Alfred Dampier's ‘Shakespearean Fridays’

Abstract

Throughout the British Empire, visiting and immigrating professional actors ‘from the old country’ realized and reinforced for settler cultures a dominant imperial identity. In Australia, Alfred Dampier (1843–1908) and his company exploited the opportunities that this cultural milieu offered by staging austere, ‘reverential’, well-elocuted Shakespearean productions which raised their artistic status and asserted their respectability while enabling Dampier to offer as well, without censorship or public condemnation, dramatizations of sensational and controversial bushranger and convict narratives.