Women's Clubs, the 1916 Anniversary, and Popular Interest in Shakespeare

MARGARET KNAPP: Around 1916, the 300th anniversary of Shakespeare's death, when there was a lot of celebration of Shakespeare, manuals came out about how to do a Shakespeare play with your high school class and how to involve the students in the shop class to build the sets and the students in home economics to sew the costumes, so that the whole school, whether they were academically adept or not, could be part of this process.

So it became more active in the schools to do Shakespeare or at least to read it aloud and not simply treat it as a literature on the page. But also there were women's clubs, literary clubs, mostly women's clubs, that had started after the Civil War and had become very interested in learning about literature. And Shakespeare would be an abiding subject, it would come up in their cycle of readings every couple of years. Interestingly, because they wanted to do this kind of reading and discussing of literature, and they didn't have a lot of access to books, many of the women's clubs founded the public library in their town, so that 75 percent of the public libraries in the United States were founded by women's clubs. So they provided the place to get together, the means to have something to discuss, and so they were very active in reading and discussing Shakespeare among themselves. So, you had the literary clubs.

There was also a great deal of what we would call adult or continuing education. There were lots of correspondence schools, there were magazines that were published for people who just wanted to educate themselves on various subjects. I have one called The Mentor that came out every month and in 1916 came out with an issue on Shakespeare's England with beautiful photographs in it, so people could really get a sense of what England was like in Shakespeare's day, and in 1916. So there were many ways for people to go to Lyceum lectures, Chautauqua lectures, many universities had extension programs where they would send out their professors to lecture at clubs and at local libraries and the sort, so everyone who was interested could find something out about Shakespeare without having to go to a university and take a class.