Percy MacKaye's Caliban for a Democracy

The Shakespeare Tercentenary of 1916 became a bouquet of American offerings: scholarly and popular essays, tribute poems, university, community, and commercial performances. After a year of preparation, and then a rain delay, Caliban by the Yellow Sands, Percy MacKaye's civic masque, his huge, astonishing transformation of The Tempest, opened on May 24, 1916, in the stadium of the City College of New York. For ten nights, 1500 performers played before 150,000 people. The city ran special buses up to the stadium. Extra trains came in from New Jersey and down from Boston. After some pruning, the performance ran two and one half hours. One year later, at Harvard Stadium, the masque ran nine nights with twice as many participants before even larger audiences. Art and imagination, MacKaye believed, were "practical means for expressing and promoting democratic life" (quoted in Glassberg 198). Such may not have been Shakespeare's intent, but MacKaye saw a relationship between Prospero and Caliban which bound the English poet to his American impresariodescendent. Percy MacKaye was born in New York in 1875, son of the actor/playwright Steele MacKaye, and Mary Keith, also a writer. An 1897 Harvard graduate, MacKaye spent the years 1898-1900 in Italy and in Germany. His early dramatic work shows the strong influence of classical, European and English traditions in theater arts. The body of his dramatic work falls into three main groups: plays written for what Arthur Quinn called the "regular" theater, community plays, and operas. He wrote in blank verse when he used older literary material-Jeanne d'Arc (1906), Sappho and Phaon (1907), Canterbury Pilgrims, Fenris the Wolf (1905). Later, his satiric and serious plays on modern themes, his studies of American provincial life, relied on modern speech and even dialect. In addition, there are MacKaye's critical works on the theater and his drama and masque prefaces. The critical pieces were often published after they had been delivered as speeches before civic and university audiences. MacKaye regarded himself not as a EuroAmerican, an Englishman-manqu6, but as an American remaking European patterns to enhance the democratic ideal. In 1908, he writes in Art and Democracy: In America, the kinship of the true artist and the true statesman is clear and legitimate: both are children of the Commonweal. And the noblest function of democracy is to bear sons who shall excellently express-for their countless brothers who are dumb and incapable-the excellent beauty of their common mother. (191) Here and in his papers on the civic theater that he was inventing, MacKaye bears a strong intellectual resemblance to his contemporary, Upton Sinclair, that other reformer/esthetician. Unwilling to give up the notion of an aristocracy of intellect and talent, MacKaye believes that his Caliban-the masses, the immigrants whose lives in America were generally contaminated by vulgar commercial entertainments, and characterized by dullness and despair-yearn to imitate, to be accepted by this aristocracy, and to embrace its icons. They are willing, even eager to be led by this aristocracy. MacKaye's Caliban kneels to Prospero. MacKaye believed he could reconcile the polarities of aristocratic and democratic ideals in the drama, the peculiar art for the people which can sum up, express the conflicts, the aspirations of a "race." Its scope, he wrote, can be a national consciousness; it can rekindle the past, foreshadow the future; "it has the same rights to the reverence of a people as the spirit of religion to which it is kin." It "expresses the joy of life" (The Playhouse and the Play 75). The theater forms "the taste, the moral will, the mental capacity of our people." If the theater exercises so vast an influence, its special function must be, he believed, to produce civic-inspiring art. And it must be protected against commercial corruption. In 1909, MacKaye came out strongly for full endowment of a public theater that would educate the public with the creation of a drama for democracy: a drama as a fine art for the many rather than for the select few as was the case (he believed) of the European bourgeois theater. …