Shakespearean Scraps

Librarian Leigh Anne Palmer’s contribution (“‘A thing of shreds and patches’: Memorializing Shakespeare in American Scrapbooks”) in Shakespeare in American Life (2007)—the volume, compiled and edited by Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan, designed to accompany the exhibition at the Folger Shakespeare Library in the spring and summer of 2007, marking the library’s 75th anniversary—supplies a brief “interlude” in the middle of the catalogue section of the volume. The essay describes a peculiar genre of artifact, of which the Folger has several hundreds: scrapbooks created by Shakespeare aficionados to fix in their memory their contact with the playwright and his plays, either in the form of journal entries recording thoughts and impressions after a fresh reading or theatrical viewing, or simply collections of theatre programs, tickets stubs, and newspaper clippings. One female 13-year-old scrapbook-keeper, Palmer records, obsessed with Ada Rehan, the star of Augustin Daly’s Shakespeare revivals in the 1890s and 1900s, “used satin ribbon, scraps from the New York Tribune, and paint to construct two hearts ‘linked by a never-broken chain.’ In one heart, she placed her initials; in the other, those of Rehan” (146).

Much the same semi-eroticized adolescent hero worship, and very much the same obsession with collecting, recording, and memorializing, was behind the compulsive book and manuscript collecting of gilded-age plutocrats such as Henry Clay Folger, whose personal library formed the nucleus of the Capitol Hill institution that bears his name, about whom Georgianna Ziegler writes in her contribution to the Vaughan and Vaughan volume. Like the 13-year old, Folger’s obsessive collecting (which included 79 of the 230 known copies of the 1623 First Folio, the first published near-complete collection of Shakespeare’s plays) represents an attempt to make cultural experience material, to assign physical form to evanescent experience. For though Shakespeare can be experienced through the reading of material texts and processed through a reader’s intellect (as it was by prominent Americans such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Quincy Adams, and others), the experience of Shakespeare in the theatre could only be captured indirectly, through ticket stubs, newspaper clippings, and bits of fabric, dinner menus, and train tickets—anything that can jog the memory, that can give lasting form to a temporal experience that left its more indelible mark in the personal and collective consciousness. Philadelphia’s Horace Howard Furness, whose collection is now at the University of Pennsylvania, tried to integrate ephemeral performance into his study of the more lasting literary texts by corresponding with the star actor Edwin Booth; he included Booth’s observations on the experience of playing his roles in the voluminous footnotes of his compulsively inclusive variorum editions of the plays. Furness’s variorums, like Folger’s Folio-collecting, attempt to establish significance by the sheer, redundant quantity of data: shelve together so many copies of the Folio press run (and there are differences from one to the other, though Folger did not know that at the time), or add together so many textual notes, and—they evidently believed—you generate meaning.

Shakespeare in American culture is more like a scrapbook than a shelf of Folios or a variorum edition: meaning lies, not in the authority of the material text or in the scholarly footnote, but in the way theatre is experienced and absorbed by the culture. And those data are much harder to catalogue and to capture. As in a scrapbook, meaning lies not in but in between the used napkins, the stage-door autographs, and the tram tickets, in the gaps between document and memory, between text and performance, between literary studies and theatre history—or rather, to move beyond the linear narrative-bound determinism of mid-twentieth-century Theaterwissenschaft, in the gap between literary studies and both cultural studies and performance studies. The Vaughans’ superb essay collection and exhibition catalogue is, like the other two volumes under review here, among the many scholarly attempts in recent years to understand the reciprocal relationship of Shakespeare and American culture. The volume, they write in their introduction, “celebrates the extra-ordinary influence on American Culture...