She Hath Been Reading: Women and Shakespeare Clubs in America

Chapter 3. The Outpost

79  Chapter 3 The Outpost “In a log-cabin in the woods of Southern Minnesota , on cold stormy nights in winter, after the ranch work is done,” a group called the Snow Blockade Club met in the late 1880s to read Shakespeare in Lanesboro, a town of just over 1,000 people. Less than ten miles from the Canadian border,in Swanton,Vermont (population 1,200),a club of women gathered in 1893 to read Shakespeare. In a tiny village in northern Michigan that numbered between 400 and 600 citizens at the time,the Northport Shakespeare Club received its traveling library shipment of “Shakespeare and American Literature ” to share among its eight readers in 1896.1 Two years later, in 1898, the Woman’s Shakespearean Club of Barnesville,Georgia,halfway between Atlanta and Macon, reported that its twenty-five women had not only studied Shakespeare but also established a public Shakespeare reference library, started a night school for factory hands and a girls’ club for factory women, and sponsored a series of public lectures.2 In this rural town, known as the “Buggy Capital of the South” for its production of buggies, wagons, carts, hearses, and coffins, the study of literature, public service, and community education were connected to reading Shakespeare. From Florida to California, in cities and towns of every size, thousands of American men and women gathered to read Shakespeare.3 Activities of urban Shakespeare clubs are relatively well known; Boston, New York, and Philadelphia all had active and fairly well documented Shakespeare clubs, and it is no surprise that Shakespeare provided reading material for women’s clubs in 80 SHE HATH BEEN READING these areas. But what role did reading Shakespeare have for Americans outside these cultural centers? This chapter concentrates on several representative rural and isolated communities and their Shakespeare reading groups, exploring how reading Shakespeare played a key part in civic life and in the formation of American literary culture in locales not usually considered crucial to literary history . The story of Shakespeare in the frontier West has been well documented, particularly in terms of performance history and male readers.4 Yet a substantial population of women readers of Shakespeare in “outpost” areas made up a significant portion of Shakespeare’s audience in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These American women readers of Shakespeare, who pursued an agenda of self-education and instruction, suggest the need for further inquiry into the variety of readers in geographically distant locales and their often overlooked influence on a broad understanding of American literary culture and civic life. As one 1929 account put it, “The cultural standards of the towns in which these [Shakespeare] clubs have functioned owe something definite and fine to their continued presence. They buy new books on the general subject of the Shakespeare plays, they encourage ‘Little Theatre’ projects, they support stage revivals of the great plays.”5 A letter from “an earnest teacher in New England”likewise affirmed the need for intellectual inspiration across the country: “Many people are suffering for the lack of mental food to whom such a club would be a blessing . . . . My own experience shows me that a club might be formed in every town and village in our country, where two persons could be found to make a nucleus for it.”6 The women of the Zetetic Club in Weeping Water, Nebraska (population 1,150), would have agreed with this teacher’s statement; located in sparsely populated Nebraska near the Iowa border, they spent two full years in the 1880s studying Shakespeare.7 Likewise, an account of the clubs in the Black Hills of South Dakota boasted that “perhaps there is no section in the country with the same number of inhabitants where there are so many woman’s literary organizations as there are in this district”; according to this history, there were nineteen women’s clubs in the Black Hills,most of which studied Shakespeare.8 In many such areas of the country, starting a Shakespeare reading club was a way of reestablishing a cultural life from a former place of residence and an important part of community building. In his story of “the trying years of our mother’s life,” Owen P. White recalled the excitement his parents expressed when a traveling group came to present Shakespeare in 1890s Tucson, Arizona: “Tucson, being the kind of town it was, had several variety theaters, and when the largest of these advertised that some traveling barnstormer would...