Significantly for the course of American history, the Founding Fathers were among the first to expound the delights of reading (rather than seeing) Shakespeare. Benjamin Franklin urged the Philadelphia Library Company to buy a collected works in 1746, while Thomas Jefferson – a Virginian – recommended the plays to a friend, explaining that ‘[a] lively and lasting sense of filial duty is more effectually impressed on the mind of a son or daughter by reading King Lear, than by all the dry volumes of ethics and divinity that were ever written’. Among the holdings in Jefferson’s fine library at Monticello, a forty-minute drive from Staunton, are numerous Shakespearian texts and commentaries.
One of the earliest American enthusiasts for a writer he called ‘the Great Master of Nature’ was John Adams, who succeeded George Washington to become the second president of the United States. As a lawyer in Boston, Adams devoured the works, saturating his diaries with quotations from King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, Troilus and Cressida, The Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry VIII. If anything, however, the Bardolator in the Adams household was John’s wife Abigail; years later, their son John Quincy Adams recorded that an edition of Shakespeare had been ‘on my mother’s nursery table’, and that ‘at ten years of age I was as familiarly acquainted with his lovers and his clowns, as with Robinson Crusoe, the Pilgrim’s Progress, and the Bible’.
By then, perhaps inevitably, Shakespeare had been recruited on to the side of a nation fighting for independence. In October 1775, as war with Britain raged, Abigail Adams wrote to John suggesting that George III would soon be bellowing, ‘My kingdom for a horse!’ like the doomed Richard III at Bosworth. The following March, trapped in a besieged Boston, she urged her husband on with stirring words from Julius Caesar, spoken by Brutus on the eve of battle:
There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.
Although the north-eastern states persisted in their costive animosity towards theatre – New England would not relinquish its ban on public performances of plays until the late 1700s – down in the more permissive South, Shakespeare’s scripts began to make their way out of libraries and on to the stage. In contrast to his more serious-minded colleagues, George Washington was a devoted playgoer in Williamsburg, Virginia, particularly partial to comedies. In July 1787, he whiled away an afternoon watching Dryden and Davenant’s operatic version of The Tempest, The Enchanted Isle; later, as president, he hosted an amateur performance of Julius Caesar in his official residence at Philadelphia.
Washington’s correspondence bustles with Shakespeare, particularly when it comes to the struggle against British tyranny. In October 1778, as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, he wrote:
They will know, that it is our Arms, not defenceless Towns, they have to Subdue. Till this end is accomplished, the Superstructure they have been endeavouring to raise ‘like the baseless fabric of a vision’ falls to nothing.
The words are Prospero’s near the close of The Tempest: an image of British dominance that figures it as a wistful, poetic illusion, created for a fleeting moment before dissolving into thin air.
The British were not above using Shakespeare, too, albeit as much for the purposes of entertainment as propaganda: between 1777 and 1783 they staged a number of plays including Richard III in New York. Not to be outdone, the rebel army later mounted Coriolanus at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. An anonymous verse that circulated in the lead-up to hostilities poked fun at the British and their detested levies: ‘Be taxed or not be taxed, that is the question.’
The very first performance of Shakespeare on the American continent is usually credited to an amateur: a New York doctor, Joachimus Bertrand, who advertised in March 1730 a staging of Romeo and Juliet ‘at the Revenge Meeting House, which is fitting up for that purpose’. In a nice piece of director’s casting, Dr Bertrand announced that he himself would play the Apothecary.
Two decades later, a pair of ambitious young tyros, Walter Murray and Thomas Kean, founded a theatre company in Philadelphia; forced by the mistrustful authorities to relocate to New York, they performed Richard III in March 1750. The show was so successful that they took it out on tour through Virginia and Maryland – making the play perhaps the first homegrown American Shakespeare hit.
But the earliest actor-manager to put down solid Shakespearian roots on this side of the Atlantic was not American, but English, Lewis Hallam. In April 1752, Hallam, his wife Sarah, their three children and a ‘good and sufficient company’ of ten actors embarked on a sloop called the Charming Sally bound for Virginia, aiming to make new lives for themselves in the New World. With them was a trunk-full of costumes, a few pieces of portable scenery and a small library of plays: light comedies by George Farquhar, William Congreve and John Gay; sober tragedies including Joseph Addison’s Cato and Nicholas Rowe’s Fair Penitent; and, crucially, a bundle of scripts by Shakespeare.
After docking at Yorktown, Hallam and his troupe travelled to Williamsburg and prepared a place to perform. The first advertisements went out in late August 1752, grandly announcing the arrival of ‘a Company of Comedians, lately from London’, and boasting that ‘Ladies and Gentlemen may depend on being entertain’d in as polite a Manner as at the Theatres in London’. On the bill for their debut was The Merchant of Venice. As well as a patriotic dedication to King George II, the poster carried a warning: ‘No Person, whatsoever, to be admitted behind the Scenes.’ The London Company of Comedians would take no chances with rude-mannered colonials.
Sometimes, though, colonials had occasion to be rude. One early tale is revealing: the visit to Stratford-upon-Avon made by John Adams and Thomas Jefferson on a tour of the English countryside in April 1786. Determined to make it a pilgrimage – Jefferson kissed the ground when they arrived – the pair were nonetheless underwhelmed by the Birthplace (‘as small and mean, as you can conceive’, wrote Adams) and unimpressed by Shakespeare’s funeral monument (‘an ill sculptured head’). Adams wrote dejectedly, ‘There is nothing preserved of this great Genius which is worth knowing. Nothing which might inform Us what Education, what Company, what Accident turned his Mind to Letters and the Drama.’
I wondered if this contained a clue as to why a much later group of Americans had decided to raise a seventeenth-century theatre here in twenty-first-century Virginia. Despite carving separate chips from a chair in which Shakespeare had reputedly sat (Jefferson was sceptical), the second and third presidents became two in a long line of foreign tourists to become convinced that the English had failed to honour Shakespeare – and that they, leaders of a brand-new nation, could do an infinitely better job.
The American Shakespeare Center wasn’t hard to find: in a cosy town centre dominated by pillared nineteenth-century storefronts with striped awnings, it was a hulking interloper, a barn-like building in ox-blood brick.
Inside, however, the Blackfriars was a beauty, a casket in pale Virginia oak, glistening in the light. It felt tiny: the whole thing was roughly the size of a tennis court. A waist-height stage filled approximately half of the space, benches the rest, with railed galleries ranged all around. The stage itself was a scale model of the Globe’s, minus the canopy and pillars: a central ‘discovery space’ with curtains, flanked by wooden doors, with a small curtained balcony aloft at first-floor level. With its hammer-beam roof and amber woodwork, it looked prettily like the hall of a Jacobean stately home.
The Blackfriars was the brainchild of an English professor from a nearby liberal-arts college, Ralph Cohen. He’d set up a small touring troupe in 1988 with friends, using research into Renaissance staging practices, beginning to make its way out of the seminar room: a minimum of props and scenery, Elizabethan-style doubling. When the company decided they ne
eded a home, it seemed only logical to build a copy of one their house dramatist would have known, as exact as they could make it.
London’s replica Globe was already being planned, Cohen told me cheerfully; so Staunton had gone under cover. Built on a shoestring budget of $3.7 million (£2.2 million), the Blackfriars had opened in 2001, six years after its cousin beside the Thames. He denied there was any hint of competition, but I wasn’t so sure: hearing later that the Bankside Globe had plans to build its own indoor theatre, modelled on designs from later in the seventeenth century, the American Shakespeare Center had upped the ante. Their next project was called ‘Globe II’: a replica of the second, tile-roofed Globe raised in 1614 after the first Globe burnt down. Fundraising was being conducted via their phone number: (877) MUCH-ADO.
Shakespeare wouldn’t entirely have recognised the American Blackfriars, Cohen admitted. Planning issues had prevented them from adding windows (which would have helped light the original, as well as providing much-needed ventilation). More controversially, the Staunton fire department had been chary about lit wicks and the smoke. The candlelight they used was electric. ‘We did what we could, with the money, in the time,’ Cohen said. Settling on to my wooden bench, I thought they had done an impressive job, by any measure.
I had tickets for Cymbeline – a late play, and so entirely suited to the space. Rude-mannered colonials were not in evidence: it was a well-groomed crowd. On the bench in front of me was a woman in her early seventies, splendidly clad in camel coat with a sweep of honeyed silver hair. Next to her was a man in an exquisite grey suit, purple silk scarf cascading from his breast pocket. Clearly when one came to the theatre in Staunton one came in one’s finery.
Happenstance though it was, it was a pleasing touch. One of the main attractions of playgoing in the Jacobean period – especially in a ‘private’, indoor theatre – was the opportunity it offered for gawping at folk off stage as well as on. Jacobean Londoners were a fashion-conscious bunch, obsessed with luxurious fabrics, rich colours, expensive jewels and gewgaws. Ornamental hairpieces (some of which were made by Shakespeare’s erstwhile landlord, the Huguenot exile Christopher Mountjoy) were pieces of art in themselves. At the London Blackfriars one could pay extra to sit on the stage and be seen – a practice the Virginia Blackfriars had joyously brought back to life, placing a row of stools either side to make seats for ‘gallants’.
After a brief and energetic burst of banjo, the Blackfriars company launched into Cymbeline. It, too, was brief and energetic. Speeches were taken at a gallop; in no time at all, the plot was up and running. Imogen, sole remaining child of King Cymbeline, has married the commoner Posthumus Leonatus against the wishes of her father (and, even more, the wishes of her wicked stepmother). Posthumus is banished; Imogen follows him, and so begins a wild and troubling journey of self-discovery. She dons the garments of a man to recover her husband and – though she doesn’t yet realise it – her brothers, Guiderius and Belarius.
The costumes were a melange of Jacobean and early-twentieth-century, but the actors’ confidence in this bare, unadorned space felt entirely authentic, and Shakespeare’s late, meaty dialogue sounded to my ear fully plausible with an American twang:
GUIDERIUS
There is cold meat i’th’ cave. We’ll browse on that
Whilst what we have killed be cooked.
BELARIUS Stay, come not in.
But that it eats our victuals I should think
Here were a fairy.
GUIDERIUS What’s the matter, sir?
BELARIUS
By Jupiter, an angel—
Bah Jup’tuh … It remained an enigma, the question of how Shakespeare might have heard (or spoken) his own lines; at the London Globe I had attended performances by actors trained in so-called Original Pronunciation, which sounded to me like broad Somerset inflected with the slatey nasal twang of Lancashire. One thing everyone could agree on, however, was that East Coast American, with its neat terminal rs and light medial vowels (pass to rhyme with ass, scenario as ‘scen-ai-rio’) was much closer to the language Shakespeare and his audiences understood than the fluting tones of the Royal Shakespeare Company.
I was most intrigued by how the ASC would handle a tricky aspect of Shakespeare’s late plays, their fondness for spectacular staging. Following the experiments conducted in Jacobean court masques, where no expense was spared on eye-popping scenography, the London Blackfriars was seemingly equipped with a battery of high-tech special effects: a hoist in the ‘heavens’ via which actors could be flown on to the stage; elaborate trapdoors through which performers were propelled at speed; a company of resident musicians to provide magical sound effects. Cymbeline’s stage directions call for any number of tricks to dazzle the eye – a cunning device to make it appear that the doltish Cloten has been beheaded; an ‘apparition’ of ghosts to musical accompaniment; the entry of Jupiter himself, who ‘descends in thunder and lightning, sitting upon an eagle’ before casting a thunderbolt.
There were no godly descents on offer that night: a golden-robed Jupiter simply strolled on to the upper-level balcony to the crashing of some backstage ironmongery (a device for flying in dei ex machina had been another casualty of the Virginia Blackfriars’s tight budget). But Cloten’s death had a satisfying gruesomeness, amplified by the harrowed expressions on the faces of the on-stage gallants.
I loved it. Fast, tonally all over the place, with more switchback turns than a mountain pass, the production made sense of Cymbeline in a way that a more austerely conceptual version wouldn’t. Conducted on a stage not much larger than a tablecloth, the sword-fighting was properly perilous, and one of the most famous lyrics in the English language, spoken over the body of the disguised and apparently dead Imogen, was delivered with a touching lack of preciousness:
Fear no more the heat o’th’ sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages.
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone and ta’en thy wages.
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
It might have been the tiredness, but I was dabbing my eyes at that. Ambushed by the late plays once again.
IF YOU WANT TO GET A FIX on the importance of Shakespeare to a certain kind of American life, you have only to glance at a street plan of Washington DC.
First, trace the twin diagonals of Pennsylvania and Maryland Avenues as they rush towards the west frontage of the Capitol building. Then nudge your eye gently right. Above, to the north, sits the marble lozenge of the Supreme Court. To the immediate south is the Library of Congress’s Jefferson building – a blowsy, Beaux-Arts affair, crowned with a squat pimple of a dome. Next door is the Adams building, raised in the 1930s when the library ran out of book stacks.
The building to look for is the fifth. Tucked next to the Adams, it completes the arrangement, which is as severely patterned as any Renaissance garden. It is the Folger Shakespeare Library, the world’s vastest Shakespeare archive, home (at the most recent count) to 256,000 books, 250,000 playbills, 60,000 manuscripts, 200 oil paintings and any amount of other Shakespeariana. The brainchild of collector Henry Clay Folger and his wife Emily, it sits enclosed on two sides by the United States’s central library, in the shadow of Congress, just across the street from the highest court in the land. In this most symbolic of cities, it is hard to see how it could be more symbolically embedded.
There is another conceit, meticulously planned by the architects. Sketch an imaginary plane back west from the library’s front wall, and run it straight through the Capitol and along the National Mall. The line brushes the Washington Monument, before running headlong into the Lincoln Memorial – plumb through what the library’s first director, speaking at its opening on 23 April 1932, called ‘the three [men] whom Americans universally worship’.
Lincoln, Washington, Shakespeare: the Pilgrim Fathers, who had fled England precisely to avoid diabolical iniquities like Shakespearian dr
ama, would doubtless be appalled.
Deep in my map as I came up past the Capitol, the Folger sprang out on me by surprise: a slim, art-deco cigarette case of a building, its marble shining bone-white in the sun. It looked for all the world like a minor government department, or the embassy of a small but strategically important country. Bardonia, I supposed.
I had a meeting, bang on 9 a.m., with Michael Witmore, the Folger’s director. Escorted to his corner office, I tapped gently at the door, which was half ajar, and poked my head around. Glossy green carpet, helipad-sized desk, with the windows giving on to a panoramic view of the Washington skyline. There was only one word for it: presidential.
A few seconds later, Witmore appeared behind me, bearing two steaming mugs emblazoned with the Folger logo. He looked pretty presidential himself – pinstriped suit and shining shoes, sandy brown hair, a youthful mid-forties.
Quite a view, I said, looking out of the window and towards the Capitol dome, glimmering in the light.
He eased back behind the desk, mug in hand. ‘In DC, our culture is politics. And Shakespeare is a writer who is very good for people who think about the world in political terms.’
A former professor at the University of Wisconsin who had done graduate work at Berkeley and UCLA, Witmore was a new arrival at the Folger. He had qualifications in scholarly fields I barely knew existed: the crossover between Renaissance rhetoric and bioinformatics; data-visualisation in Shakespeare’s texts. He had only been in the post a few months.
I asked him to sum up what the job involved. He offered a well-practised smile. ‘Secretary of state for Shakespeare … I exaggerate, of course.’
Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised by the politico-corporate atmosphere: Henry Clay Folger had been, after all, a businessman. Born in New York City in 1857, the son of a millinery dealer, he got a job in the nascent oil industry partly to pay himself through Amherst College. After graduating, he raced up the corporate ranks – first as a clerk at a small oil firm, then, in 1881, joining what became Standard Oil. By 1909, he was one of Rockefeller’s juniors. By 1911, he had become the first president of Standard Oil New York.
Worlds Elsewhere Page 15
