The Shakespeare Riots introduced me to a part of Americana long lost: a time when, still a young country, America regarded Shakespeare’s plays, especially his dramas, as models of personal, community and national behavior; and when the audience was a cross-section of all classes with conflicting tastes, expectations of actors, and attention spans.
I came across this history of the Astor Place Riot of May 1849 when I was looking to see what else Nigel Cliff, author of Holy War, had written, and its title appealed to me. Having read most of his plays in third English Lit core course in college – from an anthology I remember most as the place where during every Monday’s lecture I wrote the previous weekend Yale football game score – I was pressed to imagine performances inciting riots. Any book that begins with an acknowledgment or quote from de Tocqueville immediately has my attention: "The tastes and inclinations natural to democratic nations will ... find their first literary expression in the theatre, where we can be sure they will make a violent entry. On the page, aristocratic traditions will be gradually modified in, so to speak, a legal manner. In the theatre, they will be overthrown by riots." (This composed almost a decade before Astor Place.) Couple de Tocqueville with an early reference to what was going on with touring actors in Albany, and I’m fully transfixed.
Alexis recognized the civilizing and alienating elements of the theater. As the country’s population moved west, as towns sprung up, so did rudimentary stages, followed by more culturally affected venues. Rag tag troupes were in turn succeeded by “stars,” most notably the touring Englishman, William Macready and Edwin Forrest, a rough-hewn Jacksonian, who both came to personify the antagonism festered by memories of too recent wars and exaggerated patriotism.
Interwoven are other literary icons from both sides of the Atlantic: Dickens whose critique of America after his visit, contributes to the vitriol; Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper writing almost as mediators and finding no audience. As provincial as America comes off during this period of history, England already displays low brow behaviors and traits that continue today as national stereotypes: inflammatory scandal sheet newspapers and a preference to spectacle, circus and vaudeville over serious drama. The book also details the effect of the gangs from Five Points in the riots, the emergence of NYC's silk stocking National Guardsmen,
At the conclusion of chapter ten, Cliff distills the factors leading up to the riot: "A personal, a local, and an international feud had all converged in one fraught moment. Macready's determination to make the theatre respectable had made him the archetype of the Victorian Englishman. Forrest's frontier populism had made him the hero of the new America ... English abuse had worn America's patience thin, and American expansionism and indebtedness had raised English hackles. The wealth of New York's elite had incensed its increasingly impoverished workers, and the power of gangs had made organized violence demonstrable threat ... Not least of all, America's conflicted relationship with its heritage had split the nation into two opposing camps, and both were determined to claim Shakespeare as their own ... It was absurd that two Shakespearean actors fomented one of the worst riots in American history, but it would have been even more astonishing if peace had suddenly set it."
Finally, Cliff analyzes the effects of the riot: " ... there was a strange new sound from the audience - silence. No longer were interventions from the gallery tolerated ... the working classes gravitated to vaudeville houses ... the age of the theatres as meeting places for an entire society had come to an end ... to the public minded middle classes, the riot at last brought home the shocking depth and extent of disaffection in their midst. They became obsessed with the image of New York City as a diseased organism (even going so far as to clear out space for Central Park)." The Bard was stripped of old acrobatics and song and dance acts and performed with due deference to genius, yet in schools, Shakespeare became a perplexing puzzle of metrics and syntax (gee that reminds me of that old anthology again) and not a writer of familiar speeches to roll around the tongue. And on the stage, his plays were often turned into burlesques.
In retrospect, I would recommend if M'ville still approaches English Lit through five core courses, more overlay of concurrent histories might make the literature both have more context and at the same time, prove its timelessness. And now back to Vasco de Gama and the Holy Wars.
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