Shakespeare In America Research Articles

Communications

Communications Alden T. Vaughan and Miles P. Grier To the Editor: The recent announcement that the 2022 Douglass Adair Memorial Award winner is "Staging the Cherokee Othello: An Imperial Economy of Indian Watching" by Miles P. Grier in the January 2016 issue of the William and Mary Quarterly prompts me to submit a minor correction. Professor Grier wonders if a book that Virginia Mason Vaughan and I coauthored, Shakespeare in America, "doubt[s] the veracity of the story" (78) regarding the Cherokee performance of 1752, the principal subject of his article. Interested readers will find the episode discussed in our book on pp. 22–23.1 Alden T. Vaughan Columbia University, emeritus Response to Letter to the Editor: I met Professors Alden and Virginia Mason Vaughan in May of 2016 when Virginia and I spoke on the same panel at "America's Shakespeare," an event sponsored by the Brown University Library and Rhode Island Historical Society. On that occasion, Alden informed me of the substance of this letter. I had written that the Vaughans' Shakespeare in America "omit[ted] the Cherokees from their discussion of the first season of professional theater offered in North America" (78) in 1752. I speculated in the article that perhaps this omission indicated that they doubted the veracity of the Virginia Gazette's report. He noted that they do discuss the incident several pages later. I was mortified, at first. How could I have made such an error? When I got my hands on a copy, I realized that I was not entirely wrong. After moving from that first season of 1752 to the 1770s, the Vaughans include an interlude without a subheading, stepping out of the chapter's chronological order to loop back and cover together all the records of Cherokees at colonial American playhouses. [End Page 428] I addressed the matter. For the revised version of the article, appearing in my book Inkface: "Othello" and White Authority in the Era of Atlantic Slavery (forthcoming from University of Virginia Press in late 2023), I moved the Vaughans' book from a footnote listing scholars who pass over the Cherokees' interruption of the 1752 performance of Othello to one containing those who give credence to the Virginia Gazette's implication that the empress of the Cherokees could not grasp the concept of playacting. That decision reflects the fact that the Vaughans eventually credit the "veracity" of the Virginia Gazette's short article on the interrupted performance. At first, though, they adopt a neutral stance: "What the Indians thought of Shakespeare's play is unrecorded, but a newspaper reported that they expressed 'great surprise' at the Harlequin pantomime afterpiece, 'as did the fighting with naked swords on the stage, which occasioned the empress to order some about her to go and prevent their killing one another.'" Here, the Vaughans decline to speculate on what motivated the surprised expressions and the command to intervene in the action. However, later they write that British Atlantic playhouses hosted "overflow audiences [who] came to ogle exotic strangers struggling to comprehend Shakespearian drama." While their choice of "exotic" suggests that the authors are ventriloquizing an imperial view that they do not share, the phrase "struggling to comprehend Shakespearian drama" transforms an inference that depends upon the reliability of the Gazette's depiction into a fact.2 The Cherokees who attended the command performance at Williamsburg in 1752 were seasoned diplomats representing a sovereign polity. Since they were not subject to the pressure to "comprehend Shakespearian drama" familiar to modern-day ticketholders or students taking a compulsory course, I decided a different question was in order. Rather than asking whether Cherokees had enough Anglo cultural competency to understand the speech and action of Othello, I asked whether the Virginia Gazette could be relied upon to "comprehend" what in Othello could have provoked chief Amouskositte's wife to disrupt the ceremonies surrounding negotiations to establish diplomatic and economic ties between her people and Virginia. I concluded that it was likely that the spectacle of a blacked-up personage's arrest at the hands of an armed white guard signaled to her that Virginia would insist on jurisdiction over Cherokees accused of crimes...

“Nor doth this wood lack worlds of company:” the American Performance of Shakespeare and the White-Washing of Political Geography

The paper examines the spatial overlap between the disenfranchisement of African Americans and the performance of William Shakespeare’s plays in the United States. In America, William Shakespeare seems to function as a prelapsarian poet, one who wrote before the institutionalization of colonial slavery, and he is therefore a poet able to symbolically function as a ‘public good’ that trumps America’s past associations with slavery. Instead, the modern American performance of Shakespeare emphasizes an idealized strain of human nature: especially when Americans perform Shakespeare outdoors, we tend to imagine ourselves in a primeval woodland, a setting without a history. Therefore, his plays are often performed without controversy—and (bizarrely) on or near sites specifically tied to the enslavement or disenfranchisement of people with African ancestry. New York City’s popular outdoor Shakespeare theater, the Delacorte, is situated just south of the site of Seneca Village, an African American community displaced for the construction of Central Park; Alabama Shakespeare Festival takes place on a former plantation; the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, Virginia makes frequent use of a hotel dedicated to a Confederate general; the University of Texas’ Shakespeare at Winedale festival is performed in a barn built with supports carved by slave labor; the Oregon Shakespeare Festival takes place within a state unique for its founding laws dedicated to white supremacy. A historiographical examination of the Texas site reveals how the process of erasure can occur within a ‘progressive’ context, while a survey of Shakespearean performance sites in New York, Alabama, Virginia, and Oregon shows the strength of the unexpected connection between the performance of Shakespeare in America and the subjugation of Black persons, and it raises questions about the unique and utopian assumptions of Shakespearean performance in the United States.

Directing Shakespeare in America: Historical Perspectives by Charles Ney

Directing Shakespeare in America: Historical Perspectives by Charles Ney

Shapiro, James (ed.). Shakespeare in America. An Anthology from the Revolution to Now. New York: The Library of America, 2014. 724 pp.

Shapiro, James (ed.). Shakespeare in America. An Anthology from the Revolution to Now. New York: The Library of America, 2014. 724 pp.

Cracking Shakespeare: A Hands-On Guide for Actors and Directors by Kelly Hunter ,and : Directing Shakespeare in America: Current Practices. by Charles Ney

Reviewed by: Cracking Shakespeare: A Hands-On Guide for Actors and Directors by Kelly Hunter ,and : Directing Shakespeare in America: Current Practices. by Charles Ney Tom Scholte Cracking Shakespeare: A Hands-On Guide for Actors and Directors. By Kelly Hunter. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Pp.xiii + 174. $86 (hardback), $30 (paper) Directing Shakespeare in America: Current Practices. By Charles Ney. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Pp. xii + 362. $112 (hardback), $30 (paper). Taken together, these two volumes from Bloomsbury highlight challenges of Shakespearean performance as well as the relative efficacy of the two major modes of instruction for theatrical practitioners: programmatic and anecdotal. Along the way, they consolidate, and, in a few cases, augment, the field's current practices in a manner bound to be of great use to teachers and emerging practitioners. Following ten years of rumination on her own experience with Shake-speare's plays, accomplished English actor/director and Actor's Centre tutor Kelly Hunter's Cracking Shakespeare lays out a program of exercises designed to enable young actors to "genuinely take ownership of Shakespeare's language" and, subsequently, take "possession of the plays" for themselves (x). This program benefits greatly from a series of accompanying demonstration videos available on Vimeo, in which a delightful group of students from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama move through the process under the guidance of Hunter herself. The opportunity to see Hunter's core principles embodied does much to preempt potential misapplications that might lead students to an imbalanced attachment to the sounds and textures of the words at the expense of clarity of thought. One significant omission from the list of techniques profiled in the videos is Hunter's notion of "scaffolding." This omission looms large as references to the notion are scattered liberally throughout the text and may lead to some particularly old-fashioned modes of poetic speaking that it would be hard to imagine Hunter endorsing. Hunter is on the firmest ground when, in addition to the requisite discussions of blank verse fundamentals such as iambic pentameter and feminine/masculine line endings, she guides the reader through some [End Page 357] of the principal rhetorical devices (antithesis, lists, puns, etc.) through which the characters seek to persuade one another, thus highlighting the essential fact that one cannot take "ownership" of any language, however juicy and colorful, without first fully understanding its argumentative and semantic content. Hunter further underscores this necessity by encouraging readers to paraphrase thoroughly characters' speeches without taking shortcuts. Returning to the text, her advice to the players is at its most sound regarding the device of antithesis in particular: "So as not to feel like the purveyor of a device, you must engage on a human level with the ideas, which involves engaging your voice with the natural inflection it takes to make comparisons" (77). This appeal to the shape of argument itself as the surest guide to appropriate inflection and emphasis is invaluable for young actors who too often find themselves trapped in grasping at some externalized notion of an appropriately Shakespearean tone. Hunter is certainly correct in encouraging students to explore fully and exploit Shakespeare's rich use of alliteration as well as the expressive potentialities of certain key vowel and consonant sounds, and the exercises she has developed in order to do so are ingeniously effective. Undergirding all of this magnificent texture, however, is the skeletal structure of argument and its sense-making demands. As Hunter has pointed out, the "natural inflection" necessary to make oneself understood on a "human level" is the surest way to avoid a forced or mannered delivery (77). This is what makes her concept of "scaffolding" so jarring. Scaffolding is initially defined as "a short set of words that you remove from a speech in order to practice them out loud and get them into your sense memory" (25). This is all well and good as a means to uncover the relationships between key words that provide "the thread of sense" within a particular speech. However, she then instructs us to "repeat the … words with an increased emotional intensity, driving toward the last one" and then to reintegrate the scaffold into the complete phrasing (26). Further...

Shakespeare in America by Alden T. Vaughan, Virginia Mason Vaughan

Journal Article Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan. Shakespeare in America. Get access Shakespeare in America. Oxford ShakespeareTopics Series. By Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. xiv + 220. $90.00 cloth, $30.95 paper. Rosemary Kegl Rosemary Kegl Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 66, Issue 3, Fall 2015, Pages 359–362, https://doi.org/10.1353/shq.2015.0050 Published: 01 October 2015

Shakespeare in America

Shakespeare in America

Collecting Shakespeare: The Story of Henry and Emily Folger by Stephen H. Grant, and: Shakespeare in America: An Anthology from the Revolution to Now ed. by James Shapiro (review)

Collecting Shakespeare: The Story of Henry and Emily Folger by Stephen H. Grant, and: Shakespeare in America: An Anthology from the Revolution to Now ed. by James Shapiro (review)

Shakespeare in America: an anthology from the Revolution to now

The history of Shakespeare in America, writes James Shapiro in his introduction to this groundbreaking anthology, is also the history of America itself. Shakespeare was a central, inescapable part of America s literary inheritance, and a prism through which crucial American issues revolution, slavery, war, social justice were refracted and understood. In tracing the many surprising forms this influence took, Shapiro draws on many genres poetry, fiction, essays, plays, memoirs, songs, speeches, letters, movie reviews, comedy routines and on a remarkable range of American writers from Emerson, Melville, Lincoln, and Mark Twain to James Agee, John Berryman, Pauline Kael, and Cynthia Ozick. Americans of the revolutionary era ponder the question to sign or not to sign; Othello becomes the focal point of debates on race; the Astor Place riots, set off by a production of Macbeth, attest to the violent energies aroused by theatrical controversies; Jane Addams finds in King Lear a metaphor for American struggles between capital and labor. Orson Welles revolutionizes approaches to Shakespeare with his legendary productions of Macbeth and Julius Caesar; American actors from Charlotte Cushman and Ira Aldridge to John Barrymore, Paul Robeson, and Marlon Brando reimagine Shakespeare for each new era. The rich and tangled story of how Americans made Shakespeare their own is a literary and historical revelation. As a special feature, the book includes a foreword by Bill Clinton, among the latest in a long line of American presidents, including John Adams, John Quincy Adams, and Abraham Lincoln, who, as the collection demonstrates, have turned to Shakespeare s plays for inspiration.

Rethinking the Creation of Cultural Hierarchy in America

vol. 6, 2014 Copyright © 2014 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA The year 2013 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Lawrence Levine’s Highbrow/ Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. The book was immediately, and wildly, influential among American cultural historians and students of American literature. I remember attending a national meeting shortly after it came out where participants reverentially invoked Levine’s key terms and assumptions, as if they had discovered in the book’s pages an explanation, deeply satisfying both ideologically and emotionally, for a phenomenon that had long been troubling them. In the years since 1988, Highbrow/Lowbrow has exhibited the staying power of a classic, a status certified by the book’s appearance on countless syllabi and oral exam lists. Today it remains available in paperback and in a Kindle version, and I am told that a French edition was just recently published. Many of us have profited a great deal from Levine’s study, and we lament his untimely death in 2006. Yet those of us who have been working in the history of the book and related areas have arrived at a point where we might profitably reassess the arguments of Highbrow/Lowbrow, instead of merely appropriating its framework. What have we learned over the last twentyfive years about cultural hierarchy in America? What Rethinking the Creation of Cultural Hierarchy in America

Shakespeare in America by Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan (review)

Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason Vaughan. in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. xii + 220 + [20 b/w illus.] $75.00 cloth; $27.95 paper. in retells the story of how, since 1776, have appreciated (and appropriated) the writings of Englishman and playwright William Shakespeare. This story has been narrated and well analyzed in several earlier and similarly entitled books, so perhaps it is reasonable to ask the question, did we need one more? Oxford University Press certainly thought so, and the jacket cover of this small addition to their Oxford Topics series makes the bold claim that the book will be of interest to students and teachers. Sadly, I would be surprised if this particular publication would interest either target group. The book, in the opinion of this reviewer, is perhaps more suitable to students of William McKinley High School rather than any university undergraduate or professional scholar. The important limiting factor of the book is that while the authors in the introduction state as their purpose to narrate Shakespeare's (1), they seem to fail to explain why Shakespeare in differs from in Britain (1), or in fact anywhere else in the world. One of the book's other limitations is the economic use of citations, leaving this reviewer sometimes in doubt as to where to find the source material or originator of some broad ideas. Having not read any other books in the Oxford Topics series, I think perhaps this was an editorial decision. Of course, it is possible that someone has assumed that most of the knowledge in the book is now in the so called public domain and therefore the original scholar or source does not need to be named. However, while being surprised and disappointed at the academic level and perceived lack of originality of much of the content, the writing is lucid and thankfully very easy to read. In this book the authors have narrated a simple although engaging story that should perhaps more correctly be referred to as Americans and Shakespeare; while doing so, they seem to have chosen not to offer the reader any meaningful or new critical analysis of the seldom explored paradox of the enthusiastic and wide consumption of by Americans. It is a fact that these plays were written by a non-American in a foreign country, and the plays largely concern the lives of kings and aristocrats living at a time long before the United States came to be founded. British-Americans, after rejecting British governance and nationality in 1776, nevertheless, appropriated the English playwright as an cultural icon and hero. This is a key element for any meaningful study of Shakespeare in America but surprisingly absent from this book. I also suggest that a university undergraduate student might find it interesting to note, despite the book title, appropriation and nationalism are two significant topics omitted by the authors. If there is one section of the book where the publisher's claim on the book jacket is partially warranted it is in the last brief appendix, Further Reading. Here an undergraduate student or professional scholar is provided with a literature survey offering useful suggestions for reading that ultimately will be necessary for any serious academic study of the topic of and Shakespeare. In their introduction the authors have described the book as comprising three sections: 1-3 relate chronologically ... the history of Shakespearean performance, reading, and criticism from the early seventeenth century to the late nineteenth. Chapters 4 to 6 present a narrative of the twentieth century and beyond, while the final chapter gazes both backward and forward (6). With the first chapter, American Beginnings covering the period 1607 to 1776, the authors indulge themselves by making the assertion that wrote about the New World albeit sparsely (7). …

Shakespeare in the nineteenth century

Introduction Gail Marshall 1. Shakespeare editions Christopher Decker 2. Shakespeare criticism Mark Hollingsworth 3. Shakespeare in the periodicals Kathryn Prince 4. Shakespeare our (nineteenth-century) contemporary Russell Jackson 5. Shakespeare and nineteenth-century fiction Gail Marshall 6. Shakespeare and nineteenth-century poetry Philip Shaw and Gail Marshall 7. Shakespeare and drama David Taylor 8. Shakespeare in London Russell Jackson 9. Shakespeare in the provinces Richard Foulkes 10. Shakespeare and music Julie Sanders 11. Women and Shakespeare Georgianna Ziegler 12. Shakespeare and politics William Greenslade 13. Shakespeare and commercialism Julia Thomas 14. Shakespeare and the visual arts Stuart Sillars 15. Shakespeare in Europe John Stokes 16. Shakespeare and Germany Frederick Burwick 17. Shakespeare in America's Gilded Age Virginia Mason Vaughan Reference guide: performances of Shakespeare's plays in nineteenth-century London Janice Norwood Nineteenth-century works about Shakespeare: criticism, editions, reference works, biographies, play publication by year Mark Hollingsworth Bibliography Index.

Shakespeare in America

Shakespeare in America

Shakespeare and the Staging of English History * Shakespeare in America

Shakespeare and the Staging of English History * Shakespeare in America

Passing strange: Shakespeare, race, and contemporary America

TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments 1. Introduction: The Passing Strangeness of Shakespeare in America 2. Universalism: Two Films that Brush with the Bard, Suture and Bringing Down the House 3. Essentialism: Meditations Inspired by Farrukh Dondy's novel Black Swan 4. Multiculturalism: The Classics, Casting, and Confusion 5. Original(ity): Othello and Blackface 6. Reform: Redefining Authenticity in Shakespeare Reform Programs 7. Archives: Classroom-Inspired Performance Videos on YouTube 8. Conclusion: Passing Race and Passing Shakespeare in Peter Sellars's Othello Notes Works Cited Index

Women direct Shakespeare in America: productions from the 1990s

This book studies the connection between feminist performance theory and practice, considering how women directors of Shakespeare in America have recently interpreted and staged female subjectivity and gender, particularly as exhibited in sex relations. Rather than studying twenty or so women directors to assess their general working methods, or two or three to assess their entire careers, the work focuses on eight women and choices they made in specific productions: Jayne Koszyn's and Lisa Wolpe's Romeo and Juliet; Tina Packer's and Ellen O'Brien's Measure for Measure; Abigail Adams's and Melia Bensussen's Twelfth Night; Barbara Gaines's and JoAnne Akalaities' Cymbeline. These directors not infrequently use feminist strategies, but most do so because they are drawing from their own experiences as women and from their familiarity with avant-garde techniques rather than a theoretically informed feminist agenda. Illustrated. Nancy Taylor is the chair of the English and Theatre department at MacMurray College and administers the theatre program, which includes working as the artistic director of Mac-in-a-Box.

Teaching Shakespeare in America

Teaching Shakespeare in America

Shakespeare in America

Shakespeare in America

The American Shakespeare Festival

HE inaugural season of the American Shakespeare Festival Theatre and Academy at Stratford, Connecticut, offering Julius Caesar and The Tempest, was disappointing. It was all v*N.; X the more disappointing in the light of developments in Shake~. >>tspearian production in England in the last twenty years along A_ C7$j the lines of ensemble playing, emphasis on clarity and beauty of the text, and an insistence that every element of the production-acting, decor, spectacle, sound-be integrated as part of an artistic whole, the play in all of its drama, poetry, and theatricality. In other words, the play is the thing, not the stars, or the scenery, or the desire to experiment. This new approach to the staging of Shakespeare was demonstrated in 1935 at the New Theatre in London with the now-famous production of Romeo and Juliet in which Peggy Ashcroft played Juliet and Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud alternated as Romeo, with Gielgud directing, and decor by Motley. It is considered in England the beginning of the modern renaissance in Shakespearian production, with the characteristics described above apparent in many outstanding offerings in England since that time. When one considers that signs of the movement in England have not been discernible in the past two decades in professional productions of Shakespeare in the United States, the uninspired, old-fashioned and plodding presentations at Stratford, Connecticut, were not surprising, but they were still a disappointment. That these productions were so poor should be of vital concern to everyone interested in Shakespeare in America. For one thing, an organization named the American Shakespeare Festival automatically represents itself to theatergoers here, including critics and ministers of culture from foreign countries, as the best of American professional achievement in staging Shakespeare. Secondly, its obligation, like that of the Stratfords in Ontario and England, is to set the standard for other Shakespearian productions in this country. In both instances, if the productions at the festival are dull, elocutionary exhibits, harm is done both to the appreciation of Shakespeare in America and to the reputation of the United States for achievement in the arts as it is judged internationally. Besides, if these productions are bad, they betray the trust of those who read, study, and admire the poet's works, for they deprive us of the vital, exciting beauty of a Shakespeare play in its own medium, the stage. The stated aims and objectives of the festival are certainly admirable. They include the plays and the building, 'to give Shakespeare a home in America to keep his plays alive, the establishment of a Shakespearian acting company which, after performing at Stratford in the summer, will tour the

Emerson and Shakespeare

Students of Emerson, as well as those who have followed the reception of Shakespeare in America, have been disturbed over the words in the essay “Shakspeare; or, the Poet” from Representative Men in which Emerson seems finally to condemn Shakespeare as a “master of revels to mankind” who, after all, shared “the halfness and imperfection of humanity.” Thus Emerson's criticism, it has been said, is “deficient in sympathy,” and “the key to all he has said and written is to be found in the fact that his point of view is not that of the acceptor, the creator,—Shakespeare's point of view, but that of the refiner and selector, the priest's point of view.”