Albert Hamilton Holt Colloquium

“Kate the Curst, Marriage, and Slavery in Nineteenth-Century America”

At the beginning of the twentieth century, scholars of English literature tended to dismiss The Taming of the Shrew as a simple farce, whose violence toward women was just part of the genre. Not until first-wave feminism in the 1970s did critics and directors begin to look at the play through Kate’s eyes. Discussion about marriage as an institution in relation to Shakespeare’s play had actually begun, however, in the nineteenth century and had particular significance for defining national and regional character both before and after the Civil War. In the South, particularly, on both page and stage Taming became a space for discussing the Cult of True Womanhood. After the war, the play provided a vehicle for explorations of the New Woman. In both cases, the discourse about marriage and womanhood is wound up with a metaphorical language of slavery, as American character is defined through women in relation to its most troubling political and ethical problem. While before 1860, a focus on marriage and womanhood is evoked to evade the relation between marriage and slavery, by the 1890s an easy metaphorical equation between the two provides opportunities for radicalizing Shakespearean gender politics. Is marriage slavery or slavery marriage? The answers produced by nineteenth-century writers indicate how Shakespeare can be pressed into service as a forum for American cultural politics and simultaneously bring American voices into dialogue with those of other regions and nations.

“Blackened Reputation: Shakespeare on the Minstrel Stage”

Shakespearean burlesque was integral to the reconfiguring of canons of cultural stratification and Shakespearean authority in the nineteenth century, segregating elements traditionally associated with popular stage performance–topicality, linguistic indecorum, social heterogeneity, a participatory relationship between audience and performer, ideological unruliness or irreverence for authority–from "proper" Shakespeare. Nowhere is this social process more apparent than in its American manifestation, the minstrel show, where Shakespeare was to play a crucial, recurrent and symbolically fraught role. The Shakespearean minstrel show is a particularly contradictory, troubling and thus instructive example of popular Shakespeare. Indisputably racist and thus deeply complicit with the social status quo of antebellum America, the Shakespearean minstrel show traded on the considerable cachet of popular subversion of cultural authority. It legitimized a distinctively American form of popular culture by casting Shakespeare as its British high cultural doppelganger, while at the same time it marshaled Shakespeare's authority to undermine emergent African-American claims to cultural power and legitimacy. Ambivalence toward changing constructions of Shakespeare's cultural status, in other words, is especially acute in this popular genre; more clearly and forcefully than in other burlesques of the period, minstrel shows refract questions of Shakespearean cultural authority through the kaleidoscopic lens of race and post-Civil War American nationhood. However, this is not to argue that the subgenre was homogenous in its engagement with questions of authority or that the the minstrel show was in some way decisive in recalibrating Shakespeare's cultural register in the period. Rather, my approach is to read the particular historical evocations of Shakespeare in the minstrel show less as strictly topical than as symptomatic of larger processes of cultural re-stratification in nineteenth-century America. This paper will explore the specific historical dynamics of legitimation and delegitimation in nineteenth-century Shakespearean minstrelsy, focusing primarily on minstrel adaptations devoted to the issue of black actors and Shakespeare and offering a glance at minstrel Shakespeare's afterlife in American culture.

“Who Brings Home the Bacon?: America’s Preoccupation with the Shakespearean Authorship Controversy”

Alfred Van Rennsselaer Westfall sneers in his history of Shakespearean criticism: “Just before the Civil War there leaped into prominence a school of Shakespearean criticism for which America can claim chief credit, if credit it is. This is the school which challenged Shakespeare’s title to the authorship of the plays which bear his name.”

The question I pose is not who wrote Shakespeare’s plays – but rather, why did Americans care so fiercely? What on earth was it about late nineteenth-century American culture that enabled an argument over whether or not a certain sixteenth-century century glover’s son from Stratford had written Shakespeare’s plays, to be featured prominently in major periodicals and to be opined upon by virtually every major author, journalist, celebrity, and literary critic of the time? What led this issue to be one of the most prevalent, pressing, and exasperating controversies to dominate, in particular, the American magazine scene?

I place this controversy in the context of American notions of authorship and art that were both peculiar and particular to this era.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Henry James, Hamlin Garland, Edgar Lee Masters, and P.T. Barnum all cared passionately about this issue but it would be difficult to place any of them easily on a pro- or con grid. Instead, by analyzing the context for the authorship controversy within particularly the copyright debates articulated in American Magazines that parallel the publication of the Authorship controversy, (not infrequently on the very same page as Baconian discussions) as well as analyzing developing theories of American literary realism, I demonstrate that the cultural capital at stake in whether Francis Bacon had indeed written Shakespeare’s oeuvre, was nothing less than deciding where art came from - and, with inimitable American style, who should get paid for it.