Worlds Elsewhere (20 page)

Making a trip had been on my mind for years. When I first moved to London in the early 2000s, I'd haunted the Globe, mooning over Mark Rylance's boyish, sweet-tempered Hamlet and Kathryn Hunter's cackling Richard III. Going there had opened my eyes–as it has since opened the eyes of hundreds of thousands of others – to how fluid and fast Shakespeare's scripts could be, how little paraphernalia they needed to spring into life: oak columns, bare wooden boards, daylight. For a while I couldn't bear to see Shakespeare anywhere else (it helped that the tickets were cheap).

But the Globe was only half the picture. It was what happened to Shakespeare in the latter part of his career that I wanted to explore. Able for the first time to perform all year round, the King's Men forged
for themselves a new kind of drama. All of Shakespeare's late plays, though they continued to be performed outside, were written with the Blackfriars in mind: a shadowy space, intimate, candlelit, the photographic negative of the rambunctious open-air Globe.

There were other connections, teasing ones. Virginia had been established in May 1607, when 104 English settlers had stolen land from Algonquian Native Americans and christened their settlement Jamestown after the monarch who chartered their voyage. (Virginia itself was named for James's predecessor, Elizabeth I.) As these ill-equipped gentlemen colonisers were battling disease, Indians and their own manifold incompetence, Shakespeare and his colleagues – another and rather more professional company of James's men – were mapping new worlds back in London. Stories from America and its struggling colonies would infiltrate Shakespeare's late work, most obviously
The Tempest.
Who needed
Hamlet
off the coast of Sierra Leone? Here was a more solid seafaring connection. Jamestown was only 150 miles away.

Staunton also featured the place where I was staying, Anne Hathaway's Cottage. This wasn't, as I had first assumed when I found it online, an official outpost of the American Shakespeare Center, but a guerrilla replica, set up by an enterprising B&B owner to cash in on the town's new-found appreciation for the Bard. Though it was thatched and prettily half-timbered, set in a pleasant garden, one had to squint to see the resemblance. I doubt it would have fooled Shakespeare.

Juliette, the owner, and I chatted over breakfast. Unlike the cottage, she was the real deal, an emigrée from Bath who had lived in the US for forty years. It was just possible to hear in her voice the starchy vowels of home, softened by four decades of American life. She'd had the idea for the B&B soon after the theatre opened – but I suspected it wasn't just that.

‘A little home from home, that's what it is,' she said, sounding for a second terribly English.

My eye was on the corner of the room, where a thin ginger cat was skulking, eyeing the invader with a notebook.

‘Oh,
his
name's King Lear,' Juliette said, all-American again. ‘Don't worry. He's a real sweetie.'

That Shakespeare's work had made it out here was, on the face of it, deeply improbable. In 1607, when Jamestown was founded, the
playwright was in his celebrated, prosperous mid-forties – about to get stuck into
Pericles,
and so begin his last great phase. His near-contemporaries, the earliest European settlers in America, had little time or temperament for drama. The kind of people driven to forge new lives for themselves in the unyielding environments of Virginia, Massachusetts and Maryland were, almost by definition, not minded to spend time idly watching plays.

In 1642, in the throes of a fundamentalist Christian government, England had barred the doors on its public playhouses. Across the Atlantic, an even more pursed-lip spirit prevailed. In 1687, the clergyman Increase Mather thundered, ‘Persons who have been Corrupted by
Stage-Plays
are seldom, and with much difficulty, Reclaimed.' As late as the mid-eighteenth century, Massachusetts levied hefty fines on anyone who dared watch or perform them. Time and again, early American legislation associates playgoing with the most damnable kinds of iniquity. In 1682, William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania, made a point of outlawing ‘stage plays, cards, dice … masques, revels, bull-baitings, cock-fightings, bear-baitings, and the like, which excite the people to rudeness, cruelty, looseness and irreligion'.

Accordingly, Shakespeare's work was slow to journey across the Atlantic – and did so not as theatre, but as literature. In the late 1640s, the Reverend Seaborn Cotton, son of the famous preacher John, copied out the yearning lyric ‘Take, O, take those lips away' from
Measure for Measure
into a commonplace book, alongside fragments from Herrick, Spenser and Sidney. Another Harvard man, Elnathan Chauncy, fell for the charms of Shakespeare's beguiling long poem on love and lust,
Venus and Adonis,
copying a few lines into his own scrapbook in the 1660s. (
Venus and Adonis
was so popular in Shakespeare's own lifetime that only a single copy of its first edition survives: fans seem to have read it to destruction.)

The earliest date scholars can locate a copy of the collected works in the American colonies is in the library of a well-to-do Virginia planter called William Byrd II, who returned from England in 1696 with a copy of what seems to have been the 1685 Fourth Folio, a reprint of the famous First Folio assembled by Shakespeare's colleagues and published after his death. By 1723, Harvard had acquired a six-volume edition to be shelved alongside the forbidding theological and classical works that made up most of its library.

Significantly for the course of American history, the Founding Fathers
were among the first to expound the delights of reading (rather than seeing) Shakespeare. Benjamin Franklin urged the Philadelphia Library Company to buy a collected works in 1746, while Thomas Jefferson – a Virginian – recommended the plays to a friend, explaining that ‘[a] lively and lasting sense of filial duty is more effectually impressed on the mind of a son or daughter by reading
King Lear,
than by all the dry volumes of ethics and divinity that were ever written'. Among the holdings in Jefferson's fine library at Monticello, a forty-minute drive from Staunton, are numerous Shakespearian texts and commentaries.

One of the earliest American enthusiasts for a writer he called ‘the Great Master of Nature' was John Adams, who succeeded George Washington to become the second president of the United States. As a lawyer in Boston, Adams devoured the works, saturating his diaries with quotations from
King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, Troilus and Cressida, The Merry Wives of Windsor
and
Henry VIII.
If anything, however, the Bardolator in the Adams household was John's wife Abigail; years later, their son John Quincy Adams recorded that an edition of Shakespeare had been ‘on my mother's nursery table', and that ‘at ten years of age I was as familiarly acquainted with his lovers and his clowns, as with Robinson Crusoe, the
Pilgrim's Progress,
and the Bible'.

By then, perhaps inevitably, Shakespeare had been recruited on to the side of a nation fighting for independence. In October 1775, as war with Britain raged, Abigail Adams wrote to John suggesting that George III would soon be bellowing, ‘My kingdom for a horse!' like the doomed Richard III at Bosworth. The following March, trapped in a besieged Boston, she urged her husband on with stirring words from
Julius Caesar,
spoken by Brutus on the eve of battle:

Although the north-eastern states persisted in their costive animosity towards theatre – New England would not relinquish its ban on public performances of plays until the late 1700s – down in the
more permissive South, Shakespeare's scripts began to make their way out of libraries and on to the stage. In contrast to his more serious-minded colleagues, George Washington was a devoted playgoer in Williamsburg, Virginia, particularly partial to comedies. In July 1787, he whiled away an afternoon watching Dryden and Davenant's operatic version of
The Tempest, The Enchanted Isle
; later, as president, he hosted an amateur performance of
Julius Caesar
in his official residence at Philadelphia.

Washington's correspondence bustles with Shakespeare, particularly when it comes to the struggle against British tyranny. In October 1778, as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, he wrote:

The words are Prospero's near the close of
The Tempest
: an image of British dominance that figures it as a wistful, poetic illusion, created for a fleeting moment before dissolving into thin air.

The British were not above using Shakespeare, too, albeit as much for the purposes of entertainment as propaganda: between 1777 and 1783 they staged a number of plays including
Richard III
in New York. Not to be outdone, the rebel army later mounted
Coriolanus
at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. An anonymous verse that circulated in the lead-up to hostilities poked fun at the British and their detested levies: ‘Be taxed or not be taxed, that is the question.'

The very first performance of Shakespeare on the American continent is usually credited to an amateur: a New York doctor, Joachimus Bertrand, who advertised in March 1730 a staging of
Romeo and Juliet
‘at the Revenge Meeting House, which is fitting up for that purpose'. In a nice piece of director's casting, Dr Bertrand announced that he himself would play the Apothecary.

Two decades later, a pair of ambitious young tyros, Walter Murray and Thomas Kean, founded a theatre company in Philadelphia; forced by the mistrustful authorities to relocate to New York, they performed
Richard III
in March 1750. The show was so successful that they took it out on tour through Virginia and Maryland – making the play perhaps the first homegrown American Shakespeare hit.

But the earliest actor-manager to put down solid Shakespearian roots on this side of the Atlantic was not American, but English, Lewis Hallam. In April 1752, Hallam, his wife Sarah, their three children and a ‘good and sufficient company' of ten actors embarked on a sloop called the
Charming Sally
bound for Virginia, aiming to make new lives for themselves in the New World. With them was a trunk-full of costumes, a few pieces of portable scenery and a small library of plays: light comedies by George Farquhar, William Congreve and John Gay; sober tragedies including Joseph Addison's
Cato
and Nicholas Rowe's
Fair Penitent
; and, crucially, a bundle of scripts by Shakespeare.

After docking at Yorktown, Hallam and his troupe travelled to Williamsburg and prepared a place to perform. The first advertisements went out in late August 1752, grandly announcing the arrival of ‘a Company of Comedians, lately from London', and boasting that ‘Ladies and Gentlemen may depend on being entertain'd in as polite a Manner as at the Theatres in London'. On the bill for their debut was
The Merchant of Venice.
As well as a patriotic dedication to King George II, the poster carried a warning: ‘No Person, whatsoever, to be admitted behind the Scenes.' The London Company of Comedians would take no chances with rude-mannered colonials.

Sometimes, though, colonials had occasion to be rude. One early tale is revealing: the visit to Stratford-upon-Avon made by John Adams and Thomas Jefferson on a tour of the English countryside in April 1786. Determined to make it a pilgrimage – Jefferson kissed the ground when they arrived – the pair were nonetheless underwhelmed by the Birthplace (‘as small and mean, as you can conceive', wrote Adams) and unimpressed by Shakespeare's funeral monument (‘an ill sculptured head'). Adams wrote dejectedly, ‘There is nothing preserved of this great Genius which is worth knowing. Nothing which might inform Us what Education, what Company, what Accident turned his Mind to Letters and the Drama.'

I wondered if this contained a clue as to why a much later group of Americans had decided to raise a seventeenth-century theatre here in twenty-first-century Virginia. Despite carving separate chips from a chair in which Shakespeare had reputedly sat (Jefferson was sceptical), the second and third presidents became two in a long line of foreign tourists to become convinced that the English had failed to honour Shakespeare – and that they, leaders of a brand-new nation, could do an infinitely better job.

The American Shakespeare Center wasn't hard to find: in a cosy town centre dominated by pillared nineteenth-century storefronts with striped awnings, it was a hulking interloper, a barn-like building in ox-blood brick.

Inside, however, the Blackfriars was a beauty, a casket in pale Virginia oak, glistening in the light. It felt tiny: the whole thing was roughly the size of a tennis court. A waist-height stage filled approximately half of the space, benches the rest, with railed galleries ranged all around. The stage itself was a scale model of the Globe's, minus the canopy and pillars: a central ‘discovery space' with curtains, flanked by wooden doors, with a small curtained balcony aloft at first-floor level. With its hammer-beam roof and amber woodwork, it looked prettily like the hall of a Jacobean stately home.

The Blackfriars was the brainchild of an English professor from a nearby liberal-arts college, Ralph Cohen. He'd set up a small touring troupe in 1988 with friends, using research into Renaissance staging practices, beginning to make its way out of the seminar room: a minimum of props and scenery, Elizabethan-style doubling. When the company decided they needed a home, it seemed only logical to build a copy of one their house dramatist would have known, as exact as they could make it.