Shakespeare in America by Alden T. Vaughan, Virginia Mason Vaughan (review)

Shakespeare in America is one of over twenty titles issued to date in the Oxford Shakespeare Topics series—a series with the aim of providing students and teachers with short, lucid, and original volumes on “important aspects of Shakespearean criticism and scholarship” (www.ukcatalogue.oup.com/category/academic/series/literature/osts.do). Series editors Peter Holland and Stanley Wells continue to assemble a distinguished set of authors and an admirably varied catalogue of emphases within Shakespeare studies. Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan’s Shakespeare in America is an impressive contribution to that effort.

In their introduction, the Vaughans confront head-on the challenges inherent in making this sort of project manageable for its authors and useful for its audience. They prune their titular emphasis on “Shakespeare in America,” narrowing to a topic more likely to allow a balance of breadth and depth. So it is that over the course of two paragraphs Shakespeare in America becomes a monograph on Shakespeare in North America and then Shakespeare in the “evolving United States” (5). As the Vaughans acknowledge, this narrowing entails a tremendous loss, sacrificing the potential richness of a volume that also might have addressed, for instance, the reception and production of Shakespeare in Mexico, Canada, and the British West Indies. Their focus on a single national culture, however, does allow the Vaughans sufficient space to sketch the history of Shakespeare in the “evolving United States” from the mid-seventeenth century to the present and to compare this Shakespeare to his counterpart “in Britain or in any of the other countries that have adopted him as a significant component of their cultural property” (1). This comparative element is necessarily underdeveloped in the Vaughans’ short volume, but it does underpin their argument for a distinctively “American” Shakespeare. Three through lines unite their analyses of Shakespeare “on the stage (legitimate and burlesque) and on the page (editions, criticism, school books, handbooks, and appropriations)” (4). First, the American “utilitarian approach to literature in general, Shakespeare in particular” makes pervasive claims for Shakespeare’s moral or social efficacy for playgoers, students, and members of local clubs—the conviction that Shakespeare helps us think more deeply about moral or social questions (1). Second, the American emphasis on entrepreneurship has revolutionized Shakespeare’s cultural impact on readers, scholars, and theatergoers. And, third, the American resistance to a “formal guiding authority on cultural matters” has allowed popular enthusiasm for Shakespeare to take shape along the full spectrum from the purest of productions to the most playful of adaptations (3). This argument for a distinctively “American” Shakespeare organizes the book’s focus on an extraordinary range of objects of analysis across almost four centuries.

But it is in the chapters’ details that the Vaughans’ work is most absorbing. For instance, the three opening, roughly chronological chapters (“American Beginnings,” “Making Shakespeare American,” and “Shakespeare and American Expansion”) trace the colonial fate of Shakespeare in performance and in print in Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New England. They explore the early colonial popularity of English touring companies and the later rivalries between English and American companies, studying the intricacies of the companies’ production schedules, including their movement among performances in England, the colonies, and the West Indies. These chapters discuss the illustrative early and mid-nineteenth-century acting careers of Ira Aldridge, Edwin Thomas Booth, Charlotte Cushman, George Frederick Cooke, James Henry Hackett, and Edmund Keane. This early portion of the book also examines the connections among original American editions of Shakespeare, evolving copyright laws, and library early modern print and manuscript collections, as well as the interdependence of actors, editors, lecturers, and literary critics throughout the nineteenth century. In these initial chapters, the Vaughans also attend to the culture that found credible early challenges to Shakespeare’s authorship, and they detail the geographical, educational, and cultural expansion of Shakespeare’s plays as read, performed, and parodied from the early nineteenth to...