It was a volunteer company from New York, stationed at Santa Barbara during the same Mexican wars, who first brought Shakespeare to California. Bored of guard duty, they spent the summer of 1847 busily remodelling a Spanish adobe house as a theatre. The debut performance was Richard III, with two blankets for a curtain, wigs made from lambskin, and a grand orchestra of two guitars, a violin and a drum. Drafted to Los Angeles in the spring of 1848, they promptly erected a 300-seat theatre. Their thespian activities were only halted when news leaked about Sutter’s Mill, followed quickly by the peace treaty with Mexico.
The same economic and social forces that drove westward expansion in the nineteenth century spread East Coast culture in all its forms. Shakespeare, as I had discovered on Capitol Hill, had been regarded as a central part of American identity since the Founding Fathers at least; it must have seemed only natural to many pioneers that he came along for the ride.
In the mid-nineteenth century Shakespeare was experiencing his own relentless expansion. ‘Stereotype’ technology, in which printers used plaster casts to take an impression from pages of pre-existing metal type (the origin of the word), enabled American publishers to produce still-cheaper editions. These made the plays available to more readers than ever before – nearly two hundred and fifty separate editions printed between 1795 and the 1860s, with fifteen published in 1850 alone.
The texts – or at least expurgated chunks of them – also loomed large in schoolrooms, where they had long been valued for their usefulness in teaching elocution. Primers such as McGuffey’s Reader, first published in 1836, introduced generations of American schoolchildren to stirring speeches by Mark Antony in Julius Caesar and Prince Arthur in King John, and became as substantial a part of American culture as the King James Bible and John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.
The easy familiarity with which popular writers such as James Fenimore Cooper and Louisa May Alcott cite Shakespeare in their frontier tales merely hints at the reality. In the words of the historian Ashley T. Thorndike, ‘in the West the travelling elecutionist, the lecturer, the company of actors on a Mississippi showboat became his emissaries and evangels … no other writer was so quickly assimilated into the wilderness’. The mid-nineteenth-century cult of Anglo-Saxonism, which proclaimed the idea of Manifest Destiny and the supremacy of white, English-speaking Americans over all others (especially those others who were recent immigrants), bolstered still further the importance of Shakespeare.
As Thorndike suggested, while Shakespeare may have been recited in log cabins and rehearsed by beardless lieutenants, it was because of professional travelling actors that his plays reached new and much broader audiences on the frontier than they had ever done back east. The famous seven-strong Chapman acting family bought a flatboat in Pittsburgh in 1831, and sailed it up and down the Ohio river, offering mixed bills everywhere from major cities such as Cincinnati to straggling riverside villages. Other companies played hotel ballrooms, billiard parlours, food cellars, converted barns – anywhere that would have them.
After 1849, professional performers began to descend on California in their hundreds. Although many actors stayed in San Francisco, others assembled touring companies to take on what became known as the ‘gold circuit’ across the Sacramento valley and up into the Sierras. Of necessity these were small groups: according to the historian Helene Wickham Koon, perhaps eight to ten people made up each, the leading man or woman usually doubling as an actor-manager – booking whatever theatre (or billiard parlour, or food cellar) they could get into.
What drew them, as it drew everyone, was lucre. For those prepared to put up with the hardships of a mountain tour, the money was dizzying: an average of $300 a night (the best part of $8,000 today). Miners were appreciative audiences. If you had a fan on the other side of the oil footlights, your share of the box office could be supplemented by a nugget or bag of gold dust tossed your way.
These actors travelled with the barest essentials: a change of costume or two, a handful of props, the whole lot thrown into an open wagon. In Britain, the movement towards historically informed design – the practice of setting Henry VIII, say, in elaborately researched Tudor costume or Much Ado About Nothing in Renaissance Italian garb – was just getting started, courtesy of pioneers such as William Macready, his contemporary Charles Kean (the rather more straight-backed son of Edmund) and the designer William Telbin. Out in California, however, these were luxuries no one could afford. According to one possibly sardonic account, ‘six dresses, two wigs and an iron sword constitute an ample wardrobe for a company of six to travel in the mountains’. McKean ‘Buck’ Buchanan, a larger-than-life actor who cut his teeth in the US Navy, was known to play Macbeth in the gloriously inexact costume of slouch hat, cape, yellow gauntlets and riding boots.
Tight-knit troupes trekked through such sprawling, brawling tent-and-tarpaper cities as Hell’s Delight, Port Wine Diggings, Skunk Gulch, Flapjack Canyon and Yankee Jim’s. Koon estimates that by 1850, just a year into the Gold Rush, fifty stock companies were plying gold-mining towns.
Nearly all the immigrants to California – as many as nine out of ten – were men. But in theatre, at least, different rules applied. One of the many side effects of this topsy-turvy new world was that female actors and managers were permitted much greater autonomy than they were back east. The name of Lola Montez – a strong-featured, blue-eyed Irish immigrant whose ‘Spanish dances’ made her transcontinentally famous and eventually led her to the bed of King Ludwig I of Bavaria – is still spoken of with fondness. There were countless others: operatic prima donnas, leading ladies, child stars, equestrian divas …
I read about the life of Sarah Kirby Stark, acclaimed as California’s first female tragedian, for whom the Gold Rush seems to have been the opportunity of a lifetime. Born in New Orleans, by the time she arrived in San Francisco in early 1850 at the age of thirty-seven, Sarah had already buried one husband, and her second would be dead within the year. In short order she met and married the rugged Nova Scotian James Stark. Dark-haired and slight, Sarah had a sharp intensity on stage, but also a much rarer talent – the ability to keep a theatre in business. Between 1850 and 1864, she would manage no fewer than five separate theatres in Sacramento and San Francisco.
Before they met, both Starks had travelled to London to study with Macready (somewhat ironically, in view of events in New York in 1849). Perhaps it was from Macready that they acquired an adoration for Shakespeare, but whatever the source, it would change American theatre history. Together they offered the first professional Hamlet to be seen on the West Coast (James as the Prince with Sarah, pre-Freudianly, playing Gertrude), and gave the Californian premieres of at least seven other plays, among them Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, The Taming of the Shrew, King John, The Merry Wives of Windsor, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and even the romance Pericles – one of only a handful of performances on record anywhere in the world during the nineteenth century.
Sarah seems to have seized on Shakespeare’s rich female roles: according to the press her Portia was fittingly ‘lawyerly’, her Katherine (in The Taming of the Shrew) ‘truthful’, and her Lady Macbeth ‘a woman of powerful, but ill-balanced mind, ambitious, but by no means devoid of her finer womanly qualities’. After she and James divorced, Sarah went on to marry twice more and moved to New York. In 1896, having outlasted five husbands, she retired to California, the golden state that had brought her so much.
More snapshots of the early years come courtesy of the Edinburgh-born artist and travel writer J. D. Borthwick, who had been living in New York in 1850 when – in the formula that became a catechism – he had been ‘seized with the California fever’. He boarded a barque bound for the Panama isthmus (an instinctive gambler, Borthwick took his chances with malaria and the shortcut through the jungle) and arrived in summer 1851.
In San Francisco Borthwick was surprised – and impressed – to find beached ships being used as warehouses and salmon ‘equal in flavour to tho
se of the Scottish rivers’. In this hectic environment, he observed with gruff approval, ‘people lived more … in a week than they would a year in most other places’.
It wasn’t the only thing he observed. Holed up for the night in a town in the Nevada mountains called Nevada City (despite its name, neither in Nevada nor a city, but ‘a mixture of staring white frame-houses, dingy old canvas booths, and log cabins’), Borthwick had just retired to his berth in a boarding house after a pleasant evening’s gambling when he was abruptly awakened:
Next door was a large thin wooden building, in which a theatrical company were performing. They were playing Richard [III], and I could hear every word as distinctly as if I had been in the stage-box. I could even fancy I saw King Dick rolling his eyes about like a man in a fit, when he shouted for ‘A horse! A horse!’ The fight between Richard and Richmond was a very tame affair; they hit hard while they were at it, but it was soon over. It was one-two, one-two, a thrust, and down went Dick. I heard him fall, and could hear him afterwards gasping for breath and scuffling about on the stage in his dying agonies.
After King Richard was disposed of, the orchestra, which seemed to consist of two fiddles, favoured us with a very miscellaneous piece of music. There was then an interlude performed by the audience, hooting, yelling, whistling and stamping their feet; and that being over, the curtain rose, and we had [William Barnes Rhodes’s farce] Bombastes Furioso.
Richard III yet again … The play seemed to be everywhere. But why? Borthwick wasn’t much help: ‘[The farce] was very creditably performed,’ he concluded, ‘but under the peculiar circumstances of the case, it did not sound to me nearly so absurd as the tragedy.’
In a folder at the museum collections I came across a stray photograph – a nineteenth-century theatre just over the mountains in Nevada. The photograph was in colour, dating (I guessed) from the late 1940s or early 1950s, shortly before the theatre was demolished. A low stage, pine floor, two levels of red-plush boxes either side of the proscenium arch; hard wooden chairs in the stalls. Plastered around the safety curtain, which featured a bucolic scene of what appeared to be Tuscany, were crude hand-drawn advertisements for local businesses: AMERICAN BAKERY: PIES, CAKES AND BREAD … RYAN & STENSON: DRY GOODS, GENTS OUTFITTERS, HATS ETC … SAWDUST CORNER SALOON: WINES, LIQUORS & CIGARS.
The gilt decoration was peeling, the pink-and-green paint pitted and stained with damp. On the ceiling, the plaster was coming off in sheaves. But if one squinted carefully, one could just about see a bearded figure painted above the centre of the stage: Shakespeare, presiding deity and the most popular playwright of the American frontier.
Before I lit out for the Nevada foothills in pursuit of the actors, I had a date. Following the advice of a friend, I had booked to see a show at the California Shakespeare Theatre in Berkeley. In the best Western traditions, it was a big-boned tragedy, indeed the biggest of them all: Hamlet. For added frontier-style authenticity, it was in the open air, at the Bruns Amphitheatre in the Orinda foothills.
‘Just make sure you layer,’ my friend had said. ‘It gets kind of fierce up there at night.’ I thought of all the times I’d attended outdoor Shakespeare in England – shivering on damp grass to the faint aroma of manure – and reckoned I could survive.
The quickest route to Berkeley was east over the grey spans of the Bay Bridge, but I was determined to leave San Francisco in style: north over the Golden Gate. By the time I got there, the towers were glowing like molten steel, crimson in the late-afternoon sun. In the rear-view mirror fog was still shrouding the city, a purplish cloud from which towers and high-rises occasionally protruded. It had the pleasing appearance of a disaster scene I had narrowly escaped.
Just before Orinda I swung the car right and pulled on to a narrow asphalt track that wound up through the woods. We were only fifteen minutes past the university bookstores and gourmet coffee shops of Berkeley, but this was decisively hill country. Grasslands and knots of tawny rock reared steeply either side. The hills, beaten to gold by the heat of summer, were shading into copper. For the first time in two weeks in America, I felt as though I was outside.
The parking lot was a field; and already, with an hour and a half to go before the performance, three-quarters full. We were a genial lot, the early crowd – in our fifties and sixties, mostly, wearing hiking gear and stoutly booted. There was a worrying quantity of fleeces and gloves. One woman had two sleeping bags sausaged under her arms. I began to wish I had taken my friend’s warning seriously.
The California Shakespeare Theatre was a child of the early seventies, a hippyish artistic collective that had gathered to stage Hamlet in a church in downtown Berkeley. Expanding into a summer-long festival majoring in Shakespeare, it had staged more than fifty productions before moving up here to a purpose-built amphitheatre in the forest.
I climbed through dense thickets of cedar and oak, the tang of pine needles strong on the breeze. Cal Shakes relished its outdoorsy reputation, even if nature had been somewhat declawed. When I reached the top of the hill, it was to benches and refreshment stalls dotting the glades. The queue for the buffet (signature dish: The Hamlich) was thriving. It reminded me faintly of the summer opera festival at Glyndebourne in Sussex, though instead of dinner jackets and evening gowns here the tailoring was by North Face. I inspected the wine menu: as heavyweight as one would expect.
Presiding over this fine example of wholesome Northern California living was Jonathan Moscone, Cal Shakes’ artistic director. Stoutly built, with a silvering goatee, he was clad in a bulky cardigan and had the aspect of an ageing software developer.
If I couldn’t get hold of a living and breathing nineteenth-century Californian actor-manager, I figured Moscone was a decent substitute. A San Francisco native, he had run Cal Shakes since 2000 and was by all accounts making a roaring success of it. Audience numbers were up for the third year in a row, and Moscone himself had recently received an award for his work in regional arts. The company was on a roll.
Shakespeare wasn’t the only thing they produced, said Moscone, but the major reason Cal Shakes was doing well was the Bard. Hamlet had extended its run a week after opening, having scored the largest advance sales in the theatre’s thirty-year history. I caught something I’d rarely glimpsed in the eyes of an American theatre producer: the sight of accumulating dollar bills.
‘At first I thought they were mistyping the numbers. I thought we’d never make so much. Hamlet’s a big-ass play, three and a half hours sitting outside on a bench. You’ve got to know it’s long, right? But this time they’ve really gone for it.’
We talked through which other titles were safe bets. He mentioned Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Taming of the Shrew – plays that had also done well in these parts during the nineteenth century.
‘They’re big plays, I guess. They seem to fit here. We had the same with our version of Nicholas Nickleby. Big stories.’ He glanced at the forest around us, beginning to twinkle with fairy lights. ‘You know, the East Coast is small – the cities are big, but the states are small, the houses are small. Here, the hills are not small.’
The American festival circuit, of which Cal Shakes is a well-established part, told its own story about the success of Shakespeare in the United States. There are now at least 250 Shakespeare festivals in operation in the US, more than anywhere else in the world by a comfortable margin. Some American festivals inhabit beautifully appointed theatres in historic settings, such as the Virginia Blackfriars or the replica of the London Fortune playhouse at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, a few hundred miles north of where Moscone and I were sitting. Nearly all have repertoires centred on Shakespeare, but some have swelled into permanent producing houses offering everything from Marlowe to adaptations of Disney’s The Little Mermaid. Others, in the best Western traditions, are fly-by-night travelling outfits: Montana Shakespeare tours isolated rural communities and parks with a handful of actors, covering thousands of
miles annually.
According to figures compiled in the mid-1990s, over three million tickets were sold annually at Shakespeare festivals in the United States. If one factors in free events – including such institutions as New York City’s Shakespeare in the Park, set up in the 1950s – nowadays the numbers would be even higher. Festivals such as these are the way most Americans still encounter live Shakespeare.
As the audience began to move towards the auditorium, I rattled on about my discoveries in the Museum of Performance and Design. Moscone knew it all, having once directed a show on the subject by the contemporary playwright Richard Nelson. I liked the play’s title: How Shakespeare Won the West. As it happened, Nelson had also written a play about the Astor Place Riot.
I wondered if Moscone ever dreamed of the 1850s, the pit heaving with miners, the shuddering pinewood floor …
His eyes acquired a faraway look. ‘Man. Yeah. Wouldn’t it be fabulous if we could do shows like they did? People shouting the lines back with them, throwing them dollars, or they’d just stop in the middle and start playing a song?’
He pounded the table. ‘That. Would. Be. Fucking. Awesome.’
The audience for Hamlet was on its best behaviour, and there were no songs that I could hear, if one discounted the crickets thrumming loudly all around and the occasional sorrowing howl of a coyote.
Next to me in the crowd, a man in a green cap with the logo of the Gallo winery lifted a bottle in greeting. He appeared to be on the single-estate Cab Franc.
The setting was undeniably spectacular. The broad sweep of the amphitheatre – a slender doughnut of steel girders, with a wide stage in front and stepped terraces – echoed the Globe in London, except that instead of the Thames and St Paul’s cathedral we had a fine view of the Orinda hills, now mottling to dark green and grey in the gloom. Above it, the sky was the colour of sapphire.
Worlds Elsewhere Page 20
