Shakespeare and the Immigrants

MARGARET KNAPP: There is this spectrum. On one end is the nativist. We see today the term "nativist" very ironically, but their idea was that their ancestors came over on the Mayflower and fought in the Revolution and Civil Wars, and that their culture was superior. It had been proven to be superior. And Shakespeare is the finest product of that kind of Anglo-Saxon culture, so they see their culture as being superior and anything that the immigrants would be bringing over would be inferior. They tended to celebrate Shakespeare privately in banquets and in clubs where they would meet with their own kind.

Then you had progressives, who believed in the melting pot, which is also kind of ironic, because even though the rhetoric said everybody would melt together and create this super race, actually the activities that took place tended to be ways of acculturating immigrants to a preexisting Anglo-Saxon culture. So that's kind of the melting-pot part of the spectrum.

And then there is this kind of "jump into Shakespeare and bring with it your culture, and see if that creates something new." That took longer to happen, but there were immigrant groups in the big cities that had German-speaking theaters, Yiddish-speaking theaters, that did do Shakespeare in their own languages, so that rather than just acculturate into American, they kept their culture, but yet still did Shakespeare.

And there was a production of Merchant of Venice done with Jacob Adler, the great star of the Yiddish theater, playing Shylock in Yiddish with an American company playing the rest of the play in English. There were ways in which other cultures said, well, Shakespeare belongs to us, too, and rather than just try to learn how to do an Elizabethan folk dance, we're going to do Shakespeare in our own cultural traditions.