How has the United States celebrated Shakespeare’s anniversaries? |
The first Shakespeare anniversary generally noted in the United States was probably 1864, the 300th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth. Despite the nation’s overwhelming focus on the Civil War, a small group of actors and others in New York took time to seek permission to erect a statue of Shakespeare in New York’s Central Park. Fundraising began that year, although the statue was not unveiled until 1872. New York’s major German-language theater, the Altes Stadttheater, put on an unusually large number of Shakespeare productions in German that season, and Ralph Waldo Emerson paid tribute to Shakespeare in a speech at the Saturday Club in the city. Years later, a reprint of that speech inspired Henry Clay Folger’s lifelong interest in Shakespeare.
The biggest American Shakespeare anniversary celebration, in 1916, was the Shakespeare Tercentenary, marking the 300th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. US silent-movie studios produced Antony and Cleopatra and two rival versions of Romeo and Juliet, and there was a vogue for Elizabethan folk dancing. The New York Times issued a two-month series of articles about Shakespeare by distinguished international contributors. In New York, huge crowds attended a “community masque” called Caliban by the Yellow Sands, staged by its author Percy MacKaye; the production was repeated in Boston the next year. Other new Shakespeare- and Elizabethan-themed community masques were produced in such cities as Atlanta, Georgia; Grand Forks, North Dakota; and Wellesley, Massachusetts. (In the Wellesley masque, Will O’ the World, one character told an approving Queen Elizabeth that there was a women’s college just down the road from the performance.) In St. Louis, Missouri, there was a giant outdoor production of As You Like It. The Drama League of America reached out to America’s schools with a booklet offering “suggestions for school and college celebrations.”
In 1964, America took note of the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth with exhibitions, scholarly conferences, books and magazine articles, and special performances. In February of that year, just three months after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced the establishment of a national Shakespeare Anniversary Committee to publicize and encourage such events, with former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy as the honorary chair. For many institutions, the 400th anniversary was a chance to do something special. The San Diego Old Globe acting company, for example, embarked on its first major tour outside its home theater, putting on productions of Much Ado About Nothing and Macbeth at Stanford University that June.
Mackaye. Caliban by the Yellow Sands. New York, 1916. Cover. Folger Shakespeare Library.