Ubiquitous Shakespeare

Exploring Lake Superior in 1840, one Charles W Penny wrote, “We read the Bible I dare say much more than we would have done had we been in Detroit. Shakespeare was duly honoured, as he is every day when we travel. When on the water, some one of the party usually reads his plays to the others.”

Jim Bridger, an illiterate Rocky Mountain scout, learned passages of Shakespeare by heart by having the plays read to him, and Tocqueville wrote in the early 1830s that “there is hardly a pioneer’s hut that does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare.”

Karl Marx’s daughter called Shakespeare “the Bible of our house . . . by the time I was six I knew scene upon scene . . . by heart.”

Daniel Boone, though, preferred Swift during the quiet nights by his Kentucky campfire.