Shakespeare

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in America, the plays of Shakespeare played a similar role to popular movies today. So many people knew the characters and plot lines that many traveling actors made a living performing hilarious Shakespeare parodies for the masses, often during the
intermissions of Shakespeare plays!

“The theater, like the church, was one of the earliest and most important cultural institutions [in America] . . . And almost everywhere the theater blossomed Shakespeare was a paramount force . . . From the large and often opulent theaters of major cities to the makeshift stages in halls [and] saloons . . . of small towns . . . Shakespeare’s plays were performed prominently and frequently. . . James Fenimore Cooper had this familiarity in mind when he called Shakespeare “the great author of America.”Shakespeare was popular entertainment in nineteenth-century America. The theater . . . played the role that movies played in the first half of the twentieth: it was a kaleidoscopic, democratic institution presenting a widely varying bill of fare to all classes and socioeconomic groups . . . An entire evening generally consisted of a long play, an afterpiece (usually a farce), and a variety of between-act specialties
. . . Thus Shakespeare was presented amid a full range of contemporary entertainment . . . part of the same milieu inhabited by magicians, dancers, singers, acrobats, minstrels, and comics. He appeared on the same playbills and was advertised in the same spirit . . .The nineteenth-century theater housed under one roof a microcosm of American society.”

- excerpts from Highbrow/Lowbrow:
The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America
by Lawrence Levine
Harvard University Press, 1990

The Shakespeare Project performs "Twelfth Night" at Hood College in Frederick

There is hardly a pioneer’s hut that does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare. I remember that I read the feudal drama of Henry V for the first time in a log cabin.
- Alexis de Tocqueville, 1831

At ten years of age I was as familiarly acquainted with [Shakespeare’s] lovers and his clowns, as with Robinson Crusoe, the Pilgrim’s Progress, and the Bible. In later years I have left Robinson and the Pilgrim to the perusal of the children; but have continued to read the Bible and Shakespeare.
- John Quincy Adams, b. 1767

[My grandfather] had thoroughly formed [my mother’s] literary taste onShakespeare, Milton and the Bible.
- Florence Trail, 1892, Frederick Maryland,
An American Mother in the 19th Century, The Gorham Press, 1929

There is, assuredly, no other country on earth in which Shakespeare and the Bible are held in such general high esteem as in America, the very country so much decried for its lust for money. If you were to enter an isolated log cabin in the Far West and even if its inhabitant were to exhibit many of the traces of backwoods living, he will most likely have one small room nicely furnished in which to spend his few leisure hours and in which you will certainly find the Bible and in most cases also some cheap edition of the works of the poet Shakespeare.
- Karl Knortz, German poet and traveler of America, 1880

Shakespeare in America
www.shakespeareinamericancommunities.org

Some excerpts from this site:

Records suggest that the owner of the oldest folio edition of Shakespeare’s works in the colonies was the Reverend Cotton Mather, a staunch Puritan and renowned witch-hunter in the mid-17th century.

During the days just prior to the War for Independence, John Adams compared Britain’s maternal instincts to those of the murderous Lady Macbeth; Thomas Jefferson advised that Shakespeare should be read (not necessarily seen) for the sake of moral edification; and in 1770, the following parody of Hamlet’s famous speech appeared in an edition of the Massachusetts Spy. It was one of many parodies of the Bard that crept into the culture of the rebellious colonies.

Be taxt or not be taxt—that is the question.
Whether ‘tis nobler in our minds to suffer
The sleights and cunning of deceitful statesmen
Or to petition ‘gainst illegal taxes
And by opposing, end them?

In 1839, young Joseph Jefferson was touring the country with his actor-parents, when the family and show stopped in Springfield, Illinois. Instead of performing as usual, they found a ban on drama, but a young lawyer, acting on behalf of the troupe—free of charge—was so passionate and persuasive with the town legislators that the ban was lifted overnight and the performances allowed. Fortunately, Joseph meticulously recorded the name of the brilliant lawyer: Abraham Lincoln.