Shakespeare in a Divided America

by James Shapiro

  * * *

  • • •

  IN 1915, at the height of his fame, the 40-year-old playwright Percy MacKaye was commissioned to write and produce Caliban. MacKaye espoused a new kind of national theater, a noncommercial one by and for the American people. This in turn demanded a new dramatic form, large-scale outdoor community pageants he called masques. MacKaye had recently staged one in St. Louis, where, remarkably, roughly 100,000 spectators attended each of the four performances celebrating that city’s history.

  MacKaye’s success was enabled by and in many ways tied to the immigration debate, and when that died down in the mid-1920s, so did his career. In the years leading up to Caliban, MacKaye wrote tirelessly on the subject and served on the advisory editorial board of the short-lived journal The Immigrants in America Review. He wrote a play called The Immigrants (1912), and followed that up with a commissioned drama, The New Citizenship (1915). When the time came to seek out a leading playwright to contribute something major for Shakespeare’s tercentenary, one involving the large-scale participation of immigrant groups, he was the obvious choice.

  MacKaye’s views on immigration resist easy categorization. The one thing he did believe was that if anything was going to break down the barriers separating “new” and “old” Americans it was participatory theater. In A Substitute for War (1915), MacKaye quotes an admirer of his Saint Louis: A Civic Masque who spoke of how, at the end of its final performance, when everyone in the cast and audience sang “The Star-Spangled Banner,” it “was like a transfiguration”: “There was no race or national antipathy then. It was destroyed, not by logic or reason, but by playing together, working together.”

  Yet his works undermined their ostensibly progressive position on immigration. Take The New Citizenship, for example, that enacts an initiation ceremony in which groups of newly naturalized foreigners listen to the Founding Fathers speak, then sing religious hymns and perform folk dances to show how their “distinctive national cultures contributed to our country as the common heritage of Americans.” But becoming American requires them to renounce what those powerful symbols of their identity stood for. And while MacKaye insists that he is committed to the “welcoming of all world cultures to create an American excellence,” he nonetheless introduces a “representative” American who reminds the foreign-born citizens (whom MacKaye identifies by nations—Russian, Italian, Greek, etc.) that “you cannot become thorough Americans if you think of yourselves in groups.” When he published The New Citizenship MacKaye admitted how troubled he was that the “vast majority” of America’s “15,000,000 foreign-born white persons” are “essentially out of touch with the basic traditions of liberty and democracy.” And he added an appendix that drew on the overheated rhetoric of the Immigration Restriction League, noting that more “than one-sixth of the American population” is “not yet Americanized,” and observing as well that three million adult immigrants (half of whom are illiterate) can’t speak English.

  MacKaye records that Percival Chubb, president of the recently formed Drama League of America, first suggested that he write a “Memorial Masque to Shakespeare.” At much the same time, the Players Club decided to raise money through a celebratory masque that would pay for a statue of Shakespeare as well as contribute to the Actors’ Fund of America. Both organizations were likely behind his commission. Caliban would serve, in MacKaye’s words, “as the central popular expression of some hundreds of supplementary Shakespeare celebrations” from coast to coast, and the text was rushed into print “to give communities, societies, colleges, and Drama League centers throughout the country an opportunity to read the text and thus arrange their celebrations in harmony with the Masque.”

  MacKaye worked fast, and in early January 1916 read from his draft to three hundred distinguished guests, invited to hear him at the Metropolitan Opera House by the banker Otto Kahn, who chaired the Shakespeare Tercentenary Celebration Committee. MacKaye announced that Caliban would be performed in late May in the Sheep Meadow in Central Park. But that immediately ran into a buzz saw of local opposition. He had planned to charge a modest admission fee to pay for the massive enterprise, with the profits, as in St. Louis, used to fund future efforts, but such fees were forbidden in Central Park. Popular resistance to holding the Shakespeare masque there intensified, and in the end a disappointed MacKaye agreed to relocate it uptown to a smaller and more obscure venue, Lewisohn Stadium, at New York’s City College. His overreliance on the support of cultural elites, coupled with his reluctance to make use of grassroots organizations and local actors (as he had done in St. Louis) for what was heavily promoted as a community effort, hobbled the production from the outset.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE TEMPEST PERFECTLY suited MacKaye’s didactic, top-down approach to art. Its four main characters—Prospero, Miranda, Caliban, and Ariel—offered a framework for celebrating not only literary culture from ancient to modern times, but also Shakespeare’s greatest hits, all in the service of Caliban’s education. Like many at the time, MacKaye believed that Prospero was Shakespeare’s autobiographical stand-in, pronouncing on his own art, and at the end of Caliban Shakespeare himself enters and replaces Prospero, as Caliban crouches at his true master’s feet. When MacKaye speaks of Prospero’s art, then, he is also speaking of that of a benevolent Shakespeare, whose goal, like his own, or so he imagined, was to “liberate the imprisoned imagination of mankind from the fetters of brute force and ignorance.” What he took to be Shakespeare’s central theme—“Caliban seeking to learn the art of Prospero”—anticipated his own mission: “the slow education of mankind through the influences of co-operative art.” When elaborating on this in a long interview in the New York Times, MacKaye adds that he saw in Caliban “that passionate child-curious part of us all, groveling close to his origin, yet groping up toward that serener plane of pity and love, reason and disciplined will.” But it remains unclear whether his Caliban is quite so universal or whether MacKaye, when speaking of “us,” is referring to only that segment of his audience and cast who, like Caliban, were of inferior racial and national origin.

  While The Tempest as a story of the moral education of a brutish and illiterate creature clearly appealed to MacKaye, Shakespeare’s plot brought with it potential obstacles, the most glaring of which was that, however much progress Caliban makes, it is never enough; he remains a sexual and political threat, having sought to rape Miranda and conspire in Prospero’s overthrow. Prospero, in Shakespeare’s original, is clear about this, declaring that Caliban is one on “whose nature / Nurture never sticks.” It didn’t help that MacKaye had himself thought of Caliban as irredeemable; in October 1914 he published an antiwar poem in the New York Times, “A Prayer of the Peoples,” in which Caliban, along with the wolf, serves as a shorthand for those who are irredeemably bloody-minded:

  God of us, who kill our kind!

  Master of the blood-tracked Mind

  Which from the wolf and Caliban

  Staggers toward the star of Man—

  Now on thy cathedral stair,

  God, we cry to thee in prayer!

  His Caliban didn’t stand much of a chance of redemption once MacKaye chose to represent him as a bestial Missing Link. The popular British actor Lionel Braham was given the part. Braham stood six feet four inches and weighed more than two hundred pounds, and in production photographs he appears fanged and subhuman, his body and feet covered in thick hair, his skin blackened, and his long fingers clawlike. His hulking image adorned the official program. MacKaye’s depiction of Caliban did not take place in a political vacuum. The moment was fraught: the Immigration Act that overwhelmingly passed the House of Representatives in late March 1916, two months before the masque opened, was awaiting a Senate vote that would bar entry not only to illiterate migrants but also to those who in other respects resembled Caliban: drunks, anarchists, and those deemed mentally and physically defective.
/>
  While more than 1,500 locals were included in the New York production, the starring roles went to 47 professional actors—a sharp departure from MacKaye’s earlier work. Isadora Duncan even took a star turn, dancing across the titular yellow sands one evening during the run. All key aspects of the production—including costuming, scenic design, and choreography—were overseen by established professionals, not recent immigrants. And most of the community groups that acted or sang tended to be from upscale organizations, such as the Hellenic Union, the German University League, the Alliance Française, and the New York Oratorio Society. The reality, then, fell far short of Otto Kahn’s assurances at the tercentenary dinner that MacKaye’s masque was neither a “‘high-brow’ affair” nor “a benevolent up-lift movement backed by a few men and women of wealth,” but rather “stands upon a deep and popular base it enlists and has significance for Avenue A no less than for Fifth Avenue.”

  The recollections of Cecil Sharp, an English folklorist employed by MacKaye to help with the masque’s Elizabethan interlude, reveal how deep the chasm ran between the creative team and the locals who were involved, as well as how momentary the transformative nature of the performance turned out to be for “them”: “the spirit of the tunes and dances was such that all participants became infected by it and for the moment they became English, every Jew, German, French, Italian, Slav of them.” While MacKaye recognized “the problem of carrying its community meaning to the still polyglot population,” his provisional solution, translating Caliban “into Italian, German, and Yiddish,” didn’t stretch nearly far enough (and was never done). He showed no interest in traffic flowing in the opposite direction. No effort was made to involve those who had long been staging Shakespeare’s plays in Yiddish on the Lower East Side, or include the African American community, which had recently packed the Lafayette Theater in Harlem, where Othello was performed by an all-black cast; Edward Sterling Wright, who played the lead, felt it necessary to remind the crowd of 1,500 or so before a performance, a bit defensively, that the “Negro people are Americans in the highest sense of the word . . . they are law-abiding, patriotic and as capable of being inspired by the plays of Shakespeare as any race in the world.”

  * * *

  • • •

  ON MAY 24, 1916, ten thousand New Yorkers filled City College’s Lewisohn Stadium to witness Caliban’s long journey “toward that serener plane of pity and love,” a number that swelled to more than eighteen thousand the following evening. We don’t know what proportion of these playgoers were immigrants, but it’s a safe assumption that it was a considerable one, as roughly 40 percent of the 5 million or so inhabitants of New York City at this time were foreign born. In his first entrance, Caliban is seen crawling on his belly, barely able to speak, hissing and stuttering. He is bedazzled when he first catches sight of Miranda, sniffing her, dancing around her, excited by the prospect of impregnating her. The threat of rape is repeated throughout the masque. Prospero enters and protects his daughter, announcing that Caliban must be “transformed,” a process that will require his exposure to great cultural landmarks, including Shakespeare’s plays. But this approach initially backfires, as Caliban is overstimulated by the seduction scenes in Troilus and Cressida and attacks Miranda; she is saved once again from sexual assault by the arrival of her father, who wonders aloud, “How shall mine art reclaim this lapsing ape / From his own bondage?”

  The answer: more culture, including works from Germany, France, Spain, and Italy, entertainment interrupted by Miranda’s abduction by (and subsequent rescue from) Caliban. Slowly, however, progress is made in Caliban’s education. Watching the scene from As You Like It in which Old Adam is saved makes a deep impression on him, and he grasps that Miranda has likewise pitied him. By now, Caliban speaks English far more fluently and has learned empathy and gratitude. But sadly, he is now in love with Miranda, who just wants to be friends, something he has trouble understanding. There is one more relapse, as Caliban misreads Henry V to justify his attempt to kill Prospero and rape Miranda: “Ho, God for Caliban and Setebos! / War, War for Prosper’s throne!” Yet again Prospero must intercede and curb Caliban’s desires, explaining that Miranda “is charmed against thy body’s rape / By chastity of soul.” It is at this point, as the long pageant approaches its end, that Shakespeare replaces Prospero onstage. “Out of the dimness” Caliban approaches the poet, and “in a voice hoarse with feeling” announces, with new self-awareness: “A little have I crawled, a little only / Out of mine ancient cave. All that I build / I botch; all that I do destroyeth my dream.” He begs for help, prostrating himself at the feet of Shakespeare, who gazes on him “with tenderness” and recites Prospero’s valedictory speech from Act 4, scene 1, “Our revels now are ended.”

  In the program summary we learn that Caliban then stepped forward and addressed the crowd directly, urging everyone to join him in bowing down to Shakespeare. The distance between the aspiring Caliban and the thousands of spectators who have witnessed his incomplete journey collapses:

  You, you my fellow dreamers in the dark,

  We which are one, you millions that are me,

  Like as our dreams shall we ourselves become!

  My brothers, now with me! To yonder Spirit

  Bow down, bow down, and on this bed of clay

  Together let us dream another world.

  Caliban then raised “his arms toward Shakespeare with a great gesture of aspiration,” and the orchestra broke into “the strains of the national anthem.” MacKaye had stolen a trick here from the ending of his St. Louis masque, and the shift here from bardolatry to patriotism is seamless. Or so we may assume. It is worth noting that the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” was both new and controversial. It was only in this year that President Wilson had ordered that it be performed at military events, and recent efforts in Baltimore (where its lyrics were written) to impose a fine on anyone who refused to stand when it was played were met by resistance to “the folly of trying to instill patriotism by law, to create reverence by statute.”

  Toward the end of the extended run, the New York Times published a poem, “Caliban at the Stadium,” by Florence Ripley Mastin, an American-born poet and teacher of immigrants (including the future novelist Bernard Malamud). In her poem, Mastin connects the dots, making explicit what MacKaye had gestured at: “The audience itself is Caliban!” she writes. “Monstrous and murmuring beneath the stars,” and in the end it “roars and crawls away.” If MacKaye’s goal was to use theater to break down the boundaries that divided new and old Americans, Mastin’s admiring poem suggests how profoundly he had failed. Anti-immigrant assumptions, in circulation now for twenty years, had clouded MacKaye’s vision and undermined his best intentions. If the restrictionists needed more evidence for why a literacy test was warranted, and for the folly of imagining that the Caliban-type could ever be fully assimilated, they didn’t need to look further than this masque. The brief New York run of Caliban was well attended and was extended for a few nights, as the Boston one that followed in 1917 would be. But by the time it was restaged there, Congress had already overridden a presidential veto and voted the literacy requirement into law. Few who witnessed MacKaye’s depiction of Caliban’s struggle and ultimate failure to acculturate would have been surprised when seven years later the anti-immigration forces achieved their ultimate goal: the institution of racially driven quotas in 1921, and even more restrictive ones in 1924, that would be the law of the land until overturned in 1965.

  * * *

  • • •

  SHAKESPEARE WOULD CONTINUE to be implicated in the story of American immigration. On April 23, 1932, President Herbert Hoover and three hundred or so other luminaries, including members of Congress and foreign ambassadors, crammed into a small theater across from the United States Capitol, for the opening of the Folger Shakespeare Library, an unsurpassed collection of Shakespeare materials as well as a stunning building in whic
h to house them. Not many Shakespeare scholars get to lecture a sitting president; that task fell to Joseph Quincy Adams, the Folger’s first director of research.

  Adams chose to offer those gathered there a historical overview of “Shakespeare and American Culture.” He was interested in Shakespeare’s racial origins and had published an essay suggesting that Shakespeare may well have had both French and Anglo-Saxon blood; if so, Adams argued, the fusion of “two important race elements” helps us grasp “the versatility of Shakespeare’s genius.” A child of the South (Adams was born in South Carolina, not far from where his grandfather had owned a slave plantation), he was drawn to the notion that The Tempest was “more closely allied with the founding of Virginia than has been generally realized.” His take on Shakespeare’s view of the natives that early colonists encountered (in the conclusion of an unpublished essay he wrote about “Shakespeare and Virginia”) is chilling: “in the person of Caliban, Shakespeare represented the treacherous nature of the natives, as reported by the colonists,” and Shakespeare “agreed” with the Elizabethan travel writer Richard Hakluyt “that it would be fatal to show them any leniency. In Hakluyt’s advice as to how to treat them,” Adams writes, Shakespeare “foresaw their ultimate extermination.”