The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 13 (2002)

Americanization of Shakespeare:
A Cultural History through Three Posters

Nahoko TSUNEYAMAINTRODUCTION
Stratford-upon-Avon became well known to the Americans as a townwith literary historical roots after Washington Irving introduced theplace in his Sketchbook in 1817. The records show that such U.S. presidents as John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Ulysses Grant, and the Confederate president Jefferson Davis, as well as writers like Nathaniel
Hawthorne and Harriet Beecher Stowe all visited there.1
Nevertheless by the mid-nineteenth century, Shakespeare’s birthplacein Stratford had fallen into disrepair due to ﬁnancial problems, since public interest in the birthplace remained low as people were more interested in where the Bard was buried in the same town than in where he wasborn. With the death of Ann Court, the last owner of the house, deputy
George Robins decided to put the birthplace on the market. According
to the announcement, the auction of “THE TRULY HEART-STIRRING
RELIC OF A MOST GLORIOUS PERIOD, AND OF ENGLAND’SIMMORTAL BARD . . . THE MOST HONOURED MONUMENT OF
THE GREATEST GENIUS THAT EVER LIVED” was scheduled for
September 16, 1847 (See Illustration 1).
Already during the 1840s, there was a persistent rumor that
Shakespeare’s birthplace might fall into American hands. The British
public was horriﬁed by the idea:
Copyright © 2002 Nahoko Tsuneyama. All rights reserved. This work may be
used, with this notice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of thiswork may be distributed, electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without
permission from the author.
171

172

NAHOKO TSUNEYAMA. . . [O]ne or two enthusiastic Jonathans have already arrived from America
to see what dollars can do in taking it away. The timbers, it is said, are allsound, and it would be no very difﬁcult matter to set it on wheels and makean exhibition of it. We hope and trust that no such desecration awaits it.2

One of these “Jonathans” was the legendary impresario Phineas Taylor
Barnum (1810–91). Upon hearing the news during his 1844–47 Tom
Thumb tour in Europe, Barnum plotted to purchase the birthplace, dismantle it, and ship it across the Atlantic for ﬁnal display in his American
Museum in New York. However, backed by the British public and media
who protested the loss of this cultural relic, the Shakespeare Birthplace
Trust was founded to purchase the birthplace at the auction. Consequently, Barnum’s attempt to acquire the home failed.3
Later, the tale of Barnum’s pursuit of the birthplace was featured as aminor episode in Mark Twain’s Following the Equator: A Journey
Around the World (1897),4 a literary travel book chronicling Twain’s
lecture tour through Oceania, India and South Africa between 1895 and1896. In Chapter 64, there appears a reference to the Second Class Passenger who claimed to have previously worked with Barnum. According
to the Passenger, Barnum had initially wanted to buy the huge elephant,
Jumbo, which was then “as popular as the Prince of Wales,” “an English
institution” and “part of the national glory” (639). When that turned out
to be an impossible feat, he shifted the focus of his attention to the Bard’s
birthplace. Barnum explained his intentions:“I’ll buy Shakespeare’s house. I’ll set it up in my museum in New York andput a glass case around it and make a sacred thing of it; and you’ll see all
America ﬂock there to worship; yes, and pilgrims from the whole earth; andI’ll make them take their hats off, too. In America we know how to value
anything that Shakespeare’s truth has made holy.” (641)

According to the Passenger’s account, Barnum did successfully purchasethe birthplace. However, the British were so opposed to the idea that a“priceless possession of Britain” might be converted into a “sixpenny
desecration in a Yankee show-shop” (641), that Barnum was able toacquire Jumbo in exchange for the birthplace.
Barnum’s story, as related in Following the Equator, is more likely
rooted in ﬁction than fact. In reality, Barnum purchased Jumbo from theLondon Zoological Society for $10,000 in early 1882. The elephant was
brought back to America, and Barnum made a fortune by exhibiting it
in his circus.5 Considering the length of time separating the two sales, itAMERICANIZATION OF SHAKESPEARE

173

would be difﬁcult to conclude that Jumbo served as a substitute for
Shakespeare’s birthplace, as indicated by Twain. Neither of Barnum’s
autobiographies, furthermore, relates such an account.
The accuracy of the facts concerning Barnum’s ownership of Jumbo,
or of how Shakespeare’s birthplace remained in England, is not the main
issue6; reconciling the contradictory accounts is less important than considering what these accounts mean within the context of the history of
Shakespeare in America. From early colonial days through the revolutionary period and the remainder of the nineteenth century, Shakespearean tradition was central to the American theater. Much as The Tempest’s
Prospero and Miranda taught Caliban their language, Shakespeare wasEngland’s “cultural gift” to America.
America, as colonized Caliban, has given rise to a culture that bears
the imprint of its colonial legacy. American literature has many characteristics in common with the literary traditions that have emerged in otherformer English-speaking colonies. These traditions are often referred toas “english literature,” beginning with a small “e.”7 In this context, it isreasonable to conclude that the Shakespearean tradition, which America
imported from England, has metamorphosed from “English literature”
into “english literature.”
According to Homi K. Bhabha’s theory of mimicry, the colonizedlearns the culture of the colonizer with “the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but
not quite.” By absorbing the culture of the colonizer with “its slippage,
its excess, its difference,” the colonized invents a new post-colonial
culture.8 Thus, “english literature” is a new literary form forged fromEnglish literature. In the same manner, Shakespeare was destined toundergo hybridization in the creation of a new American form of art. In
a sense, Shakespeare has been transformed into “shakespeare” beginning with a small “s.”An overview of the history of Shakespeare in the New World will clarify the postcolonial process of appropriation and naturalization of
Shakespeare into the American theatrical culture according to political,
economical and social conditions of the time. Such clariﬁcation will lead
us to assume that the Bard had long been received not as a symbol ofelite culture as we think of him today, but as part of Americanized popular culture.9

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NAHOKO TSUNEYAMAISHAKESPEARE AS A CULTURAL GIFT

The earliest written record of Shakespeare’s name in America dates
from the end of the seventeenth century. In the will of Virginian lawyer
and merchant Arthur Spicer, dated September 18, 1688 and probated on
April 3, 1700, Macbeth is listed in an inventory of his book collection.10
This single reference to the playwright suggests that Shakespeareanbooks were both owned and read in the colony.
Theater culture developed very slowly in the New World, due in partto Puritan beliefs that regarded theater as a symbol of depravity.11 It was
not until urban centers experienced rapid growth in the 1710s that theater culture truly began to thrive. The ﬁrst permanent playhouse was built
in Williamsburg, Virginia in 1716. The earliest performance of Shakespeare was staged on March 23, 1730 when an amateur group performed
Romeo and Juliet; the ﬁrst professional performance is recorded as
March 5, 1750 when the Murray and Kean company performed Richard
III. The more established Louis Harram company staged The Merchantof Venice in Williamsburg in 1752. These early performances of
Shakespeare in America pre-date those by native playwrights. The ﬁrst
professional performance of a play written by an American playwright
was in 1767, a production of The Prince of Partia by Thomas Godfrey,
and it was not until 1787 that the ﬁrst American play was staged which
addressed a particularly American topic, The Contrast by Royall Tyler.
We may say that theater culture in America developed from Shakespeare.
Exposure to Shakespeare was not limited to theater. The library catalogue of Harvard College, published in 1723 and entitled Catalogus
Librorum Bibliothechae Collegij Harvardini Quod est Cantabrigiae in
Nova Anglia, indicates that the library had in its possession “Shakespear’
Plays Vol. 1–6 (London, 1709).”12 As there is no play listed in the 1682
edition of the Harvard library catalogue compiled by Boston minister
Cotton Mather, we can conclude that theater culture expanded rapidly
between the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
Eighteenth-century Philadelphia, then the third biggest city in the
British Empire, was a large importer of English texts.13 Shakespeare
commonly appeared on sales records; Benjamin Franklin had a set of
Shakespeare on his list in 1744. The ease with which English texts could
be imported seems to have initially detracted from the need to print
American editions. By 1794, however, Hamlet and Twelfth NightAMERICANIZATION OF SHAKESPEARE

175

appeared in print as the ﬁrst American printings of Shakespeare’s original works. The ﬁrst American edition of the complete plays was published by Bioren & Madan in Philadelphia in 1795–96, and quickly
became a best seller.14
Although theater culture gradually spread, a strong aversion to theater
remained. With the exception of Maryland and Virginia, all colonies
established some sort of prohibition against theatrical performance andother kinds of entertainment that were deemed as threats to public morality.15
At the root of hostility towards the theater was an ideology of whatmight be called “productionism,” itself a product of a mixture of elements central to Puritanism and republicanism. The productionist aesthetics attacked creative ﬁction as a source of degeneracy,16 and wasmuch more intolerant of representational and creative drama. At the ﬁrst
Continental Congress, held on October 20, 1774, all types of amusement
were prohibited by the wartime government:
We will in our several stations encourage frugality, economy, and industry
and will discountenance and discourage, every species of extravagance anddissipation, especially all horse-racing, and all kinds of gaming, cock ﬁghting, exhibitions of shews [sic.], plays, and other expensive diversions andentertainments. . . . (Emphases added.)17

Thus, the precedence of production over consumption was further conﬁrmed.
The American aversion towards the theater has long been describedas having origins in the Puritan ethic; however, the campaign had secular roots as well.18 From an American viewpoint, the heavy taxes leviedupon the colonies were a direct result of the establishment of a consumer
culture in England during the 1760s and 70s. In this sense, it is altogether
natural that the American theater culture, then overwhelmed by British
plays and actors, was seen as an imported product from England, andthus became a target of buyer’s strike.
Members of the theatrical world attempted to avoid criticism by stressing their own morality, patriotism and didacticism within their performances. For example, Tyler’s The Contrast (1787) compared a diligent
republican Manly with wasteful anglophilic Dimple, intelligent Mariaand frivolous Charlotte, and Yankee Jonathan and mincing Jessamy. The
relationship that was constructed between these pairs was intended toreﬂect the sharp “contrast” between America and England, or production and consumption.

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In an effort to circumvent restrictions placed upon theater, performances were carefully advertised as “dialogues” or “lectures.” In 1760
David Douglass, a successor to Louis Hallam, called his new theater in
Providence “a school house.” When Hallam’s company performed
Othello in Newport the following year, it was advertised as: “MORALDIALOGUES, IN FIVE PARTS, Depicting the evil effects of jealousy,
and other bad passions, and proving that happiness can only spring fromthe pursuit of virtue.”19 Thomas Jefferson, in a 1771 letter, discoveredin King Lear the virtues of “a lively and lasting sense of ﬁlial duty.”20
Many theatrical performances did, in fact, weave moral lessons into theplot of the story in an effort to fulﬁll promises made in advertisements.
Although anti-British sentiment spread to theater culture during therevolutionary period, Shakespeare remained as popular as before. Quotations from and allusions to Shakespeare’s works were often used in revolutionary propaganda. In 1770 a parody of Hamlet was used to criticize
heavy taxes:
Be taxt or not be taxt . . . that is the question,
Whether’t is nobler in our minds to suffer
The sleights and cunning of deceitful statemen
or to petition ’gainst illegal taxes
And by opposing, end them?21

In turn, in 1776 one Loyalist wondered whether he should sign up forthe anti-British “association” in disguise:
To sign, or not to sign!—That is the question:
Whether’t were better for an honest man
To sign—and so be safe; or to resolve,
Beside what will, against ‘associations,’
And, by retreating, shun them.22

Since parody is most effective only when the audience is fully familiar
with the original text, these examples teach us that Shakespeare had beennormalized as American, whether by the Tories or the Whigs, by the timeof the War of Independence. One might say that Shakespeare had become
so deeply ingrained in American culture that people were capable ofoverlooking his nationality altogether.
II THEATER FOR NATIONAL ENTERTAINMENT
After the War of Independence and the War of 1812 (1812–14), a the-AMERICANIZATION OF SHAKESPEARE

177

ater culture heavily inﬂuenced by Shakespeare spread through America.
Conditions of urban growth in the 1820s resulted in the construction ofmany theaters. In New York, the Park Theater was built in 1820 and was
succeeded by the Chattam (1824), the Bowery (1826), Niblo’s Garden(1827), the National (1838), the Broadway (1847), Astor Place Opera
House (1847), and the Burton (1848). The development of transportation and postal services helped to promote provincial tours, thereby
widening public access to the theater. Showboats emerged in the 1830s
and brought the theater to riverside towns. According to Helene Koon,
even gold miners in California were able to enjoy Shakespeare.23
Theatrical space in the Republican period was a microcosm of society. Although seats—box, pit and gallery—were distinguished according to class and race, people were in fact united. All gathered together
in one place to share common productionist values and patriotic sentiments. The audience’s reaction, positive or negative, towards a given
performance was strong and swift. Commenting on the 1800 season in
the Morning Chronicle under the pen name of Jonathan Oldstyle,
Washington Irving described the conditions inside the hall as similar to“Noah’s ark” with “an imitation of the whistles and yells of every kindof animal.”24 In Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), FrancesTrollope noted that he was troubled by “the spitting,” “the mixed smellof onions and whisky,” and “the noises . . . of the most unpleasant kind.”25
The atmosphere seemed truly interactive as the audience sang songs
together with vocalists while actors recited soliloquies as though they
were having a more direct, intimate conversation with the audience.
As theater became increasingly accessible, Shakespeare remained afavorite among audiences. Judging from playbills of the time, it was rarethat only the play itself was performed; sideshows such as farces, comic
operas, dances, and a chorus were also featured as part of that samenight’s entertainment. Usually one performance was divided into twoparts—a play and a series of short performances which followed. This
did not imply that a performance consisted of a more serious and professional ﬁrst half followed by amusements designed purely for lightentertainment; Shakespeare was an “entertainment” as well for the public in the age of productionism.
An advertisement for a performance of Romeo and Juliet at the UnitedStates’ Theatre in Washington scheduled for September 5, 1800 is suggestive (See Illustration 2). Featured were the “Masquerade” scene in
Act 1, and a “Funeral Procession” and “Solemn Dirge” in Act 5, which

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NAHOKO TSUNEYAMA

probably added spectacular effects to the show. As there was a reference
to “The Vocal Parts” in the poster, we can also assume that the performance included songs and accompaniment. After the play itself, a farce
entitled The Village Lawyer was to be staged as well. On the list of castmembers to appear in the farce, we can ﬁnd the names of the same “serious” actors who played Tibalt or Friar Lawrence in Romeo and Juliet.
Obviously the audience at the United States’ Theatre was not expecting
high art, but a production of Shakespeare that incorporated melodrama,sensationalism, and comedy.
Entertainment of this period, including Shakespearean plays, wasexpected to incorporate productionist moral lessons and didactic messages. However, it seems that the meaning of morality had become moresecularized. In 1837, the New York Mirror insisted that theater would bea useful “School of Reform” especially when it reﬂects the American
conditions:
The stage can never be to us a School of Reform, until the mirror be held up
to ourselves, until we see our own follies reﬂected. . . . there are as many
virtues, peculiarly American, which, if literature would make them fashionable, might be more frequently practiced [sic.].26

Shakespeare was transformed and staged in accordance to these newstandards.
To make the content more palatable to the morally conscious, details
were often changed as well as wording. Obscene references to “whores,”“wenches” and “maidenheads” were omitted from the text and The
Merry Wives of Windsor was rarely staged due to its ribald humor.27
Furthermore, in actress-writer Anna Cora Mowatt’s sentimental novella about the theatrical world, Stella (1855), the actress Stella refuses torecite an “objectionable phrase” from The Merry Wives of Windsor.
Morality took precedence over originality: “In the stage versions of
Shakespeare’s plays a large portion of the original text is omitted.
Numerous passages, which were tolerated in the lax days of the Virgin
Queen, are suppressed, as a matter of course.”28 The age of Juliet or
Miranda was often raised to a marriageable one. In the New England
Magazine in 1835, John Quincy Adams lamented the thoughtless change
of Juliet’s age from fourteen to nineteen, since he considered her childlike nature as a root cause of the tragedy.29 Moreover, references to classic literature became less frequent in an effort to lower plays to a levelsuited to the audience’s knowledge. Subplots were often omitted entirely in order to spotlight star-actors.

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179

Departures from and misrepresentations of original texts became thefocus of criticism. The Albion in 1846 asked, “Why, there is not a single
play of Shakespeare’s that would be tolerated by modern audiences as
written by the author.”30 In a review of a performance of Richard III at
the Park Theatre in the same year, The Anglo American attacked thealtered script:
More than half the acted text is not Shakespeare’s at all, yet a contemporary
congratulates the public on its ﬁdelity to ‘the original!’ Can he have been in
the theatre during the performance, . . . and, if so, does he know the original?31

If the performance staged at a theater as established as the Park was subject to intense criticism, it can easily be imagined how much Shakespeare
was transformed in the countryside. According to Koon in her study ontheater in the West, when companies tried to stage Shakespeare with aminimum number of actors, the original text was cut and botched, one
actor played two or three roles, and amateur actors were employed temporarily.32
Despite such criticism, we must remember that Americans altered
Shakespeare to conform to their own taste and derived great pleasurefrom the new forms that emerged. The Shakespearean play, as one formof entertainment, helped to bridge the gap between people of different
social backgrounds to create a sense of spiritual unity. As James
Fenimore Cooper stated in 1828, Shakespeare had become “the great
author of America.”33
III THE COMMERCIALIZATION OF SHAKESPEARE
As a market economy emerged by the time of the Civil War due to theIndustrial Revolution, America’s mode of consumption shifted from“productionism” which maintained life at the subsistence level to “consumerism” with emphases on the acquisition of material goods and the
pursuit of leisure. Note that this paradigm shift was a gradual one. New
notions appeared with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the1820s, and consumerist capitalism gradually gained momentum between
the 1880s and the 1920s.34
Barnum personiﬁed the age of consumerism. He attained both wealthand fame by exhibiting curiosities, staging oddities, and manipulating
publicity. His American Museum, built in Manhattan in 1842, was open
to all classes and age groups. There, people enjoyed displays of artifacts

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NAHOKO TSUNEYAMA

from cultures around the world, rare live animals and plants, and human
oddities including giants, dwarfs, albinos, a bearded woman and Siamese
twins. The museum was popular beyond imagination.
Barnum’s success seems to owe to his ability to forecast the needs ofthe new consumer society. On one hand, people with the time and money
for leisure thirsted for entertainment. On the other, a strong sense of
Puritan morality was still prevalent. Barnum was able to simultaneously
appeal to these two contradictory social trends. At the Museum, people
were encouraged to broaden their knowledge of God’s great undertakings through watching various exhibitions; under such a mask of
education, Barnum allowed the public to spend on amusement without
developing a guilty conscience.
The theater constructed inside the American Museum maintained thisillusionary coexistence of education and entertainment. Rather thancalling his theater a “theater,” Barnum instead named it “The Lecture
Room.” Along with farces, pantomimes, minstrel dances, spectacles andcomic operas, Shakespearean masterpieces and didactic plays like The
Drunkard (1844) and Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) were frequently performed. In Nation in 1865, he wrote, “No vulgar word or gesture, andnot a profane expression was ever allowed on my stage! Even in
Shakespeare’s plays, I unﬂinchingly and invariably cut out vulgarity andprofanity.”35 The closing of lobby bars and the introduction of the matinee system attracted woman and children who had not, until that time,
been avid theater-goers. Barnum was able to successfully stress themoral aspects of the most immoral forms of all entertainment. This paradox was his business strategy.
Returning to the tale of Barnum’s purchase of Shakespeare’s birthplace at Stratford-upon-Avon, according to the Second Class Passenger
in Twain’s Following the Equator, Barnum planned to buy the birthplace
for the purpose of preserving this great legacy:
He [Barnum] said that it had been his purpose to set up the house in the museum, keep it in repair, protect it from name-scribblers and other desecrators,
and leave it by bequest to the safe and perpetual guardianship of theSmithonian Institute at Washington. (642)Upon returning the birthplace to England, he supposedly even imposed
the condition “that an endowment sufﬁcient for the future safeguarding
and maintenance of the sacred relic should be raised” (644).
Barnum’s motivation to purchase Shakespeare’s birthplace must have

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181

extended beyond a simple desire to conserve a world treasure. In Twain’s
episode after listening to the Passenger’s tale, Twain, the narrator, tells
what he claims to have heard from Barnum himself. Barnum did not really want either an elephant or birthplace; he just wanted “a few hundred
pages of gratuitous advertising”: “It produced many columns of newspaper talk, free of cost, and he was satisﬁed. He said that if he had failed
to get Jumbo he would have caused his notion of buying the Nelson
Monument to be treacherously smuggled into print. . . .” After an active
media dispute, Barnum would write “a blundering, obtuse, but warmhearted letter of apology” proposing to give up the Monument and buy
the Stonehenge this time. Barnum knew that such a stupid letter would
be “worth six fortune to him, and not purchasable for twice the money”(642)
Concerning the attempted purchase in 1847, in his ﬁrst autobiography entitled The Life of P. T. Barnum, Written by Himself (1855),
Barnum commented that had he made a purchase before the Englishmen, “I should have made a rare speculation, for I was subsequently
assured that the British people, rather than suffer that house to be
removed to America, would have bought me off with twenty thousand
pounds.”36 He was all too well aware of the proﬁtability of the birthplace.
As mentioned before, it is historically true that Barnum attempted to
get Shakespeare’s house in 1847, and that he bought Jumbo fromEngland in 1881. Yet the episode that combines these two events, as told
in Following the Equator, is probably Twain’s ﬁction, from which we
can know how Twain, and contemporary readers and audiences, saw
Barnum. Barnum was a symbol of the age of consumerism, entertainment and advertisement. In Twain’s “The Stolen White Elephant”(1882), Barnum also appears as a cunning impresario. In this short story,
the precious elephant, a gift from the king of Siam to Queen Victoria, isstolen in New York, and all detectives make every effort to ﬁnd it.
Knowing the case, Barnum sends a telegram to the police saying,“Barnum offers rate of $4,000 a year for exclusive privilege of using elephant as traveling advertising medium from now till detectives ﬁnd him.
Wants to paste circus-posters on him”. The animal is found “plasteredover with circus-bills.”37
In this regard, Shakespeare became a commodity with a high market
value. While Barnum sought to proﬁt from the exhibition of the Bard’s
house, Americans consumed Shakespeare’s plays changing the form and182

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contents to suit their own tastes. Shakespeare was thus commercialized
as a cultural Jumbo.
IV

DIVERSIFICATIONThe Industrial Revolution, which led the changing economy, brought
about a change in the social structure at the same time. As the workplaceand home were separated, there emerged a middle class ideology thatassigned men to the public sphere and women to the private sphere. Since
working class and immigrant women had no other choice than to workoutside the home, distinctions among women became obvious. The race
issue sparked heated debate and the increasing ﬂow of European immigrants received intense scrutiny. By the mid-nineteenth century, theAmerican social structure was clearly segmented.
In the period of productionist-inspired theater, a diverse group gathered to enjoy the shows, contributing to a sense of community. With therise of consumerism, however, an individual’s preferred choice of theater became more closely tied to class, race, and gender.38
In the 1830s, theater managers began to arrange programs targeting
only one group of audiences; each class of people ﬂocked to their respective theaters. In New York, the upper class and intellectuals headed to
the Park and the Astor Place, the middle class to the Bowery, and theworking class to the Chattum. Immigrants clamored for vernacular programs, and the Stadtheater was established in 1854 as a German-speaking theater.
The theater experience also changed in accordance to changing gender roles. A distinction emerged between those theaters that were legitimate and those that targeted only unmarried men featuring programs
that commercialized feminine sexuality.39 In rural areas, the size of audience was so small that it was not economical to build different theaters
for different classes; in the 1860s, the stock companies began to sponsor different programs on a daily or weekly basis so that each class could
enjoy what it preferred.40
During this period of rapid economic growth and the crystallizationof a three-tiered social structure, the overall theater programs changed
considerably. The upper class attended Italian operas, ballets, and classical music concerts, while different programs were developed to target
the middle and working classes. In an essay “Some Observations on the
Theater among Democratic People” compiled in Democracy in America

AMERICANIZATION OF SHAKESPEARE

183(1835–38), Alexis de Tocqueville observed that in democratic theater,
ordinary theatergoers demanded the dramatization of daily events andthe lives of people like themselves: “Democratic peoples have but little
reverence for learning and scarcely bother at all about what happened in
Rome or Athens. They want the talk to be about themselves and to see
the present world mirrored.” The public also preferred performances that
captured and held their attention while requiring little effort to understand, as “most of the spectators are not looking for pleasures of the mind,
but for lively emotions of the heart.”41 Thus spectacular melodramas
based upon daily topics were frequently produced to entertain the newrising classes. In this context, Shakespeare naturally ceased being a central diversion for all and became synonymous with high culture.
Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, Shakespeare began to bestaged independently without sideshows, afterpieces or songs. Although
it was initially necessary to advertise that there would be no side shows,such notes soon disappeared.42 The publicity poster of a performance ofRomeo and Juliet scheduled for February 3, 1869 at the Booth Theatreshows that the tragedy was staged alone (See Illustration 3). This is incontrast to the aforementioned performance of the same play at theUnited States’ Theatre on September 5, 1800 (See Illustration 2). At thebottom of the bill, it was stated, “The Tragedy will be produced in strict
accordance with historical property, in every respect; following closely
the text of SHAKESPEARE.” This note indicates that the performance
no longer placed an emphasis upon effects added speciﬁcally to increase
entertainment value. Moreover, the literary and intellectual value of
Shakespeare is emphasized by his portrait, situated at the top of the poster
between those of Goethe on the right side and Schiller on left. The poster
is bordered by columns in the Ancient Greek or Roman style, and themasks of Tragedy and Comedy are also drawn in the lower left. All helped
to create an authentic atmosphere that was lacking in earlier productions.
Shakespeare moved from the theater into the academic ﬁeld in the latter half of the nineteenth century.43 With the desire to establish America’s
own heritage, vernacular language and literature came to be regarded ashaving academic value in the 1860s in place of classics;44 as a result,
Shakespeare’s popularity as a subject of literary study rose. School curricula were broadened and more emphasis was placed on English language and literature. Harvard’s Francis James Child gave a course on
Hamlet in the 1872–73 academic year, marking the ﬁrst time that Shakespeare was taught as literature. Cornell, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia

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soon introduced Shakespeare to their curricula. Shakespeare was utilized
in secondary and college preparatory schools when colleges began
to require the reading of plays for entrance examinations. The 1869–70
catalogue of Harvard advised freshmen to prepare to be tested on the“derivation and critical analysis of Julius Caesar” as soon as they entered
the college.45
The study of Shakespeare was further promoted after valuable primary and secondary sources were opened to general scholars and students.
In 1873, the Boston Public Library released the collection of Thomas
Pennant Barton, allegedly the ﬁrst American Shakespearean collector.
Shakespearean studies in America ﬁnally became comparable to thosein England after the opening of the Henry Huntington Collection in 1925
and the Folger Shakespeare Library in 1932.
Shakespeare’s shift from popular culture to elite culture does not meanthat Americans rejected the Bard. Rather, he came to be viewed from analternative perspective. In the nineteenth century, Shakespeare was central to public entertainment. By the twentieth century, he became recognized as one of the greatest artists to ever grace mankind. As such,
Shakespeare has continuously held an important position in American
society and culture. In 1927, Ashley Thorndike stated:
He [Shakespeare] is indeed the god of idolatry. Washington, Lincoln, Shakespeare, they are the three whom Americans universally worship, and you will
not ﬁnd a fourth of ours or any other nation to add to this trinity.46

Americans have consumed and reshaped Shakespeare since the earlycolonial era. In the end, he has been naturalized into the American mind
and culture.
CONCLUSION
The episode featuring the king and the duke in Twain’s The Adventuresof Huckleberry Finn (1885) is perhaps the most well-known and oft-cited
example of the adaptation of Shakespeare to American tastes. The kingand the duke, both con men, re-enact the balcony scene from Romeo andJuliet and the sword-ﬁght from Richard III pretending to be the famous
English actors David Garrick and Edmund Kean. When the king worries about his “peeled head” and “white whiskers” while in the role ofJuliet, the duke responds, “No, don’t you worry . . . these country jakes
won’t ever think of that.”47 The duke also suggests that they incorporate

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Hamlet’s soliloquy, actually a poor combination of a bit of Hamlet witha sprinkling of Macbeth. When the two give a performance before an
audience, all twelve audience members laugh hysterically and leave thehall before the curtain falls.
This episode is illustrative of theatrical conditions in the latter half ofthe nineteenth century. On the level of the narrative, Shakespeare was
performed in a highly dramatized fashion by touring companies that traveled even to small riverside towns. With regard to Twain’s readers, thereading public of the 1870s and the 1880s obviously had enough knowledge of Shakespeare to understand the farcical nature of the duke’s plays.
Bearing in mind that parody presupposes wide recognition of the original work, Twain’s story suggests that Shakespeare had deeply penetrated American society.
Following the Equator, published some twelve years after The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, offers further clues for understanding the relationship between America and Shakespeare. Barnum symbolized thenineteenth century American consumer society. The fact that this cunning entrepreneur planned to purchase Shakespeare’s birthplace in 1847
reveals that Shakespeare was so popular in America that the public would
have re-paid Barnum in admission fees even if he had spent a hugeamount of money to dismantle and ship the house across the Atlantic
Ocean. Moreover, Twain’s episode of Barnum’s exchanging the birthplace with Jumbo indicates that Shakespeare was popular not as a literary artist but rather as a spectacular display like the huge elephant.
The sale of the birthplace, a historical fact that is scarcely remembered
today, or a brief literary episode in Twain’s travel book, gives us an
important clue to understanding the position of Shakespeare in American
culture. It was only in the past hundred and ﬁfty years or so that the Bardcame to be worshiped as high art; before that, from colonial days to thenineteenth century, he was a popular entertainer enjoyed by all
Americans regardless of sex, class or location. And his immense popularity until the mid-nineteenth century originated in the fact that Shakespeare was transformed according to the demands of American society
and people. In a word, Shakespeare has been Americanized.
Recent efforts to develop a revised history of American theater havelargely failed to address the inﬂuence of Shakespeare.48 Prominent histories have furthermore addressed the Bard from the perspective that his
widespread popularity slowed the development of America’s own theater and drama. Claudia Johnson laments:

186

NAHOKO TSUNEYAMA. . . the American stage in the nineteenth century was decidedly colonial,attested to by the overwhelming number of Shakespearean productions supported by upper- and lower-class audiences alike, largely rendered by English
actors. . . . (Emphasis added)49

However, it was precisely because the early theater was “decidedly colonial” that America was eventually able to co-opt and transform the culture of the colonizer. Americans not only staged Shakespeare, but also
remolded his works to suit their needs and preferences. In a metaphorical sense, Shakespeare was himself transﬁgured by American people andtheater, and in this context should be considered an “American” playwright, as well as a central ﬁgure in a new American theater history.
NOTES
1
For the history of Stratford as a literary shrine, see Robert Bearman, The History of
an English Borough: Stratford-upon-Avon 1196–1996 (Phoenix Mill: Sutton, 1997),
chapter 11. Americans have been visiting there since the late eighteenth century; see
Bearman, “Americans in Stratford,” Focus (Winter 1984), 25–26, and “More on theAmerican Connection,” Focus (Spring 1985), 15–17. I would like to thank Dr. Robert
Bearman, Head of Archives and Local Studies at Records Ofﬁce, Shakespeare
Birthplace Trust, for offering me valuable information by e-mail.
2
The Times, June 15, 1847.
3
Barnum’s attempted purchase is brieﬂly mentioned in Bearman, History, 171 andA. H. Saxon, P. T. Barnum: The Legend and the Man (New York: Columbia UP, 1989),
137.
4Mark Twain, Following the Equator & Anti-Imperialist Essays (New York: Oxford
UP, 1996). All subsequent references will be cited from this version with page numbers
in parentheses.
5
Saxon, 291–98.
6
Both Barnum and Twain were fans of Shakespeare. Barnum produced many
Shakespearean plays at The Lecture Hall, a theater built inside The American Museum.
See Saxon, 105. The references to Shakespeare’s works not only appeared in Twain’s
sketches and stories but were also evident in his techniques of language, characterization, plot building, and bawdy humor that Twain obviously borrowed from the Bard.
Twain’s deep regard for Shakespeare is further evidenced by the fact that he based hislast book, Is Shakespeare Dead? (1909), upon his studies of the life of Shakespeare andthe Shakespeare-Bacon controversy. Anthony J. Berret, Mark Twain and Shakespeare:
A Cultural Legacy (New York & London: Lanham, 1993).
7
Bill Ashcroft, et al. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial
Literature (New York: Routledge, 1989), 2, 16.
8
Homi K. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.”
The Location of Culture (London & New York: Routledge, 1994), 85–92. 86.
9The extensive relationship between America and Shakespeare has attracted a considerable degree of attention from historians and literary critics. Many are historicalanalyses of productions, the most prominent of which is Charles Shattuck’s two-volumed Shakespeare on the American Stage (Washington, D.C.: Folger Shakespeare

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Library, 1976, 1987). Recently Michael D. Bristol treats development of a so-called
Shakespearean industry in America in Shakespeare’s America, America’s Shakespeare(New York: Routledge, 1990). The position of Shakespeare in American culture is a
topic of two studies: Lawrence W. Levine, High Brow/Low Brow: The Emergence ofCultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988) and Harriett Hawkins,
Classics and Trash: Tradition and Taboos in High Literature and Popular Modern
Genres (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1990).
10“Arthur Spicer’s Inventory,” Tyler’s Quarterly 10(1929): 163–67.
11
Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: U of California P, 1981).
12
W. H. Bond and Hugh Amory eds., The Printed Catalogues of the Harvard College
Library 1723–1790 (Boston: The Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1996), A95.
13
Edwin Wolfe II, The Book Culture of a Colonial American City: Philadelphia Books,
Bookmen, and Booksellers (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 164–202.
14
Frank Luther Mott, Golden Multitudes: The Story of Best Sellers in the United States(New York: Macmillan, 1947), 305; Edwin Eliott Willoughby, “The Reading of Shakespeare in Colonial America,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 31(1937): 45–56, 54.
15
George B. Bryan, American Theatrical Regulation 1607-1900, Conspectus andTexts (Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1993).
16
As Romantic imagination was taken as a source of immorality, literature of the time
had to stress its productionist nature. The moral, didactic and nationalistic ideas became
the main theme of stories. For example, the ﬁrst American novel, William Hill Brown’s
The Power of Sympathy (1787) and the ﬁrst best seller by a female author, SusannaRowson’s Charlotte Temple (1791), both encouraged the feminine virtue of chastity. In
order to deny creative elements, both authors insisted that the stories were based on actual events.
17
Bryan, 31.
18
Michael T. Gilmore suggests that the Revolution can more aptly be described as a
conﬂict between English consumerism and American productionism. Gilmore, “Modesof Consumption in the Age of Production” in Literary Perspectives, ed. Hokkaido Association for American Studies (Sapporo, Japan: Hokkaido UP, 1995), 223–50.
19
Alfred Van Rensselaer Westfall, American Shakespearean Criticism: 1607–1865(New York & London: Benjamin Blom, 1968), 56.
20David Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled: American Theater and Culture 1800–1850(Berkeley: U of California P, 1968), 114.
21
The Massachusetts Spy, August 11, 1770.
22“The Pausing American Loyalist” in Americans on Shakespeare 1776–1914, ed.
Peter Rawlings (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 29–31, 30.
23
Helene Wickham Koon, How Shakespeare Won the West: Players and Performances in America’s Gold Rush 1849–1865 (Jefferson: McFarland, 1989).
24
Washington Irving, “Jonathan Oldstyle Goes to the Play” (1800–1801) in The
American Theatre as Seen by its Critics 1752–1934, ed. Moses J. Montrose and John
Brown (New York: Cooper Square, 1967), 36–47, 40.
25
Frances Trollope, “Frances Trollope on Cincinnati Audiences, 1829” in Theatre in
the Colonies and United States: A Documentary History 1750–1915, ed. Barry Witham(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), 139.
26
“Call for a National Drama. ” New York Mirror, 1937, in The Dawning of American
Drama: American Dramatic Criticism 1746–1915, ed. Jurgen C. Wolter. (Westport:
Greenwood, 1993),101.
27
Grimsted, 112–13, 116; Peter James Ventmiglia, “Shakespeare’s Comedies on the

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19th Century New York Stage: A Promptbook Analysis,” Papers of the BibliographicalSociety of America 71 (1977): 415–41. 434.
28
Anna Cora Mowatt [Ritchie], “Stella” in Mimic Life; or, A Series of Narratives(Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1855), 155.
29
John Quincy Adams, “Misconception of Shakespeare upon the Stage,” in Rawlings,
61–66, 61–64.
30
The Albion, 1846. Wolter, 123.
31
The Anglo American, 1846. Wolter, 122–123, 123.
32
Koon, 10–11.
33
James Fenimore Cooper, “Notions of the Americans,” in Rawlings, 58–60, 59.
34
A distinction between productionism and consumerism is also ambiguous in the ﬁeldof literature. Reynolds points out the close relationship between reform literature in theearly nineteenth century and creative literature of the American Renaissance (55–56).
The former explored the dark side of human psychology under the guise of didacticism,and the latter exploited that characteristic as its own literary convention. These two formsof literature continued to coexist throughout the nineteenth century. See David S.
Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance (New York: Knopf, 1988).
35
Nation, 1865, quoted in Saxon, 107.
36
P [hineas] T [aylor] Barnum, The Life of P. T. Barnum, Written by Himself (NewYork: Redﬁeld, 1855), 344.
37
Twain, The Stolen White Elephant and Other Detective Stories (New York: Oxford
UP, 1996). 25,26.
38
The changes in theater experience are explained in Peter G. Buckley, To the Opera
House: Culture and Society in New York City, 1820–1860 (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1984);
Faye E. Dudden, Women in the American Theatre: Actresses and Audiences 1790–1870(New Haven: Yale UP, 1994), 104–22; Grimsted 110; and Levine.
39
Dudden, 107, 116–18, 149–8.
40
Dudden, 119.
41
Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1840), ed. J.P. Mayer and Max Lerner (NewYork: Harper & Row, 1966), 263, 264.
42
Levine, 171.
43
Brown illuminates WASP political manipulation in the transformation of Shakespeare into elite culture. As postbellum America was culturally confused, WASPs situated Shakespeare at the center of school education in an attempt to construct a canonicalculture based on the English language. Shakespeare became an effective means ofenforcing WASP social and cultural domination. See Stephen J. Brown, “The Uses of
Shakespeare in America: A Study in Class Domination,” in Shakespeare: Pattern of
Excelling Nature, ed. David Bevington et al. (London: Associated UP, 1976), 230–38.
44James McManaway, “Shakespeare in the United States,” PMLA 79 (1964): 513–18.
516.
45Henry W. Simon, The Readings of Shakespeare in American Schools and Colleges:
An Historical Survey (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1932), 119–31. See also John
Hampton Lauck, The Reception and Teaching of Shakespeare in Nineteenth and Early
Twentieth Century America (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1991).
46
Ashley Thorndike, “Shakespeare in America” (1927), in Rawlings, 512–26, 525.
47
Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (New York: Oxford UP, 1996),
169. The episode of the king and the duke appears in chapters 19 and 20.
48
Following the rise of new historicism and cultural studies, a critique of the established history of American literature along class, race and gender lines has emerged,
such as Emory Elliott, ed., Columbia Literary History of the United States (New York:AMERICANIZATION OF SHAKESPEARE

189

Columbia UP, 1988) and Sacvan Bercovitch, ed., The Cambridge History of American
Literature (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge UP, 1994+). Almost ten years behindsuch movement, there appeared ‘new’ history of American theater, which culminates in
Felicia Hardison Londre and Daniel J. Watermeier, eds., The History of North American
Theater (New York: Continuum, 1998) and Don B. Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby,
eds., The Cambridge History of American Theatre, 3 vols. (Cambridge & New York:
Cambridge UP, 1998+).
49
Johnson, “A New Nation’s Drama,” in Elliot, 324–41, 329.

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Illustration 1
Announcement for the Saleof Shakespeare’s Birthplace in 1847?
© The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Record Ofﬁce

AMERICANIZATION OF SHAKESPEARE

Illustration 2“Romeo and Juliet Playbill” 1800?
© Folger Shakespeare Library Photography Department

191

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Illustration 3“Romeo and Juliet Program” 1869?
© Folger Shakespeare Library Photography Department