I had come expecting this Hamlet to be traditional, but I was surprised. The production was set in a decaying mansion that could have been deep in the Hollywood hills or just outside Cupertino, where Apple have their headquarters. Centre stage was an empty swimming pool filled with discarded toys and smashed lawn furniture. Sharp tailoring and military uniforms were the order of the day; only the play-within-the-play was done, knowingly, in Elizabethan ruffs and doublets. Old Hamlet, blood-soaked, looked as though he’d done a stint in a zombie movie. Hamlet, played by LeRoy McClain, was a soulful tough guy who brought to mind the young Denzel Washington. He sobbed ‘To be, or not to be’ while clutching Ophelia in his arms. (It emerged that both actors were in fact Brits who now worked in the US: an echo of their forebears.)
Barnardo’s exclamation during the night-watch opening scene, ‘’tis bitter cold’, produced a rueful laugh among the audience. But there were consolations: it was the only Hamlet I’d seen where the Ghost’s appearance was complemented by the rising Plough, seven pinpricks of faint light in the night sky. Just once, much later on, there was the diamond glint of a meteor.
Stumbling down to the car in the dark, I saw a poster. ‘Why Go to the Movies and Be Exposed to Wanton Sex, Needless Profanity and Gratuitous Violence?’ it asked. ‘Experience It Live.’
I was up and out not long after dawn, sprinting for the 1-80 with a motley flotilla of pickups, people carriers bulky with bikes and boats, and the rest of the demob-happy weekenders.
Passing through Berkeley the day before, I had called by the Shakespeare & Co. bookshop. The name appealed for obvious reasons, but there was more to it than that. Searching online for something appropriate to read in the mountains, I had found a copy of one eyewitness account of the touring life, Walter M. Leman’s Memories of an Old Actor (first edition, 1886). Shakespeare & Co. had it in stock, a steal at six bucks.
The book was foxed, a little battered, but sturdy enough – epithets that also suited the author. In the frontispiece engraving, Leman’s shoulder-length white hair was combed back in a shaggy bonnet, surrounding stout, squat features. Beneath bustling eyebrows, his eyes were firm and sharp. I tried to picture him on stage. Not Hamlet; more like T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock, an attendant lord. An eerily plausible Polonius.
Leman certainly had Polonius’s chatter. His style was breathless and gossipy, a garrulous gale of names and second-hand tales and recollections of theatrical figures I recognised dimly, if at all. Had he been standing at the crush bar, I would have shrunk from his presence. Here, between hard covers I could close at any time, I warmed to his company.
Leman was born in 1810 and had been theatre-mad from the beginning. One of his earliest theatrical memories – so he said – was watching Edmund Kean forced in ignominy off the stage in Boston. He had met the grandson (or was it the great-grandson?) of Lewis Hallam, the man who had brought professional drama to America. He claimed intimacy with Edwin Forrest, having played ‘various times’ with him. On this last, I believed him, particularly his doleful portrait of the later Forrest, crushed by a lengthy divorce case and reduced to doing regional tours for a pittance.
Leman had an actor’s tic when it came to describing other performers – vague effusion with the occasional enlivening bout of pure bitchery. He was delightfully catty about James Henry Hackett’s pretensions to tragedy (‘the public never recognised his claim’), and studiedly offhand about Dickens, whom he saw in Montreal and accused of gabbling his lines.
The contents page mapped anywhere and everywhere. Leman travelled north to Portland, Maine; played Montreal and Philadelphia; then struck out for California in 1854. He had come back again and again, before chasing the Silver Rush into Nevada. There was a ton of material here. I awarded him a ceremonial scattering of Post-its, details to be investigated later.
Leman wasn’t my only companion. The North American Shakespeare festival circuit had produced another boon besides ticket sales: one of the finest through-composed pieces of jazz in musical history. Before leaving Britain, I had downloaded to my iPod a copy of Duke Ellington’s Such Sweet Thunder. Inspired by a residency at the Shakespeare festival in Stratford, Ontario, in 1956, Ellington and his long-time musical partner Billy Strayhorn had composed an entire suite on Shakespearian themes.
Thirty-five minutes and twelve movements long, longer than Copland’s Appalachian Spring and twice the length of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, the album had filled my hire cars on our rambles through Virginia and California. ‘Lady Mac’ – which began with playfully profane gospel-ish chords by the Duke before segueing into a sashaying dance number – had enlivened numerous traffic jams in Washington. ‘Madness in Great Ones’, Ellington’s slithering, beserkly chromatic tribute to Prince Hamlet, had popped up while I was on the way back from Cal Shakes. I had a soft spot for ‘Sonnet in Search of a Moor’, a poignant solo for Jimmy Woode’s strummed double bass, with its nobly aspiring yet fatally naive melody.
The suite’s title wittily quoted Hippolyta’s description of the hunting horns of Hercules and Cadmus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream:
Never did I hear
Such gallant chiding; for besides the groves,
The skies, the fountains, every region near
Seemed all one mutual cry. I never heard
So musical a discord, such sweet thunder.
Swapping hunting horns for the jazz variety was not only a neat spin on the Americanisation of Shakespeare; it was a mark of Ellington’s aristocratic confidence in his African American art form, and what the jazz historian John Edward Hasse calls his ‘repertory company’, the orchestra he led for fifty years.
As the car and I loosed ourselves from the freeway on to Highway 49, we entered a different kind of America: motorhomes parked on little leanings of earth, telegraph poles dancing off in mysterious directions, cracked and pitted asphalt beneath the tyres. Sagebrush and stubby cypress trees gave way, as we climbed towards the Sierra Nevada, to solid stands of pine and cedar.
I enjoyed how the car made this backwoods transition cinematic, like a spool of film put into reverse. Cars transmogrified into battered pickups. Suburban houses shrank into dilapidated bungalows, then into battered mobile homes.
The forest was starting to grow dense now, trees clustering thickly on either side. The soil had become ferrous, raw orange in the sun. The road signs acquired a sardonic backwoods poetry: Wolf Mountain Road, Rattlesnake Road, Bonanza Way, You Bet Road.
Just as Ellington eased into ‘Sonnet for Hank Cinq’, a perky, trombone-heavy tribute to Tocqueville’s favourite play, Henry V, I saw an election notice: ‘Vote Richard Barb, Supervisor. More Jobs. Less Government.’
I read it at first as ‘Bard’. Shakespeare on the brain.
There was another reason Shakespeare was popular in these parts. Like the Colorado gambler who learned Hamlet and acted it after only ‘three days’ study’, the travelling actors ranging across the Californian mountain trails found one piece of mobile equipment most useful of all: their memories. Though they did their best to offer contemporary material, for the bulk of their work they had to rely on the scripts that everyone knew, from toughened old hands to the rawest of recruits – those plays, like jazz standards, they could riff on and produce at a moment’s notice. That meant Shakespeare. The fact that the titles were familiar and guaranteed good houses was a bonus.
Whether he was the Shakespeare we would recognise today is a substantially thornier question. As Borthwick’s testimony indicated, it was usual for visiting companies to offer mixed bills, as was then standard practice on the East Coast and back in Britain. A bill might contain Othello or Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s ponderous melodrama The Lady of Lyons (1838), but would also include shows like Slasher and Crasher, A Rough Diamond and Love in All Corners.
Some were stock farces exported from London; others were written expressly for local audiences, such as Doc Robinson’s 1850 musical medley Seeing the Elephant. Robinson’s title was the slang phrase for c
oming West with overhyped expectations, and his tale of gullible miners, busted claims and bloodthirsty bandits resonated with audiences who knew those realities only too well. Robinson’s bleak song ‘Used-up Man’, with its caustic line about mosquitoes so big they’d take out your liver, became a hit. ‘I’s a used-up man, a perfect used-up man,’ it ran. ‘If ever I get home again, I’ll stay there if I can.’
Shakespeare, too, was permitted – nay, encouraged – to slum it. One travelling troupe offered Othello featuring one Miss Celeste, ‘a danseuse’. The San Francisco producer Joseph Andrew Rowe leavened his versions of the tragedies with equestrian circus entertainments.
Even ostensibly straight performances were anything but. The playscripts in use in the nineteenth-century United States (as back in Britain) would give most modern editors the vapours. The show advertised on playbills as The Taming of the Shrew was not Shakespeare’s, but the 1754 adaptation by David Garrick known as Catharine and Petruchio, one of many spin-offs composed since the seventeenth century. This boiled down the action to a brisk three acts and made the utmost of Catharine’s compliance at the end, transforming it into a heart-gladdening homily on wifely virtue. Popular for a century in the UK, it was even more so in the US, where it was preferred to Shakespeare’s text until well into the 1880s. So was Nahum Tate’s Restoration rewrite of King Lear, with its notorious happy ending.
Romeo and Juliet was usually done in another Garrick version of 1748, which increased Juliet’s age from thirteen to a more decorous eighteen and reshaped the ending so the lovers were permitted one final frantic embrace. Hamlet was heavily cut to emphasise the hero’s youthful verve, with particular attention played to the fencing scene – as well it might be, given the largely male audiences up in the mountains.
The most popular play, it seemed inevitable by now, was Richard III: performed once again not in either of the texts that derive from Shakespeare’s script (first quarto 1598, First Folio 1623), but in the adaptation published in 1700 by the English actor-manager Colley Cibber. This slimmed the cast list to more manageable proportions – particularly welcome on the road – and spliced it with sections from its prequel Henry VI Part III. Shakespeare may have written only half the lines, but Cibber’s version, beloved of actors and audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, was the favourite for many years to come. (Parts of Cibber even make it into Laurence Olivier’s celebrated film version of 1955.)
Some American companies attempted the best of both worlds, performing farces and burlesques actually based on Shakespeare. The British comic playwright John Poole’s Hamlet Travestie was an instant hit when it appeared in London in 1810, and transferred to New York the following year. It inspired a small industry in imitations, including versions of Romeo and Juliet, Othello and two separate satires of Richard III, plus new American titles such as Macbeth Travestie in 1843; An Old Play in a New Garb (Hamlet, Prince of Denmark) in 1853; Capuletta, or Romeo and Juliet Restored in 1868; and the slyly titled Much Ado About a Merchant of Venice, published in New York in 1858. Some made their way to California. In San Francisco in 1853 Doc Robinson performed a version of Richard III spliced farcically with scenes from the comedies; and bawdier, semi-scripted versions seem to have toured the mining camps.
For a sense of how these burlesques were fitted up for new audiences, there is the evidence of the 1870 Broadway revival of Hamlet Travestie, which was almost entirely rewritten for New Yorkers – from references to a ‘skating rink’ in Elsinore (probably a reference to Central Park) to satirical gags aimed at corrupt city judges. This modified version of Hamlet Travestie ends with a song-and-dance number for the whole cast, led by the ghost of Old Hamlet:
Zounds. What a scene of slaughter’s here!
But I’ll soon change it, never fear.
One touch of my most mighty magic
Shall to gay Comic change, this dismal tragic.
It was easy to imagine miners applauding that.
They might have had more complicated feelings, though, about a speech in Much Ado About a Merchant of Venice. The lines were spoken by Shylock, reflecting on the elopement of his daughter Jessica with the Christian Lorenzo. Following time-honoured anti-Semitic stereotype, Shylock was usually still acted in this period as an out-and-out villain. In Brougham’s farce, though, the Jew is different, more sensitively presented. ‘She has vamoosed far away,’ he says wistfully:
Far away from old Shylock,
There’s no one left to comfort me.
All at my sorrows mock.
These lines would, I thought, have had plenty to say to anyone who’d gone west to seek their fortune.
What was conspicuous about these burlesques was not simply that they poked fun at the ‘IMMORTAL POET’ (as John Poole half-mockingly called him), but that audiences were assumed to know their Shakespeare intimately enough to get all the jokes. Back east, in the hands of Emerson and his ilk, the Bard was being propelled relentlessly up the Parnassus of high culture. Here, out west, he was still something else.
One of the books I’d read back at the Folger was a canonical survey by the historian Lawrence W. Levine, published in 1988. Its title was Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Shakespeare was Levine’s prime exhibit.
He argued that in the culture wars that had dominated nineteenth-century America, one of the fiercest had been around how ‘culture’ itself was defined. Researching minstrel shows from the 1830s onwards, Levine had been astounded by the omnipresence of Shakespeare – astounded because this revealed an intimate knowledge of Shakespeare’s works not only among those writing and performing, but even more so among working-class audiences. For shows to call themselves Ye Comedie of Errours or Julius Sneezer; or for an African American actor to segue briskly from ‘To be, or not to be’ into a popular song; or for Mark Twain to sneak his own Hamlet-and-Macbeth parody into Huckleberry Finn (‘For who would fardels bear, till Birnam Wood do come to Dunsinane,’ proclaims an actor Huck meets on the river); it followed that everyone had to be in on the gag, regardless of their background.
Everything I had discovered so far confirmed what Levine had suggested. Shakespeare saturated ‘lowbrow’ American culture, from minstrel skits to extravagantly plotted burlesques. The culture that obtained in California during the first years of the Gold Rush was undeniably that of Jacksonian America: vigorous, demotic, democratic.
As the nineteenth century wore on, Levine argued, America itself changed so that Shakespeare became ‘sanctified’, perceived as more remote, more highbrow: the plays were purged of textual impurities, performed in historically ‘accurate’ garb; in fact, less often performed. They were increasingly the purview of scholars, editors, lecturers, professionals. Mixed bills gave way to windy Emersonisms about ‘fixed stars’ and limitless genius (and the doubts about Shakespeare’s authorship that followed). From this perspective, there is another way of viewing an event like the Astor Place Riot: not simply as a conflict between nations, but as the last gasp of a working-class culture that saw Shakespeare as something worth fighting for.
Here in California, though, I couldn’t see it being that simple. For starters, while Shakespeare in the Gold Rush was undeniably lowbrow in any meaningful sense of the word, his works were also regarded as the summit of high culture and treated with the seriousness that deserved. And to call mining audiences ‘lowbrow’ was, I thought, hugely to underestimate their sophistication: they seemed able to take entirely in their stride everything we would call ‘high’, ‘low’, ‘folk’, ‘popular’ and almost anything in between.
Accounts of frontier theatre dwell, almost as a trope, on the boisterousness of audiences – generally taken as evidence of their shaming lack of refinement. Walter Leman records a Richard III in San Francisco where the Crookback had come on and declaimed, ‘What does this mean?’ as per his version of the script, to which the audience had offered so many salty replies that the performance had to be halted. When a struggling actor arrived in Nevada C
ity to play Richard in December 1856, the audience arrived with ‘a profusion of esculents’ – vegetables – which it proceeded to hurl.
Their manners may have lacked polish, but surely this only testified to the miners’ passionate engagement with what was in front of them on stage. One of the hoariest myths about the Gold Rush was that the men who made it out here were young, poor and badly educated. As recent social historians have demonstrated, however, while argonauts were certainly footloose, shiftless they generally were not.
By its very nature, the Gold Rush was a middle-class phenomenon. Simply to attempt the great trek west cost at least $500, roughly twice the average American’s annual wage. Many miners were married and in their thirties; more had at least a sixth-grade education up to the age of twelve. Among much else, the Gold Rush created a great efflorescence of writing, with many Forty-Niners recording their experiences in diaries, quite apart from the newspapermen and professional travel writers who came to California in search of a story. It was easy to see how Shakespeare would resonate with this literate, curious and adventurous population, pining for the culture they had left behind.
And Shakespeare they knew inside-out. By today’s standards, many on the frontier were what we would regard as learned sophisticates, able to recite speeches by Hamlet, Macbeth, Mark Antony and Brutus from learning them at school. The accounts were full of miners bawling out lines or jeering off performances that didn’t reach their high standards. Nor were audiences exclusively white: according to a newspaper account from New Orleans dug up by the theatre historian Philip C. Kolin, ‘The play-going portion of our Negro population feel more interest in, and go in greater numbers to see, the plays of Shakespeare represented on the stage, than any other class of dramatic performance.’ The number of African-Americans in the ‘free’ state of California was small compared to other parts of the United States – perhaps 2,000 at the height of the Gold Rush – but it is a reasonable bet that at least some did likewise.
Worlds Elsewhere Page 21
