Shakespeare Unlimited: Shakespeare in California Stephen Dickey Interviewed by Barbara Bogaev A Folger Shakespeare Library Podcast January 25, 2017 ----------------------------------- Introduction [The sound of a wagon, creaking and rumbling down a dirt road] MICHAEL WITMORE: It's 1852, and a dusty covered wagon creaks along a dirt road, just past the town we know call Rancho Cordova, 39 miles east of Sacramento on the south fork of the American River. The wagon isn't filled with settlers. It's not caring beans, books, or whiskey. This is a remarkable wagon, though it won't stay remarkable for long. This is a wagon full of Shakespeare. [Music] From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I'm Mike Witmore, the Folger's director. We call this podcast: “The West Yet Glimmers with Some Streaks of Day.” Gold was discovered in California in 1848. Within months, a flood of people poured into the state. Some came to find their fortunes mining. Others came to make a fortune off the miners themselves: people like saloon keepers, prostitutes, and from a very early time, actors and performers. When we think of Shakespeare in the American West, the mind immediately focuses on Hollywood, but as you'll hear we can trace the history of Shakespeare's life on the American West Coast to long before then. At the time we recorded this podcast, the Library Foundation of Los Angeles had taken the Folger exhibition called America’s Shakespeare, enhanced it with a wealth of new material from the West Coast, and re-titled it America's Shakespeare: The Bard Goes West, following the quirks and turns of Shakespeare along the Pacific. Stephen Dickey, a senior lecturer in the English department at UCLA is the exhibition's curator. He came into the studio recently to talk about it with Barbara Bogaev. BARBARA BOGAEV: You know, Stephen, when I first heard about the exhibit, I thought of a quintessential Los Angeles Shakespeare connection, which is Shakespeare Beach, and for people listening, that's Hermosa Beach, they might have heard of that. That's what it's called now, but it was originally one of these early 20th-century real estate promotion ideas, to call some place a fictional, fanciful, gimmicky name and get people to buy there. STEPHEN DICKEY: Mm-hmm. That's right, and it was connected with the development of the early rail system, and people in charge of that decided to pitch an idea for a writers' colony, and they named all of the streets after actually mostly American writers like Poe, and Hawthorne, and Longfellow. But they call the whole thing Shakespeare Beach, and we have in the exhibition, we have one of the early blueprints of all the perspective housing lots worked out in that area. BOGAEV: It's wonderful because it's so much a part of Los Angeles and of California history, the Disneyfication of the state, and of the city, even before there was Disney. Because we have a bunch of things like this: you know, there's Hollywoodland, for instance, was a real estate promotion. Now, we have the Hollywood sign— the “land” part was taken down— but Hollywoodland was this big real estate development, and a lot of the houses were originally this fairy tale castle-type construction, storybook architecture. DICKEY: Storybook architecture. [INAUDIBLE] BOGAEV: Yeah, and Shakespeare fits right into that mode. DICKEY: Well, Shakespeare fits in, and actually one of my interests that I indulged here and there in the exhibition is just the subject of allusion and what it means to allude specifically to Shakespeare, because we often are using his language without really knowing it— it's not a conscience allusion— but this was a very deliberate, yeah, salesman move to kind of give the inherited prestige, I guess, of the name Shakespeare to your real estate plan. BOGAEV: Exactly. That was the same thing with Venice Beach, and the Venice Canals. This idea of, "Ooh, culture." DICKEY: Tap it in. BOGAEV: Europe. As if the west was always longing for cultural legitimacy, and Shakespeare seems to have played a big part in that. DICKEY: Yes, absolutely, and it does cover the chronological terrain between the 19th century, when Shakespeare is still what would be, I suppose, now called popular culture, and then the progression, or limitation, even, of Shakespeare to, sort of the category of highbrow, and the ticket prices go up, and it becomes sort of segregated off in that way into the fancier theaters, and so on. BOGAEV: And I want to get to that highbrow/lowbrow aspect of that thread throughout history and the West with Shakespeare, but let's go back to the beginning, because I really didn't know a lot of this history with actors coming out west to California long before there were movies, and that Shakespeare was a big impetus for that. DICKEY: Yes. Yes, that's right. Shakespeare made it west early, but he was certainly helped by gold. The Gold Rush enticed one of Junius Brutus Booth's sons, names Junius Brutus Booth Jr., to come to San Francisco. And San Francisco and Sacramento had very posh theaters, and young Booth told his father and younger brother, Edwin Booth, that they could make a lot of money if they came out and did their acting performances to these audiences. And so they did, and one of the areas that we concentrate on is the maturing moment in the art of Edwin Booth, who comes out as a young man with his father in 1852, and they act in, not just Shakespeare, but a lot of Shakespeare, together, in the mining camps. Yeah. BOGAEV: And this is immortalized, this Shakespeare in the mining towns, is immortalized in a movie: My Darling Clementine. DICKEY: Yes. BOGAEV: And we have a clip from that. My Darling Clementine is a wonderful retelling of the, not very accurate retelling, of the shooting at the OK Corral. DICKEY: No, not accurate. BOGAEV: And it was directed by John Ford with Henry Fonda and Victor Mature playing Doc Holiday, and here a Shakespearean actor is performing, standing on top a table in a saloon: [CLIP: My Darling Clementine] MEAN-LOOKING DESPERADO TYPE: Quiet! Shaddup! Look Yorick, can’t you give us nothing but them poems? ACTOR: I have a very large repertoire, sir. DESPERADO: Great. All right, Yorick, go ahead. Shoot! ACTOR: To be or not to be—that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles… … DICKEY: It's a fascinating excerpt, and we chose it because it does so many things that are relevant to the exhibition. For one thing, the actor, who is supposed to be performing in the theater, is a bit of a drunk, and he wanders off, and this seems to be a kind of allusion to Junius Brutus Booth Sr., who was notorious for going on benders when he should have been on stage. BOGAEV: [LAUGHS] DICKEY: And one of Edwin's jobs as his young son and assistant was really a kind of temperance officer. He had to try to keep him straight for performing. So, you have an actor who is not entirely sober at the moment. BOGAEV: And that's why he goes up on his lines. DICKEY: Yes, exactly, and he does into a saloon, and he's facing an audience of the bad guys in the movie, the Clayton Gang, I think, and they call him Yorick mockingly, and they want to hear something, and he does "To Be Or Not To Be”, but he falters in the middle of it, and at that point Doc Holiday, played by Victor Mature, continues the speech. [CLIP continues: My Darling Clementine] ACTOR: ‘…with a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life.’ ‘Life’. Please help me, sir. VICTOR MATURE as DOC HOLIDAY: [prompting the actor] ‘But that the dread of something after death...’ ACTOR: Would you carry on? I'm afraid it's been so long. DOC HOLIDAY: ‘The undiscovered country from whose bourn No traveler returns, puzzles the will And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of. Thus conscience does make cowards of us all’ [COUGHS]… DICKEY: And one of the things I think that scene is demonstrating is the notion that Doc Holiday is a kind of Hamlet in the film as a whole. He has a terminal tuberculosis, he's always brooding on death, he's a very melancholic kind of figure. And so, you see that there is, there's not only an allusion to, kind of, western performance, 19th-century American West, but to Hamlet itself. BOGAEV: [That?] is really rich, and Victor Mature, he is very evocative. DICKEY: Yes. BOGAEV: Very natural. DICKEY: Yeah. As Doc Holiday finishes reciting, "To be or not to be,” Wyatt Earp, played by Henry Fonda, begins to look at him with a new kind of respect, and in almost amazement. BOGAEV: Amazement, right, DICKEY: Incredulity. “How does this guy know this speech?” And that's another interesting moment, where it seems as though what you're being told is that the knowledge, or familiarity, with Shakespeare marks you off as a kind of socially polished or admirable figure. BOGAEV: Well, tell us more about how, what Shakespeare— how it functioned in the Gold Rush. Where the actors also, as you say, chasing the money? DICKEY: The actors were chasing the money.