"or "Commercial"arts. Indeed, the Columbian Expositionitself, with its sharp physicaldivision between the Midway,containing common entertainments, and the Court of Honor or WhiteCity, containing monumental classic architecture, stood as a fittingsymbol of the bifurcatedculture that had come to characterizethe United States.80 This is not to suggestthe existenceof an idyllicera when the Americanpeople experienced a cultural unitydevoid of tensions. In the nineteenth-centuryfolk paintingsof Edward Hicks, the wolf and the lamb, the lion and the fatling,the leopard and the kid mightoccupy the same territoryin harmony,but realitywas more complex-as Hicks and his countrymenwell knew.Still, America in the first halfof the nineteenthcentury did experiencegreater cultural sharing in the sense thatcultural lines were more fluid,cultural spaces less rigidlysubdivided than they were to become. Certainly,what I have called a shared public culture did not disappear withthe nineteenthcentury. Twentieth-century Americans, especially in the palaces theybuilt to the moviesand in theirsporting arenas, continued to share publicspace and publicculture. But witha difference.Cultural space became more sharplydefined, more circumscribed,and less fluid than it had been. Americans mightsit together to watchthe same filmsand athleticcontests, but those who also desiredto experience"legitimate" theater or hear "serious"music went to segregat- ed templesdevoted to "high"or "classical"art. Culturallines are generallyporous, and there were importantexceptions-Toscanini was featured on commercial radio and television,and Shakespeare's workswere offeredon the movie screen. But thesewere consciousexceptions to what normallyprevailed. The culturalfare thatwas activelyand regularlyshared by all segmentsof the populationbelonged to the lower rungsof the culturalhierarchy.

80 This accountof chromolithographyis based upon Peter C. Marzio,The DemocraticArt: Picturesfor a Nineteenth-CenturyAmerica (Boston, 1979). For the ColumbianExposition of 1893,see Reid Badger,The Great AmericanFair: The World'sColumbian Exposition and AmericanCulture (Chicago, 1979); David F. Burg, Chicago's WhiteCity of 1893 (Lexington,Ky., 1976); andJohn C. Cawelti,"America on Display:The World'sFairs of 1876, 1893, 1933,"in FrederickCople Jaher,ed., TheAge of Industrialusm in America (New York,1968), 317-63.

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As we gradually come to the realization that Fred Astaire was one of this century'sfine dancers, Louis Armstrongone of its importantmusicians, Charlie Chaplinone of itsacute socialcommentators, we mustremember that they could be shared by all of the people only when theywere devalued as "popular" art,only when theywere rendered nonthreateningby being relegatedto the netherregions of the culturalcomplex. By the twentiethcentury, art could not have it both ways: no longer could it simultaneouslyenjoy high culturalstatus and mass popularity. Shakespeare is a prime example. He retained his loftyposition only by being limitedand confinedto audiences whose space was no longer shared with,and whose sensibilitiesno longer violatedby, the bulk of the populace.

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