Folger Shakespeare Library
 
 
Stage and Screen Education and Inspiration The American Identity

 

The 1916 Caliban Masque and American Immigrants
The 1916 Caliban Masque and American Immigrants
Thomas Cartelli, NEH Professor of Humanities and professor of English, Muhlenberg College

THOMAS CARTELLI: There's a wonderful series of events that occurred in 1916—in fact, these events occurred all over the world—which was the celebration of the Shakespearean tercentenary, 300 years since Shakespeare's death.

In New York this event was grandly celebrated by a kind of master of community drama named Percy MacKaye. MacKaye got together groups of professional actors, amateur actors, members of ethnic clubs from all over New York, and wrote something that he called a masque, called Caliban by the Yellow Sands, which he had performed in Lewisohn Stadium in the city of New York, right at the edge of Manhattan, over a ten-day period with an audience that across the ten days amounted to about 135,000 people.

The masque essentially celebrates, during the period of World War I, the need to depend upon and respect the genius of Shakespeare—Shakespeare as a tamer of the wild beast, Shakespeare as the domesticator of the uncivil and of the barbaric, Shakespeare who points us the way to the stars, almost. Shakespeare becomes a figure like Dante, almost, when he comes out on Mount Purgatory and finds himself under the stars.

I read the masque as something that is slightly more insidious, insofar as this was the period, in America at least, of great anxiety, great fear about the large numbers of immigrants that had flocked to New York, to Chicago, and to other cities on the East Coast, and seemed to be threatening the hold on American identity that the Anglo-Saxon elite, you might say, had held onto for so very long. And that what MacKaye does in the masque ultimately is to dramatize how and why Caliban—and Caliban, he equates, MacKaye essentially equates, with immigrants—Caliban's need to submit to this genius of the Anglo-Saxon imagination, the Anglo-Saxon genius for order if you like, the Anglo-Saxon destiny of the country itself. So that the entire masque becomes a kind of dramatization of the need for a melting pot in which national and cultural differences can be melted away so that everybody can live together in the American grain.