Do any of these places have any Shakespearian connection at all? No, in most instances – accidents of geography, genealogy, cartography. But I’d absent-mindedly tucked the postcard into my notebook and brought it to Washington with me, and one quiet afternoon in the library, when I should have been doing a million more profitable things, I started to wonder if there was more to it than that.
A quick search online uncovered another ghost town, Shakespeare in New Mexico, rechristened in 1879 after a mining company named in honour of the playwright. North of the Canadian border, Stratford in Ontario, a former rail city, has made profitable connection with its namesake Stratford-upon-Avon: a Shakespeare festival has run there since 1953, one of the most famous in North America. (Stratford in Connecticut poached the idea, launching its own Shakespeare festival in 1955, which ran until the late eighties.) Orlando, Florida, honours its namesake in As You Like It with its own Shakespeare theatre, founded in the early 1970s when a professor from the university of Central Florida bought a school bus, painted it with rainbow stripes, and toured student actors around local educational institutions.
In a deeper sense, I began to realise, Jouris’s map is quite accurate. Littered through the history of the United States are stories of Shakespeare cropping up in odd, out-of-the-way corners, far from East Coast libraries and theatres. As early as 1764, the English explorer Thomas Morris, mapping what would become Illinois, was astounded to be presented with a volume of Shakespeare’s plays by a Native American chief in exchange for gunpowder. (‘A singular gift from a savage,’ wrote Morris wonderingly, apparently not pausing to consider the word ‘savage’ too deeply.)
I started to collect stories. I came across a vivid and nerve-jangling tale from eighty-odd years later, the early 1840s, about a touring company of actors travelling through Florida in the middle of the Seminole land wars. Journeying without military escort through an area teeming with Native American warriors determined to protect their territory from the depredations of the US government, the troupe were set upon and two actors killed. To celebrate their victory, the Indians prised open the trunk containing the company wardrobe and disported themselves as ‘Othello, Hamlet and a host of other Shakespearian characters’.
For scholars, there are three famous sentences in Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville’s sprawling eyewitness account assembled from nine months spent touring the expanding United States and Canada in the early 1830s:
The literary genius of Great Britain still casts its rays deep in the forests of the New World. There is scarcely a pioneer’s cabin where one does not encounter some odd volumes of Shakespeare. I recall having read the feudal drama of Henry V for the first time in a log-house.
Scarcely a pioneer’s cabin … I had long been intrigued by this reference – if only for the comical image of France’s grand inspector of penitentiaries in some bug-infested lean-to, reading about his own nation being crushed at Agincourt. I’d assumed it to be exaggeration, a product of romantic infatuation with the newly United States. Now I began to wonder.
*
I would probably have forgotten the question altogether had I not stumbled across an article in Shakespeare Quarterly, the Folger’s own journal. It was entitled ‘Shakespeare in the Rockies’, by an English professor at the university of Denver, Levette J. Davidson. The article was dated January 1953. Davidson was long dead.
He mentioned references I had already come across – a nineteenth-century fur trapper who lugged ‘a copy of Shakespeare’ everywhere he went; early performances of Macbeth in Salt Lake City to the hearty accompaniment of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. But he went on to recount a far more unusual tale, one I’d never heard, about the explorer Jim Bridger. Bridger, the greatest frontiersman of the 1840s and 1850s, was a mountain man born and bred, perhaps most famous for mapping the Salt Lake area for the founder of the Mormon church, Brigham Young. He also established what became Fort Bridger, Wyoming, a staging post on the long trek westwards to California.
Despite being unable to read, Jim Bridger was fond of stories – one storyteller in particular. The soldier J. Lee Humfreville, who spent the winter of 1863–64 holed up with him elsewhere in Wyoming, relates how, upon hearing that ‘Shakespeare’s was supposed to be the greatest book’, Bridger became seized by a passion:
He made a journey to the main road, and lay in wait for a wagon train, and bought a copy from some emigrants, paying for it with a yoke of cattle, which at that time could have been sold for one hundred and twenty-five dollars. He hired a German boy, from one of the wagon trains, at forty dollars a month, to read to him. The boy was a good reader, and Bridger took great interest in the reading, listening most attentively for hours at a time. Occasionally he got the thread of the story so mixed up that he would swear a blue streak, then compel the young man to stop, turn back, and reread a page or two, until he could get the story straightened out. This continued until he became so hopelessly involved in reading Richard III that he declared he ‘wouldn’t listen any more to the talk of a man who was mean enough to kill his mother’…
‘It was amusing to hear Bridger quote Shakespeare,’ Humfreville continued. ‘He could give quotation after quotation, and was always ready to do so.’ (Even if he didn’t always get the plot details quite right.)
I read this with surprise, then astonishment. Copies of a book circulating as part of a barter economy is one thing; Native Americans pilfering costumes from white men invading their land another. But an illiterate trapper selling valuable cattle to acquire a text he couldn’t read?
Yet there was corroboration, the testimony of Margaret Carrington, the wife of an officer in the US Army:
[Bridger] cannot read, but he enjoys reading … He sent for a good copy of Shakespeare’s plays, and would hear them read until midnight with unfeigned pleasure. The murder of the two princes in the Tower started him to indignation. He desired it to be read a second and a third time. Upon positive conviction that the text was properly read to him, he burned the whole set, convinced that ‘Shakespeare must have had a bad heart and been as devilish mean as a Sioux, to have written such scoundrelism as that’.
Even by the colourful standards of many frontier accounts, this was startling stuff. It was an image of Shakespeare not as a remote entity from the high Renaissance, the apex of Eng Lit, but as American popular entertainment – the author of stories vivid enough to enrapture a grizzled mountain trapper, so shockingly real that the murder of the Princes in the Tower could persuade him to burn the complete works he had spent so much to acquire. I was used to the idea that Shakespeare was, in his day, a hugely successful commercial playwright, but Richard III as a prairie companion in Wyoming? Really? I was taking a flight to California in a few days’ time; maybe here was the hook I was after. In the story of Bridger I felt I had found a clue, though to what I wasn’t yet sure.
In the nineteenth-century American West, he was certainly not on his own in his passion for Shakespeare. In January 1861, an item appeared in the Rocky Mountain News advertising an eccentric bet by the paper’s editor – that it was impossible for an amateur to play Hamlet alongside professional actors with ‘only three days’ study’. The prize for anyone willing to do so was $100.
The challenge seems to have fallen on deaf ears, at least until July, when the paper printed a follow-up:
We learn that a gentleman of this city, well known in Sporting Circles, will make his first appearance as Hamlet, on Saturday evening next at the Apollo Hall. The gentleman plays the part on a heavy bet, viz., that he could not be able to study the part (one of the longest in the drama) between this day at noon until Saturday evening. Look out for an exciting time.
Sure enough, the ‘gentleman’ (an infamous gambler) learned the part and triumphed. This was the paper again, four days later:
The performance at the theatre on Saturday night last was a highly creditable one, the chief feature being a rendition of Hamlet by Mr C. B. Cooke of this city. The character was to
our mind most faithfully represented. Mr Cooke has not a strong voice, but his reading was most capital, and his action graceful, artistic, and impressive. He is a better Hamlet than we have ever seen personified by any stock actor.
A trapper spouting Shakespeare? A gambler making the gamble of his life and winning, with Hamlet? I thought I had already gleaned a fair amount about the history of Shakespeare in America. I wondered if I really knew anything at all.
The longer I stayed at the Folger, the more it seemed that this monumental edifice of learning was also a kind of fortress. It was a definitive statement, writ in Georgia marble, that Shakespeare was best appreciated not on the stage, but on the page – more precisely, in the thousands upon thousands of pages kept down in the vaults, safe from prying eyes and grubby fingers.
Perhaps it was something about Washington, too. After five days here I had begun to tire of the city, its inhabitants’ constant sense of being on Important Business. The chinos and trouser suits and official lanyards and trilling mobile phones I found irritating. The runners in military T-shirts trekking up and down the National Mall had begun to get on my nerves.
At night, I played truant. I couldn’t stop walking. I quartered the city block by block, snapping blurry photos with my phone: the Capitol in weak moonlight; the slim point of the Washington Monument cool white against a bouillabaisse-coloured sky. The shadow-puppetry of trees and streetlights against the National Gallery of Art.
Even the FBI’s 1970s Hoover building, beige and blocky and overbearing in daylight, acquired a mysterious poetry in the dark; rounding it one evening, I dislodged a flock of starlings gossiping in the shadowy recesses of its cliff-like walls. It was the loudest sound I’d heard all day.
Late one evening, in search of Shakespeares from less domisticated American locations than the District of Columbia, I spotted on the bookshelves of my B&B a novel I’d been meaning to read for years, Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, an adaptation of King Lear. For someone interested in the westward expansion of the United States, and of Shakespeare, it was a serendipitous discovery.
Published in 1991, the book transplanted Lear from the baronial castles and wind-blasted heaths of ancient Britain to the limitless plains of Iowa in the dying days of the 1970s. A thousand acres was four hundred hectares, give or take: the size of the family farm in Zebulon County, in the grip of Larry Cook, aka Lear, for as long as anyone can recall. The story was told in the flat, undeviating voice of his eldest daughter Ginny, a stand-in for Goneril. Regan was Rose. Cordelia was Caroline, who had escaped to the city and trained as a lawyer. At the story’s fringes, on a collision course for its centre, was Jess Clark, a drifter recently returned from years in California; a shaggier but no less treacherous force than Edmund.
Shakespeare’s main source was an old play, The True Chronicle History of King Leir and his Three Daughters, and the figure of Lear also crops up in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s semi-mythical history of British kings, completed by 1139. But the story’s roots surely lie in folk tale: a king cursed with daughters instead of sons, a kingdom divided and sent to rack and ruin. Even in Shakespeare, one has the sense that Goneril and Regan are struggling to escape the shackles of being cast as fairy-tale wicked sisters.
Smiley’s was an audacious decentering. She painstakingly fleshed out these women, making them into sympathetic figures with their own tragedies – Rose, raging against breast cancer and a violent partner; the luckless, abused, browbeaten Ginny, worn almost to the bone. Caroline is an ambiguous figure: impulsive and headstrong, coddled from her father’s worst excesses, she is the first to round on him when he proposes splitting up the farm, before fatefully taking his side.
For his part, Larry isn’t a cuddly father figure more sinned against than sinning; this ‘Daddy’ is vindictive, cussed, stubbornly silent when it suits him but given to volcanic eruptions of rage. ‘Perhaps there is a distance,’ Smiley writes in the voice of Ginny, ‘that is the optimum distance for seeing one’s father’:
farther than across the supper table or across the room, somewhere in the middle distance: he is dwarfed by trees or the sweep of a hill, but his features are still visible, his body language still distinct. Well, that is a distance I never found. He was never dwarfed by the landscape – the fields, the buildings, the white pine windbreak were as much my father as if he had grown them and shed them like a husk.
Yawning Midwestern farms, the dun towers of grain elevators, fertiliser-tainted lakes – all of it emphasises the pinched interiority of these characters’ lives.
For all that its most famous setting is a heath, Lear, too, is surprisingly domestic in scale. An early performance took place at court in front of King James I on 26 December 1606 and was perhaps restaged at the original Blackfriars. The play is obsessed by the consequences of not having enough space: too many knights, multiple imprisonments, a hovel on the heath that can’t squeeze in everyone. One of its most poignant exchanges takes place between the King and his Fool:
FOOL Canst tell how an oyster makes his shell?
LEAR No.
FOOL Nor I neither; but I can tell why a snail has a house.
LEAR Why?
FOOL Why, to put’s head in, not to give it away to his daughters and leave his horns without a case.
Smiley’s Midwestern landscape offered her characters something similar, I thought: more land than they knew what to do with, but not nearly enough room to breathe.
As I neared the former schoolhouse on Capitol Hill that was the Taffety Punk rehearsal space, the night air was filled with the raw clang of electric guitars and the whump of a drum kit. Inside, in a black-box theatre, two dancers were writhing on the floor in what looked suspiciously like carnal embrace. On a bar stool in front, a singer/performer dressed in black was speaking slowly and with flat irony into a microphone. Her words I half recognised:
Her pity-pleading eyes are sadly fixed
In the remorseless wrinkles of his face.
Her modest eloquence with sighs is mixed,
Which to her oratory adds more grace.
She puts the period often from his place,
And midst the sentence so her accent breaks
That twice she doth begin ere once she speaks.
The poem was Shakespeare’s early narrative work The Rape of Lucrece; this is the desperate moment just before Lucrece is attacked by her rapist Tarquin. It was the first time I’d ever seen it performed, never mind reimagined for the age of post-post-punk.
When the performers had come to a pause, I hesitantly introduced myself to the person who seemed to be in charge – a thin, wiry man in his early thirties with a scarecrow of peroxide hair and a purple T-shirt. He introduced himself as Marcus Kyd, artistic director. His eyes, cavernous with tiredness, shone with ragged enthusiasm.
Taffety Punk had got going when Kyd and a few fellow acting graduates had begun to get work professionally in the early 2000s. They’d been shuttling between acting gigs and teaching jobs when they realised that what they actually wanted to do was make a less boringly middle-aged kind of theatre than the stuff generally on offer in Washington.
Kyd had been in the world’s most short-lived rock group; one time they’d performed with a few dancers, and it had seemed to work. They’d decided to form a theatre company, run on the lines of a band, playing in dirty basements and pop-up venues: live dancers, acting, guitars, tickets as cheap as they could make them. They’d named themselves after a line in All’s Well That Ends Well, the clownish Lavatch’s description of a ‘taffeta punk’, Jacobethan slang for a prostitute dressed in silk. Impressively – though perhaps unsurprisingly for a group based in the same city as the Folger – they had adopted the Folio spelling.
‘We’re all punk-rock, classically trained weirdos,’ Kyd said, reaching for a tall tankard of coffee.
My contact had described them as ‘cool dorks’, I said.
‘Yeah, dorks, that’s way better. We’re obsessed with Shakespeare, Greek material, anyt
hing older than the eighteenth century.’
The Lucrece project was their latest and largest so far – also their most improvisational. They’d been fiddling with it on and off for the past few years. Lucrece, Tarquin, Lucrece’s husband Collatine and the poem’s narrator were played by a cast of four, doubling musical instruments where possible. (Lucrece, played by Kimberly Gilbert, played bass.) Two dancers interpreted various parts of the piece, notably the rape scene. The rest was sort of made up, with the music remixed and looped live.
But the text was pure Shakespeare, Kyd grinned. ‘The poem endures. We keep fucking with the rest, but we don’t want to fuck with that.’
I was struck by the fact that they didn’t seek to treat Shakespeare’s poem, difficult and neglected as it was, as a historical curiosity.
Kyd shook his head. ‘We looked at the poem, and it was just so compelling: what happens to Lucrece, the way he shows her as a rape victim. Women are still going through that all the time. We talked about that a lot as a group. Tarquin, too, the bullshit he does when he’s justifying himself?’ He put on a Midwestern farm-boy accent. ‘Oh yuh, she wuz askin’ for it, look at how she dressed …’
It was nearly time to go: they only had the space for another hour, and had the whole final section to run. As Kyd was plugging in his guitar, I asked him what he thought about the Americanness of Shakespeare.
He looked thoughtful. ‘You know, the whole continent, but DC especially, suffers from a certain … preciousness about Shakespeare. I think it’s misleading, to tell people that plays are literature, you know, and I think that’s partly the impetus of the company. Theatre is not church, Shakespeare is not church.’
He grinned and hit a power chord: keowang! ‘It has to be contemporary, y’know? There’s no other way of doing it.’
Worlds Elsewhere Page 18
