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  • Shakespeare and the American Popular Stage
  • Heather S. Nathans (bio)
Shakespeare and the American Popular Stage. By Frances Teague . Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Illus. Pp. x + 222. $85.00 cloth, 29.99 paper.

Frances Teague's Shakespeare and the American Popular Stage opens with the announcement that this study will explore the ways in which Shakespeare has [End Page 414] been used "idiosyncratically" (1) in American culture from the colonial period to the present. She divides her study into two parts. The first section traces the presence of Shakespeare in America through the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. The second part brings Shakespeare up through contemporary vaudeville and Broadway adaptations. Throughout, Teague argues that Americans have used Shakespeare as a "screen" (3), either to conceal different political or social agendas or to "sift out their values" (3). As she notes, "I am less concerned with the role that Shakespeare and his writing played in the development of American culture than in the way that American culture has shaped Shakespeare" (4). Her study joins other explorations of the meaning of Shakespeare in American life, including Lawrence Levine's Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (1988), Michael D. Bristol's Shakespeare's America, America's Shakespeare (1990), and Kim C. Sturgess's Shakespeare and the American Nation (2004).

The first five chapters (part 1) of Teague's work draw heavily on secondary sources, including both older and newer histories of American theater and popular culture. She has sifted these carefully for references to Shakespeare in American life during the early national and antebellum periods. She traces Shakespeare's presence not only on the American stage, but in visual, material, and print culture. For example, Teague makes a particularly interesting analogy between Shakespeare's role in early American culture and the popularity of the silhouette: "In a sense, Shakespeare served Americans, whether they were pre-Revolutionary colonists or post-Revolutionary citizens as a silhouette artist's screen, both displaying England and projecting American emotions about England, sometimes transparent and sometimes opaque" (30).

In chapter 1, Teague begins her discussion of Shakespeare in American popular culture by remarking on his absence in the colonial world, an absence she attributes to a number of factors, ranging from England's own suspension of theatrical entertainments during the Interregnum to a lack of "nostalgia" for England—although her claims for Shakespeare's absence from American life for 150 years seem somewhat hyperbolic (19). Chapters 2 through 5 explore how Shakespeare "helped individuals form a personal identity, especially with regard to class" (39). Teague offers case studies of individual uses of Shakespeare, from P. T. Barnum to John Wilkes Booth. To explore the state of British and American relations in the 1840s, chapter 3 investigates legends surrounding Barnum's attempt to buy Shakespeare's birthplace, suggesting that the rivalry generated by the incident demonstrated that Shakespeare had ceased to be the "naturalized American" (39) character he had seemed just thirty years earlier. Instead, he had become a "more difficult figure, belonging to the English, but desired by Americans" (48). To showmen like Barnum, he had become a cultural icon and a commodity that could be marketed beyond the context of theatrical entertainments. By the time of the Astor Place Riot in 1849, his iconic status had almost superseded his theatrical significance.

Chapter 4 revisits a history long familiar to scholars of American theater—the rivalry between Edwin Forrest and William Charles Macready that contributed to the worst theater riot in American history. Somewhat puzzlingly, Teague implies that the Astor Place theater was unusual in being divided into pit, box, and gallery [End Page 415] (when in fact it represented a fairly standard urban playhouse design in America, dating back to the eighteenth century). She also remarks on the theater's location within an elite area of Manhattan. While this was certainly true, such a location was also a long-standing tradition in the development of American playhouses and urban landscapes. As the elites moved "uptown" they took theaters and culture with them, leaving their old sites of amusement to the lower and immigrant classes rapidly filling the void left behind...

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