Worlds Elsewhere (24 page)

It seemed a shame. The early
Henry VI
plays, that rollicking triple-decker on the Wars of the Roses, might have made interesting viewing in light of the ongoing stand-off between Democrats and Republicans in Congress. More polarised by the minute, the two parties seemed as impossible to manage as any of Shakespeare's brawling barons, and as unlikely to come to agreement over their blood feuds. More cynically, several commentators had noted the similarities between ex-president George W. Bush and Shakespeare's Hal – another hard-drinking wastrel who undergoes a sudden epiphany, renounces his ‘wild' youth, and becomes one of the most warmongering leaders in the canon.

But it was
Julius Caesar,
of course, that possessed an illustrious history in the United States, where this republican play has long been far more popular than back in Britain. Partly in deference to the surging patriotism being felt in the colonies, the Hallams' London Company of Comedians had been refounded in 1763, eleven years after arriving, as the American Company. In 1770, on the brink of war, they acted
Julius Caesar
in Philadelphia, astutely marketing it as depicting ‘the noble struggles for Liberty by that renowned patriot Marcus Brutus'.

A century later, the Boston-born E. L. Davenport, one of the biggest stars of the 1860s and 1870s, excelled as a redoubtably toga-clad Brutus, setting a record for performances of the play on Broadway in 1875. In 1953, Joseph L. Mankiewicz successfully made
Julius Caesar
into big Hollywood box office with Marlon Brando as Mark Antony and Louis Calhern as Caesar (Roland Barthes poked fun at these ‘gangster-sheriffs').

Julius Caesar
even shaded into real-life American political tragedy. In November 1864 John Wilkes Booth, one of three actor-sons of one of the earliest American stars, the English-born Junius Brutus Booth, participated in a production in New York alongside his brothers. Junius Brutus Jr played Cassius, Edwin was Brutus, while John Wilkes took Mark Antony. In a famous photograph commemorating the event, the three brothers pose in costume – Junius reaching for his sword, Edwin making as if to restrain him. John broods, a dangerous loner, on the other edge of the frame.

The performance was a fundraiser for the Shakespeare statue later
erected in Central Park. But it had ghoulish echoes when, the following April, John Wilkes crept into the presidential box at Ford's theatre in Washington and shot Abraham Lincoln in the back of the head.

The theatre-loving president happened to be watching a comedy, Tom Taylor's heavy-handed 1858 farce
Our American Cousin.
But Booth had cast himself in an altogether more serious role. A letter he wrote before heading to Ford's theatre, later published in the papers, ended with some well-known words apparently recalled from memory:

‘I answer with Brutus,' Booth concluded, only mildly misquoting him.

Lincoln, had he survived, would have caught the reference instantly. A lover of Shakespeare since childhood, he was known to lug a complete works around the White House, and had once performed from memory ‘Now is the winter of our discontent', the opening soliloquy of
Richard III,
‘with a degree of force and power that made it seem like a new creation' (as described by the artist Francis Carpenter, who complimented the president on his acting). Days before his assassination, Lincoln had been rereading
Macbeth,
and, tormented by a recurring nightmare, confided to his bodyguard that ‘the thing has got possession of me, and like Banquo's ghost, it will not down'.

As I walked towards the library that morning, Starbucks in hand, I thought again about the line through the centre of town connecting Lincoln, Washington and Shakespeare. More lethal than I'd reckoned.

YEARS AGO, AT A THEATRE FESTIVAL
somewhere or other, I bought a postcard. It's a map of the United States of America. At first glance it isn't much: plain black-and-white, US postal-sized, a conventional projection of the continent state by state, with locations marked in small, neat type.

You peer a little closer; peer and begin to puzzle. These places sound familiar. Tucked inside southern Texas, a short drive from the Mexican border, there's somewhere called Sebastian – a settlement of 1,864,
the census tells you, not much more than a tight grid of asphalt and some industrial facilities. Far north, at the other extreme of the United States, is a town on the North Dakota prairie called Hamlet. Hamlet, perhaps appropriately, is now a ghost.

It goes on. You count no fewer than four American Orlandos, all the way from Orlando, Kentucky (an ‘unincorporated community' perched on the edge of Daniel Boone country) to the famous resort city in Florida. There's a large village near Chicago, Illinois, named Romeoville. It boasts, apparently, a golf club called Bolingbrook.

The postcard, entitled
A Shakespearean Map of the USA, Featuring Towns that Actually Exist!
– by the American artist David Jouris – is, of course, a joke. It's an erudite joke, to be sure. One needs a secure apprehension of the canon (perhaps even a specialist encyclopedia) to remember that Speed in Indiana is also the name of Valentine's ‘clownish servant' in the youthful
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
– a character whose chief claim to fame is one of the most tedious interchanges in Shakespearian comedy, centring on the rhetorical significance of a sheep.

Equally, you'd require a firm grasp of the history plays to recall that the various American Gloucesters pinpointed here relate to five separate characters: two Duchesses (in
Henry VI Part II
and
Richard II
), two Dukes and an Earl. One Duke is Humphrey of Gloucester, the youngest son of Henry IV in
Henry IV Part II
and
Henry V.
The other is more of a celebrity: Richard, Duke of Gloucester, later King Richard III.

Do any of these places have any Shakespearian connection at all? No, in most instances – accidents of geography, genealogy, cartography. But I'd absent-mindedly tucked the postcard into my notebook and brought it to Washington with me, and one quiet afternoon in the library, when I should have been doing a million more profitable things, I started to wonder if there was more to it than that.

A quick search online uncovered another ghost town, Shakespeare in New Mexico, rechristened in 1879 after a mining company named in honour of the playwright. North of the Canadian border, Stratford in Ontario, a former rail city, has made profitable connection with its namesake Stratford-upon-Avon: a Shakespeare festival has run there since 1953, one of the most famous in North America. (Stratford in Connecticut poached the idea, launching its own Shakespeare festival in 1955, which ran until the late eighties.) Orlando, Florida, honours its namesake in
As You Like It
with its own Shakespeare theatre, founded in
the early 1970s when a professor from the university of Central Florida bought a school bus, painted it with rainbow stripes, and toured student actors around local educational institutions.

In a deeper sense, I began to realise, Jouris's map is quite accurate. Littered through the history of the United States are stories of Shakespeare cropping up in odd, out-of-the-way corners, far from East Coast libraries and theatres. As early as 1764, the English explorer Thomas Morris, mapping what would become Illinois, was astounded to be presented with a volume of Shakespeare's plays by a Native American chief in exchange for gunpowder. (‘A singular gift from a savage,' wrote Morris wonderingly, apparently not pausing to consider the word ‘savage' too deeply.)

I started to collect stories. I came across a vivid and nerve-jangling tale from eighty-odd years later, the early 1840s, about a touring company of actors travelling through Florida in the middle of the Seminole land wars. Journeying without military escort through an area teeming with Native American warriors determined to protect their territory from the depredations of the US government, the troupe were set upon and two actors killed. To celebrate their victory, the Indians prised open the trunk containing the company wardrobe and disported themselves as ‘Othello, Hamlet and a host of other Shakespearian characters'.

For scholars, there are three famous sentences in
Democracy in America,
Alexis de Tocqueville's sprawling eyewitness account assembled from nine months spent touring the expanding United States and Canada in the early 1830s:

Scarcely a pioneer's cabin
… I had long been intrigued by this reference – if only for the comical image of France's grand inspector of penitentiaries in some bug-infested lean-to, reading about his own nation being crushed at Agincourt. I'd assumed it to be exaggeration, a product of romantic infatuation with the newly United States. Now I began to wonder.

*

I would probably have forgotten the question altogether had I not stumbled across an article in
Shakespeare Quarterly,
the Folger's own journal. It was entitled ‘Shakespeare in the Rockies', by an English professor at the university of Denver, Levette J. Davidson. The article was dated January 1953. Davidson was long dead.

He mentioned references I had already come across – a nineteenth-century fur trapper who lugged ‘a copy of Shakespeare' everywhere he went; early performances of
Macbeth
in Salt Lake City to the hearty accompaniment of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. But he went on to recount a far more unusual tale, one I'd never heard, about the explorer Jim Bridger. Bridger, the greatest frontiersman of the 1840s and 1850s, was a mountain man born and bred, perhaps most famous for mapping the Salt Lake area for the founder of the Mormon church, Brigham Young. He also established what became Fort Bridger, Wyoming, a staging post on the long trek westwards to California.

Despite being unable to read, Jim Bridger was fond of stories – one storyteller in particular. The soldier J. Lee Humfreville, who spent the winter of 1863–64 holed up with him elsewhere in Wyoming, relates how, upon hearing that ‘Shakespeare's was supposed to be the greatest book', Bridger became seized by a passion:

‘It was amusing to hear Bridger quote Shakespeare,' Humfreville continued. ‘He could give quotation after quotation, and was always ready to do so.' (Even if he didn't always get the plot details quite right.)

I read this with surprise, then astonishment. Copies of a book circulating as part of a barter economy is one thing; Native
Americans pilfering costumes from white men invading their land another. But an illiterate trapper selling valuable cattle to acquire a text he couldn't read?

Yet there was corroboration, the testimony of Margaret Carrington, the wife of an officer in the US Army:

Even by the colourful standards of many frontier accounts, this was startling stuff. It was an image of Shakespeare not as a remote entity from the high Renaissance, the apex of Eng Lit, but as American popular entertainment – the author of stories vivid enough to enrapture a grizzled mountain trapper, so shockingly real that the murder of the Princes in the Tower could persuade him to burn the complete works he had spent so much to acquire. I was used to the idea that Shakespeare was, in his day, a hugely successful commercial playwright, but
Richard III
as a prairie companion in Wyoming? Really? I was taking a flight to California in a few days' time; maybe here was the hook I was after. In the story of Bridger I felt I had found a clue, though to what I wasn't yet sure.