American Shakespeare

Shakespeare’s fortunes in the US were, understandably, different from in England. Initially, Shakespeare was America’s most popular playwright, appealing to a wide sector of the American populace. Patterson notes that “by the end of the nineteenth century ‘Shakespeare’ had become a cultural icon, the property only of the ‘legitimate theater,’ if indeed of the theater at all; for his plays had been effectively transferred into an academic safety-deposit . . . .

“Charles Lamb, visiting the United States, declared that the plays were unsuited for performance, especially to a mass audience, because they were ‘so deep that the depth of them lies out of the reach of most of us’; A.C. Wheeler argued that the theater ‘materializes Shakespeare, and doing so vulgarizes him. Intellectual good taste outside of the theater spiritualizes him.’ And A. A. Lipscomb, writing in 1882, declared Shakespeare’s ascent ‘to a new and higher sphere in the firmament of intellect’; for, since to understand him required above all training, he was ‘destined to become the Shakespeare of the college and university, and even more the Shakespeare of private and select culture.’”

Shakespeare’s fortunes thus provide evidence, Patterson suggests, of the rapid infiltration of European class prejudices into American culture, and points to the Astor Place Riot of 1848 as emblematic of the conflict between the elite (European) Shakespeare and the popular American one.