- Shakespeare and the American Popular Stage
As has now been widely acknowledged, Shakespeare has been part of American life since the eighteenth century. The past few years have witnessed a renewed enthusiasm for the notion of “Shakespeare in America” as a pedagogical and critical opportunity. In 2003, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) announced the “Shakespeare in American Communities” initiative to support a nationwide, hundred-community tour of Shakespeare. In 2007, Public Radio International (PRI) and the Folger Shakespeare Library presented a radio documentary on Shakespeare in American life, with such episodes as “Shakespeare Becomes American.” The same year, a six-month festival titled “Shakespeare in Washington” was held in the District of Columbia. Frances Teague’s Shakespeare and the American Popular Stage asserts that Shakespeare was “an unacknowledged agent” of radical change in American popular theatre (5). Teague’s book expands our understanding of Shakespeare’s multifaceted presence in America before the Revolutionary War through a historically grounded assessment of the ways in which Americans used Shakespeare as they broke away from Britain. The term “Shakespeare’s American figure” is used throughout the study to refer to the complex “manifestations of Shakespeare,” including “the historical Shakespeare, his works, and the cultural institution that clusters around his name—principally in the United States” (3).
While Shakespeare’s impact on American aesthetic and intellectual life, particularly the plays on stage and on screen during the latter half of the twentieth century, has been more thoroughly examined, there has been no systematic analysis of the appropriation and reception of Shakespeare in such popular theatre forms as the musical. Teague’s treatment of Shakespeare in popular theatre of the antebellum period and in early twentieth-century musical comedy complements other post-1980 works that explore the Americanization of Shakespeare such as Lawrence Levine’s Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (1988), Michael Bristol’s Shakespeare’s America, America’s Shakespeare (1990), and Kim Sturgess’s Shakespeare and the American Nation (2004).
Teague reframes what may appear to be a familiar history of Shakespeare’s global career within the concept of heritage. She invokes David Lowenthal’s distinction between history as that which “seeks to convince by truth” and heritage as a “declaration of faith in [our] past” (175). The book’s conclusion suggests that “in appropriating Shakespeare, dreaming about Shakespeare, and employing Shakespeare to satisfy dreams,” Americans have found a heritage that is “just such a declaration of faith” (176). These patterns of interpreting Shakespeare and the American tradition in formation were aided by a tendency to “ignore Shakespeare’s national origin and to regard him as a naturalized American”—a phenomenon that begins early and continues to the present time (39).
The book begins with an intriguing question never before interrogated: why was Shakespeare absent for so long from the stage and on the bookshelves of early America? Chapter 1 demonstrates a range of factors that contributed to this absence, including the lack of “institutional backing for performances” in Puritanism (14) and the settlers’ nostalgic attempts to “preserve the cultural dynamics” of seventeenth-century England where playhouses were closed (13).
Chapters 2 through 5 offer case studies of the myriad ways in which Americans sought to own Shakespeare, and how Shakespeare helped to forge new identities. Focusing on a series of accounts by such figures as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, the American ambassadors to London and Paris, respectively, chapter 2 shows that Americans were “not averse to claiming Shakespeare as their own” as Shakespeare’s figure became “useful as a means of expressing . . . one’s national identity in America, either as British . . . or as American” (36–37). Chapter 3 considers how Shakespeare’s figure participated in the formation of personal identities in P. T. Barnum’s attempt to commodify Shakespeare, a “difficult [End Page 680] figure, belonging to the English, but desired by Americans” (48). According to Teague, Barnum’s failed project to purchase Shakespeare’s birthplace is “a performance of national and social identity, as well...