Maine Fishing Novel: Retelling of "King Lear"

THE LOBSTER KINGS

Author:

Alexi Zentner

Publisher:

Norton

Number of pages:

352 pp.

Book price:

$26.95

‘The Lobster Kings’ by Alexi Zentner

By Laura Collins-Hughes

 | Globe Correspondent   June 19, 2014

Laurie Willick

Alexi Zentner’s novel “The Lobster Kings” is a tale about family inheritance on a small New England island.

“Shakespeare,” Woody Kings tells his favorite daughter, Cordelia. “All the good lines are from Shakespeare.”

The good lines, yes, and strong narrative frameworks, too. In Alexi Zentner’s “The Lobster Kings” — a novel about inheritance, steeped in familial legend and dusted with maritime magic — Woody is a lobsterman who rules a New England island.
Scale of their dominions aside, he has plenty in common with Shakespeare’s King Lear: the imperious, autocratic style; the touch of madness; the three daughters, though Woody’s wife wouldn’t let him name their other girls Regan and Goneril. “She pointed out that Goneril might be too close to gonorrhea,” Woody says.

His kingdom is the fictional Loosewood Island, population somewhat short of 2,000. Near Lubec, Maine, it’s so far north that both the United States and Canada claim it. To Woody and Cordelia, however, it’s obvious whose territory it really is: theirs. Which is to say, his as long as he lives, then hers to take over.
On Loosewood — which seems to have no harbormaster, no police force, not even a volunteer fire department — Woody’s word is law. The threat of poachers and drug traffickers spurs the action of “The Lobster Kings,” but what matters in the long run will be a transfer of power from father to daughter that keeps the island safe.
Their family traces its line straight back almost 300 years to the arrival of Brumfitt Kings, a fisherman painter who would become famous for his canvases of the island and the surrounding sea. Was his wife a selkie — a woman on land, a seal at sea? The Kingses seem unruffled by the rumor that they’re descended from a mythological creature. Art tourists come from around the world to see the place Brumfitt painted, and Zentner tells his story partly by describing those pictures.
Like Woody, and unlike her younger sisters, Cordelia is a lobsterman, born to be on the water. She is our narrator, and through her we come to understand both the steady gentleness and the cruel, unhinged wrath of her father, who is beloved but only partially benevolent. A believer in magic, he is a bit like Prospero from “The Tempest,” and Cordelia — a woman in a male milieu, devoted to her father, in love with a washashore — is a bit like Miranda.
Woody taught Cordelia to see Loosewood through Brumfitt’s eyes and his own, so she understands that the Kings family, ever since Brumfitt, has carried a blessing twinned with a curse: They will reap the sea’s bounty, but they will also lose to the water one son from each generation. So far, family history has borne out that prophesy.
Cordelia’s little brother, Scotty, drowned as a boy. This cleared the way for her inheritance, but she has never stopped feeling wounded that her father — blind to her worth, oblivious to Scotty’s discomfort on the water — put his son first just because he was a son. Without that old psychic injury, would she feel the need to swagger quite so much? As the captain of her own lobster boat, she more than once endangers everyone on board in order to prove herself.
It’s on one of those occasions that “The Lobster Kings” veers suddenly into utter absurdity, briefly becoming a bad detective novel, complete with murdered man. When Woody arrives, his is the voice of reason. “Call in the Coasties,” he commands, and we are stunned at this display of common sense. “It’s one thing to handle a turf war on our own, but it’s another thing entirely when we’re finding dead bodies.”
But mostly Zentner keeps a firm grip on his tale, and Loosewood, for all its particular mythology, is recognizable to anyone who’s lived in a tiny New England town bordered by salt water. That’s part of the reason that Brumfitt Kings’s paintings make such good narrative sense — because on Loosewood Island, as in so many of those real-life towns, “being an artist was almost as common as being a fisherman.” It’s a sensible downtime activity. “There were enough people who took up drinking or smoking pot, but arts and crafts came in a pretty popular second to self-destruction.”

Some Shakespearean Factoids That Might Have Escaped You

Jude Morgan Become a fan Author, 'The Secret Life of William Shakespeare'

10 Things You Didn't Know About Shakespeare

What little we know about the world's greatest poet and dramatist, William Shakespeare, have made him an enigmatic figure. Some imaginative people have even concluded that he wasn't who he was after all (and why shouldn't he be Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, the Earl of Oxford and Queen Elizabeth I's by-blow all at once? Wake up sheeple.)

But what we do know about the man and his works is intriguing enough. Snap up these unconsidered trifles:
1. Shakespeare wasn't the only Shakespeare in the theatre.
His brother Edmund, sixteen years his junior, became an actor in London too, though without making much of a mark. His death at the age of twenty-seven was followed by a funeral in St Saviour's Church, Southwark, which was an expensive one - indicating a local relative with money. Which brings us to...
2. Shakespeare was a fat cat.
From his career in the theatre, which included acting, play-writing, and being a "sharer" in the profits of his company, Shakespeare amassed a comfortable fortune. By the age of 33 he was able to buy New Place, the second largest house in Stratford-upon-Avon. Later he bought property in London as well as Stratford. In his will he was able to bequeath to his second daughter Judith - not even his main beneficiary - the sum of three hundred pounds. Converting Elizabethan money is notoriously tricky, but £50,000 would about do it today. By contrast, his fellow playwright Thomas Dekker was in and out of debtors' prison his whole lifehis whole life. At his death in 1632 his widow renounced administration of his estate - meaning there was nothing to administer.
3. Shakespeare was a co-writer.
It was common for playwrights of Shakespeare's time to collaborate. Sometimes three or four writers would have a hand in a single play. While Shakespeare seems to have liked working alone, there are passages aplenty in the plays that were written by someone else. He worked with Thomas Middleton on Timon of Athens, and with John Fletcher on Henry VIII. As for some of the most famous parts of Macbeth - the witchy bits - it's likely they were Middleton's work too, bolted on to the play at a later date.
4. You speak Shakespeare.
In spite of his reputation among literature-averse students for flowery language, Shakespeare directly created a great deal of the English we use today. Not only is he recorded as the first user of more words than any other writer, he also made words up: we owe him eyeball, bloodstained, radiance, assassination and lackluster, to name but a few. And his phrases are so embedded in the language, chances are you've used some of them in the last week or so: if for example you've been in a pickle, seen better days, or caught a cold, or been a laughing stock, or had to break the ice, or said good riddance...
5. Shakespeare's sonnets are not autobiographical.
OK, we don't know that for sure. But what we do know is that the writing of sonnet sequences was very fashionable in his day. Spenser, Sidney and many others turned them out. Sonnets were a stylised way of demonstrating your technical skill. You didn't have to be actually panting with unrequited love to write them. The beautiful young man and the Dark Lady of Shakespeare's sonnets may have originals, at some remove. More likely is that when Shakespeare wrote sonnets the essential dramatist in him kicked in, creating characters and drama.
6. Shakespeare's daughter was illiterate.
Of William and Anne Shakespeare's three children, two daughters survived: Susannah and Judith. While Susannah seems to have been able to sign her name, Judith could only make her mark. But in this period, literacy was a skill, useful in certain trades and professions, mainly male. Shakespeare was a man of his time, and his time didn't value literacy in women.
7. Shakespeare didn't care about posterity.
At least, as far as his plays went. He took care to supervise the printing of his two narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, because these were prestige projects for influential patrons. But it was not until seven years after his death that his theatrical associates put together the First Folio edition of his plays. In his lifetime, Shakespeare doesn't seem to have cared whether his plays survived or not. Partly this may reflect the low esteem in which plays were held as literature. When Ben Jonson printed his plays and called them his Works, people laughed: how could you call mere plays Works?
8. Shakespeare has no descendants.
His only son, Hamnet, died at the age of 11. His daughter Susanna had no children and all his daughter Judith's children died young. None of his three brothers married. The Shakespeare line effectively ran out within twenty-five years of the poet's death.
9. For two hundred years, the theatre made a dog's breakfast of Shakespeare.
Once the theatres reopened after the Commonwealth, they began a great tradition of doing whatever the hell they liked with Shakespeare's plays. They chopped them up and adapted them into musicals and pantomimes. Most notoriously, they got rid of the whole 'tragic' thing in the tragedies by giving them happy endings. (In 1681 Nahum Tate turned King Lear into a feelgood fest completecomplete with a wedding for Cordelia and Edgar.) Reverence for 'The Bard' had to wait until the nineteenth century.
10. Shakespeare has had some heavyweight haters.
Not everyone has concurred in Shakespeare's greatness as a writer. Voltaire thought Hamlet the work of a 'drunken savage': George III confided: 'Was there ever such stuff as great part of Shakespeare? Only one must not say so!' And George Bernard Shaw, in a review of Cymbeline, got quite carried away in his detestation of the poet: 'It would positively be a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him.' That was in a newspaper. Imagine if Shakespeare had been on Twitter.
Jude Morgan is the author of The Secret Life of William Shakespeare [St. Martin's, $26.99].

Female Inmates Inspired by the Bard

How Shakespeare Is Helping Women Prisoners Help Themselves

Frannie Shepherd-Bates graduated from college with a passion for theater and the desire to use her art in ways that made a difference beyond the stage. But it wasn’t until she watched the award-winning documentary “Shakespeare Behind Bars” that she discovered the unexpected place she could take acting -- and the unexpected good it could do.
“Shakespeare Behind Bars” is a 2005 documentary about 20 Kentucky prisonKentucky prison inmates in an acting group. Shepherd-Bates decided to launch a similar program in her state of Michigan.
She had already co-founded the Magenta Giraffe Theatre Company in 2008, along with fellow alumni from Wayne State University's theater department. As executive artistic director of the small nonprofit organization, she directs, acts, choreographs, teaches and coaches speech. But what Shepherd-Bates, 29, finds most rewarding now is the side project she started two years ago.

Frannie Shepherd-Bates

“I was really inspired by the work that Curt [Tofteland], the founder of that [Kentucky] program, was doing and the positive impact that work with Shakespeare specifically had on the men in the documentary,” Shepherd-Bates told The Huffington Post. “I felt like it was time to explore programming like this.”
She reached out to a friend at Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility, the only female prison in Michigan, with her proposal and began the volunteer-based Shakespeare in Prison project in February 2012. For the first 18 months of Shakespeare in Prison, Shepherd-Bates was its sole volunteer. She now has four other people helping her lead the program, which runs in nine-month sessions.
The women inmates meet with Shepherd-Bates and her team twice a week for two hours at a time in the correctional facility’s auditorium. They share news and updates with one another, warm up with a few theater and improvisation games, and then get to work on the play they intend to perform at the end of the session.
Shepherd-Bates wants the experience to be as democratic as possible, so the women work together to select the plays they'll perform, the sets they'll design and the costumes they'll wear. The first group of women back in 2012 were a bit intimidated at the thought of performing an entire play, so they decided to create a showcase of scenes and monologues from Shakespeare's works. The second session's participants put on "The Tempest." The third group will be performing "Romeo and Juliet" in June.
According to Shepherd-Bates, the prison auditorium isn't big enough to seat all the inmates at once so the group will give multiple performances.
“It’s great for them to be able to perform for the people they live with, do this incredible thing, and have this audience that really appreciates the challenge they’ve undertaken,” she said.
All of the inmates participate voluntarily, and not everyone who joins initially sticks with the program through the full nine months. However, those who stay -- as well as those who jump in along the way -- benefit immensely from the process, according to Shepherd-Bates.
“Women will come in, and at the beginning, they’re very timid about voicing their opinions. But by the end, they know that their ideas are appreciated and valued, and that their opinions matter and make a difference so they’re very vocal again,” said Shepherd-Bates. “Or they might come in from a place of being more vocal -- even to the point of being combative -- and they learn how better to function as part of a team. It’s the complimentary effects on opposite challenges: learning how to speak up for yourself, but also learning how to recognize the value of others’ input.”
Karri Osterhout, the facility's deputy warden of programs, offered a similar assessment of the program's benefits.
"Shakespeare in Prison is a unique program," Osterhout said. "It really helps the women with their communication and leadership skills, and they're empowered through the program. They're challenged to think, behave, ask questions, and put themselves in someone else's shoes."
According to Osterhout, Shakespeare in Prison and the Prison Creative Arts Project are the two theater-based leisure time programs currently offered at the women's prison. The Ann Arbor News wrote on the latter program's 20th anniversary that founder Buzz Alexander had witnessed how "prisonersprisoners 'form a community' around group activities, especially during his students' highly collaborative theater workshops."
Several of the women who have joined Shakespeare in Prison struggled with reading disabilities. Shepherd-Bates believes that working to read, memorize and perform the playwright's lines gave them new confidence.
“We had one woman who, at the end of the first session, said, 'I'm glad I stuck with this because I’ve never finished anything in my entire life.' It's difficult to quantify a step like that, but you know that’s got to feel so good for her,” said Shepherd-Bates.
She decided to use Shakespeare's works because she thinks every woman can find some way to relate to his archetypal characters. Talking about the characters as they figure out how to portray them, the inmate actors can access human truths within the play, empathize with its characters and gain perspective on their own lives.
“So maybe if I’m talking about Macbeth, I have not killed my best friend, but I’ve probably wrestled with ambition and wondering how much control I have over my destiny,” said Shepherd-Bates.
Osterhout also noted that the communication skills and self-confidence the inmates gain on stage seems to translate into how they carry themselves in the prison as well as within their community once they leave.
Shakespeare Behind Bars, the program from which Shepherd-Bates drew her inspiration, has been around long enough to gather some hard data on how beneficial in-prison theater programs can be. Launched in Kentucky 19 years ago, Shakespeare Behind Bars now offers 10 programs in two states. Kentucky's recidivism rate -- the percentage of released prisonersprisoners rearrested within two years for a new offense -- hit 29.5 percent in 2011, which was itself a low. According to Shakespeare Behind Bars, however, the recidivism rate for prisonersprisoners who participate in its programs is a mere 5.8 percent.
For her part, Shepherd-Bates is not permitted to contact any of the women after they leave the correctional facility to learn what happens to them. But she said she has checked public recordspublic records and, to the best of her knowledge, none of the women who have completed her entire theater program, and subsequently been paroled, have since been convicted of another crime or been sent back to prison.
And maybe that suggests one more valuable connection between the stage and life.
“The [acting] performances aren’t perfect, but that’s actually part of what makes them successful. We always say that making a mistake is more of an opportunity to learn than a failure,” said Shepherd-Bates. “When a woman goofs up her lines on stage and another one leaps in to save the day by showing her a script or just moving on to the next line, a bond is formed. They become more of a team there, and they’ve worked together to solve a problem. I am just endlessly inspired by these women

Early American Women's Shakespeare Reading Clubs

It is rare that an academic read with hundreds of references is also a "page turner," but "She Hath Been Reading" manages to merit that distinction. "She Hath Been Reading: Women and Shakespeare Clubs in America" (SHBR hereafter) by Catherine West Scheil is a historical analysis of the women's Shakespeare club movement in the United States which flourished, approximately, from 1880 to 1940. She is simultaneously analytic, critical (in the literary sense), and sympathetic to a movement which resulted in over five hundred social clubs dedicated, to some degree, to reading and explicating the works of the Bard of Avon.

She tackles head-on the question: Why would mostly married women across the nation, from Anaheim to Zanesville, from California to Maine, from Minnesota to Mississippi devote time and effort to reading, debating, discussing, and critiquing Shakespeare's works? Her answer? You'll have to read SHBR to find out.

SHBR consists of introductory materials, four numbered chapters, an appendix which lists the five-hundred-plus clubs which have been created, and the references. Each of the numbered chapters considers a different aspect of the central question: Why Shakespeare clubs? I found Chapter Four to be the most fascinating of the numbered chapters. In it Scheil addresses Black women's clubs with a focus on Shakespeare. A factoid which fascinated me was that in 1893 in Kansas there was a statewide conference of Black women's clubs which included presentations of Shakespeare study groups.

SHBR also explains that while the focus was on the intellectual development of the club members there was also a strong component of feminist and social activism. For example, SHBR notes that many public libraries, including the public library of Dallas, Texas, were founded by Shakespeare clubs within the communities. Other clubs funded scholarships for women to allow them to be academics.

In summary, if you are interested in learning about a quintessential American movement with a feminist component while experiencing a "good read" I highly recommend "She Hath Been Reading: Women and Shakespeare Clubs in America" by Catherine West Scheil.

Candles light New "Blackfriars" Theatre

Can't hold a candle to it: lighting the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse

From Liberace candelabras to fiery breeches, the theatre's Cumbrian-made candles shed a unique light on its shows

Nobody can hog the limelight if there isn't any … Hannah McPake and Giles Cooper in The Knight of the Burning Pestle. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

 

The candles at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse couldn't be more simple and elegant. Most of them are long, slender and slightly tapered, like the fingers of fashionable gloves in Jacobean portraits. Their wicks have been dipped and dipped again in molten Yorkshire beeswax at Ted Thompson's Moorlands chandlery in Alston, Cumbria, but if British bees don't increase their productivity soon, he'll be supplementing domestic output with wax from small beekeepers in Ethiopia.
The Wanamaker keeps around 2,000 candles in store, but that's hardly a fortnight's supply. For each comedy or tragedy, opera or recital, more than 100 are lit in the chandeliers or on the bronze sconces strapped to pillars. They're the lighting, the setting, the special effects; they can edit a production into cinematic noir, or party up an evening into conviviality. Very slowly, their honeyed smell and invisible smoke pervades the unvarnished oak and pine of the wooden casket that is the Wanamaker. Everything about the Wanamaker is experimental, and the candles are downright edgy.
I confess: I'm a candle fan. Nobody quite expected there would be real candles as the Wanamaker was being built – a US mock-up of Shakespeare's indoor playhouse has electric ones. But Martin White, professor of theatre at the University of Bristol and a spellbinder on the history of lighting (you should hear him talk about the smutty fug of mutton tallow dips), proselytised live flame from the start, in a fiery cabal with the Globe's artistic director Dominic Dromgoole. Together, they summoned the architects, the London fire brigade and the Globe's insurance company and auditioned candles. And they got the part.
The safety advisers saw how it would work: there's a megafan above the ceiling that can suck anything out, a smoke detection system that knows the difference between candle smoke and a problem, and the ventilation system makes draughts flow up, not across, so the flames barely even flicker. (Here's the science: a candle is a stick of solid hydrocarbon. Heat from its flame melts a pool of liquid fuel that slithers up the wick by capillary action and vaporises. Keep it upright, and it won't melt gutters in the pool's rim, through which hot wax can spill, and the wick will keep working to the last stub of wax. Tall candles emit a calm starriness; shorter, fatter candles glow on faces.)
So there they all were at the Wanamaker late last year with the first programme of productions finalised, and everybody was enthralled to the archaic novelty of candlelight – as are audiences as soon as they enter the theatre. People come in as the stage managers methodically light the chandeliers dropped on ropes, the luminescence equal to only a few bare bulbs. The audience's eyes adjust to the modest illumination by the time the branches soar upwards to about eight feet above the stage, their optimum height of operation. (Haul them above that, as Ben Jonson once specified, and a general darkness comes upon the stage – flame sheds light more from the side than from above.) The rising brilliance gets a gasp. But does it have possibilities beyond this?
 

  Gemma Arterton in The Duchess Of Malfi. Photograph: Tristram Kenton 

  Oh yes. Dromgoole, directing the inaugural production, John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, picked up White's close reading of early works for the new playhouses – which were in their time dark boxes, almost like cinemas where light also controls image, mood, framing and narration. Even where there were windows, shutters were mostly kept down: indoor theatre was meant to be intimate, appealing to the unconscious as movies do (and with a music score, too). Some Jacobean scripts had lighting cues, demanding the best bright-burning wax candles on stage to make the dark denser when they were extinguished.
"If any of it becomes more important than the story, you're screwed," said Dromgoole. So the candles for The Duchess of Malfi were serviced gravely – snuffed, and their wicks trimmed at the interval to keep them soot-free, and their chandeliers ceremonially raised and lowered. In northern Europe we have 1,500 years of church candle culture, and we still read their rituals as reverence.
And then, lights out! Malfi is the play in which the gothic enters the English imagination, and gothic can't enchant by day. So the chandeliers were put out, and characters carried their own lights, which reflected their true natures. The Duchess was sensuous yet vulnerable, with her face powdered pearly and lit by a single candle. The period's tall white collars acted like those parabolic reflectors in movie-making. Her matching cuffs magnified hand gestures, her rich clothes faded to dark masses. The ambivalent spy Bosola held his polished sconce high, half his profile strongly lit, the other indecipherable. The villains entered with Liberace candelabras in their fists; the mad Ferdinand might well have been, as he claimed, a werewolf, as flames glittering back from his eyes.
Light is the ultimate bit of stage business – Rada needs a candle module and the Wanamaker already has a workshop. Dromgoole had to teach his actors to share their light, move their candles slowly (or risk them blowing out) and relax with them. By chandelier shine, the show's in mid-shot; hand-held candles zoom it into extreme close-up. In fact, Dromgoole went as far as utter blackness for Malfi, where Webster only requested gloom. Jacobean revenge plays on the Globe stage pick up on their horrible comedy, but in the Wanamaker you scream: you just can't see things coming. And candlelight played straight cuts out the camp.
As Adele Thomas, the director of the Wanamaker's current production, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, was told glumly by everybody, nobody laughs in darkness. The first thing that struck her about the place: "not the oak – but that it was candlelit, the biggest elephant in the room." But the steady burn of the chandeliers dissolves the actor-audience fourth wall, just as its playwright Francis Beaumont wanted. In 1607, the audience "plants" sat on the stage and leaned in to interrupt the actors with their demands for an alternative play. In 2014, they bob between pit and stage, which share the same candle power. Nobody can hog the limelight if there isn't any.
Dromgoole was wary of the "National Trust carols at Christmas" nostalgia evoked by candles, but Thomas is going for a generous party atmosphere. The daftness of the show depends on a warmth made visible: brilliant light would scare the fun away. She got her comedy cues by "magpieing" from Droomgoole's Malfi workshop. Whatever he did with the candles that was solemn, she has perverted, to "take the piss out of this reverence".
Candles should be pinched or snuffed, not blown out (which disturbs the fuel pool), so Thomas decided "we must blow a few out". Malfi's candles were lit as if they were on altars. "So we have the worst possible lighting technique", she says, as well as the theatre's first candle joke, where the actors burn their breeches doing the job. There's also a Jacobean smoke machine: a candle and bellows. A funereal lowering of the chandeliers is ruined in Burning Pestle when the corpse sits up in the coffin; as a phoney ghost, he self-lights absurdly with a candlestick under his chin. The pastel costumes are sheeny, taking the advice of Francis Bacon and Inigo Jones that cheap gilt spangles on pink, and white silks show to perfection by candlelight, whereas fine embroidery looks like nothing.
 

 

  Eileen Atkins as Ellen Terry. Photograph: Tristram Kenton 

  These revelations transfer over to the Wanamaker's solo recitals and masterclass gigs. It's not that candlelight flattered Eileen Atkins in her one-woman show as Ellen Terry; more that, as Dromgoole said, actors in candlelight become their own, very flexible, lighting designers. Atkins turned slightly towards the darkness to speak Lear, then, as Cordelia, looked right into the light, and mobile flames made her eyes young and bright. The lighting changed as fast as her voice and identity.
The Wanamaker is an experiment in progress – where it goes, nobody knows. There's no Shakespeare scheduled for 2014, although his last plays were written for the original Blackfriars playhouse: Cymbeline, its dodgy plot points plausible with the music up and the light down; The Winter's Tale, with its statue that isn't, animated by living flame or breath; and The Tempest, a total dream state. Just fantasise the lighting plan: chandeliers jerked up for storm lightning, the masque processing up on to stage with torches, Prospero's magic set out on the floor in arcanas of candles, and Ariel's single taper sparking all over the house. Those Brit and Ethiopian bees need to step up production right now.

Book Traces America's Infatuation with Shakespeare

Books

Measuring America’s Shakespearean Devotion

By WILLIAM GRIMESMARCH 19, 2014

Photo

In May 1911, women (and one dog) of the Wednesday Morning Club of the remote town of Pueblo, Colo., decked themselves out as Shakespearean characters. Credit Scott Rubel

New York has been handed a surplus of Shakespeare over the last six months. To celebrate the 450th anniversary of his birth, there were eight Broadway and Off Broadway productions on offer — enough, surely, for even the most ravenous Shakespearean appetite. But to a 19th-century American, this stuffed schedule might well look like slim pickings.

Two hundred years ago, Shakespeare accounted for one-quarter of all dramatic productions in cities up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Philadelphians, between 1800 and 1835, could see 21 of Shakespeare’s 37 plays. In the decade after the Gold Rush, Californians stood in line to see a raft of them. Some were presented in the palatial Jenny Lind Theater in San Francisco, where miners, the historian Constance Rourke wrote in “Troupers of the Gold Coast,” “swarmed from the gambling saloons and cheap fandango houses to see ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Lear.’ ”

Americans were mad for Shakespeare. For the evidence, look no further than “Shakespeare in America: An Anthology From the Revolution to Now,” to be published by the Library of America next month, just in time for that big birthday.

Photo

Since colonial times, Americans have made Shakespeare their own. Credit Associated Press

The collection, edited by the eminent Shakespearean James Shapiro, a professor at Columbia, begins with a parody of Hamlet’s soliloquy written by an anonymous Tory in 1776, responding to the Continental Congress’s demand in 1774 that all colonists sign on to a boycott of English goods. It starts: “To sign or not to sign? That is the question.” The book ends with “Nets,” a 2004 work by the poet and visual artist Jen Bervin that highlights selected words in the sonnets, eliciting unexpected meanings and associations.

There are discoveries and surprises along the way, like Lord Buckley’s beat-era “Hipsters, Flipsters and Finger-Poppin’ Daddies,” an extended riff on Shakespeare’s most famous speeches (“I came here to lay Caesar out, Not to hip you to him”), and “Shakespeares of 1922,” a vaudeville sketch by Lorenz Hart and Morrie Ryskind. But for many readers the real eye opener will be the heated love affair, richly documented by Professor Shapiro, between ordinary Americans and the most exalted writer in the English language.

“The 25-year period around the Civil War was the most extraordinary,” he said in an interview. “You have John Quincy Adams on Desdemona having sex with Othello, Lincoln reading ‘Macbeth,’ and another president, Grant, rehearsing the role of Desdemona at a military camp. You couldn’t make this stuff up. This is how central a preoccupation Shakespeare was at the time.”

Professor Shapiro, in his introduction, leads off with Grant’s brief turn on the boards, which he rightly calls “one of the more memorable episodes in the history of Shakespeare in America.” The year was 1846, the place was Corpus Christi, Tex.

To distract the troops, a theater was hastily constructed and a production of “Othello” put into motion. James Longstreet, the future Confederate general, was originally cast as Desdemona, but was judged too tall for the part. The shorter Grant took his place. “He really rehearsed the part of Desdemona, but he did not have much sentiment,” Longstreet later recalled. In the end, Grant was replaced by a professional actress at the insistence of the officer playing Othello, who, Longstreet wrote, “could not pump up any sentiment with Grant dressed up as Desdemona.”

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It was not fanciful to think that ordinary soldiers might enjoy a Shakespeare play. Americans in the 19th century absorbed him whole from earliest childhood. “There is hardly a pioneer’s hut that does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in the 1830s. “I remember that I read the feudal drama of Henry V for the first time in a log cabin.”

Shakespeare’s words fell on fertile ground, thanks to the American education system, which stressed public speaking as an essential acquirement in a democracy and regarded Shakespeare’s works as a gold mine of political and moral set pieces.

Excerpts featured prominently in elocution books like “The Columbian Orator” and “The National Orator” and in the advanced McGuffey’s readers. “Both boys and girls gave recitations and performed excerpts from the plays,” Sandra M. Gustafson, an English professor at University of Notre Dame, said in an interview. “This was an essential part of education.”

Women seized on Shakespeare as a way to construct a homemade version of a college class. In the second half of the 19th century, women’s Shakespeare clubs began popping up all over the United States, from Worcester, Mass., to Waxahachie, Tex., some 500 of them in the peak years from 1880 to 1940.

“They’d meet once or twice a month,” said Katherine West Scheil, an English professor at the University of Minnesota and the author of the recently published “She Hath Been Reading: Women and Shakespeare Clubs in America.” “There was pretty intense study, with quizzes on the plots and the characters and memorization exercises. They’d read the roll and as each name was called, a member would recite a Shakespearean text.” Some clubs took down their minutes in blank verse.

Americans claimed Shakespeare as their own partly because he spoke to the grand questions that stirred the nation. “Issues like immigration and race that couldn’t be dealt with directly could be confronted through Shakespeare,” Professor Shapiro said. “We didn’t have a language to express our feelings about these troubling questions. There probably wasn’t another writer on either side of the Atlantic that allowed audiences to work through issues and divisions as he did.”

With the rise of a more robust American literature, the influx of immigrants outside the Anglo-Saxon tradition, and the spread of other forms of mass entertainment, Shakespeare lost his grip on the common reader. Professor Shapiro’s anthology includes Maurice Evans’s preface to a cut-down version of “Hamlet” that he presented in 1944 to an audience of G.I.s in the Pacific with the assumption that most of them had never seen a Shakespeare play. “We could not presume any on their part any knowledge of the tragedy or any familiarity with the conventions with which it is usually associated,” Evans wrote. General Grant must have spun in his grave

Shakespearean Revenge 2014 Style

Tech More: Shakespeare Texting Britain

Revenge: Man Texts 19 Full Shakespeare Plays To The Fraudster Who Stole His PS3

Caroline Moss

To text or not to text? It wasn't even a question. 

When 24-year-old Edd Joseph dropped £80 for a PS3 on Gumtree, he never expected the seller would take his money and run.

As soon as Joseph realized he wasn't going to be receiving the PS3 he rightfully paid for, he did what any human in their right mind would do: He texted "Macbeth" in its entirety to the seller. (via Betabeat.)

“It just occurred to me you can copy and paste things from the internet and into a text message. It got me thinking, ‘what can I sent [sic] to him’ which turned to ‘what is a really long book’, which ended with me sending him Macbeth," Joseph told The Telegraph.

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"Macbeth" soon led to "Hamlet," "Othello" and 19 other plays sent entirely through text message, about 17,424 texts.

“I’m going to keep doing it. If nothing else I’m sharing a little bit of culture with someone who probably doesn’t have much experience of it,” he told The Telegraph. ”I’m not a literary student, and I’m not an avid fan of Shakespeare but I’ve got a new appreciation you could say – especially for the long ones.”

Does the punishment fit the crime? As Shakespeare would have texted, "fair is foul and foul is fair

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/revenge-man-texts-19-full-shakespeare-plays-to-the-fraudster-who-stole-his-ps3-2014-3#ixzz2wXcWaSNu