Pageants and Performances

MARGARET KNAPP: There was a movement in the early twentieth century—it started in England again and came to America—to do pageants. And pageants were usually outdoor performances, quite often gave the history of a particular town or city, and everybody in the town was supposed to be involved in some way. So you were either a performer, or worked on costumes or sets, or helped write the play. And there were people called pageant masters who would go from town to town and produce these. This was supposed to give everyone the sense that they were in a great place that has a wonderful history and they are part of it. Whether you were an immigrant, or had lived there for generations, you were part of this city or town.

Around 1916, because of the anniversary of Shakespeare's death, a lot of the pageants were about Shakespeare and the Elizabethan period, so probably the most important matron of the town got to play Queen Elizabeth, and the mayor probably played Shakespeare as he did in some towns, and everyone got to do Elizabethan dancing and quite often the characters from Shakespeare's plays would be introduced and they would do a few lines from the plays.

Rarely did they actually do a whole play. First of all, because it was beyond the abilities of amateur actors for the most part, and even community theaters didn't often take on Shakespeare, and secondly, because they wanted to avoid the embarrassing parts of Shakespeare, so they would do very idealized versions of the romantic heroines or the brave heroes, but very rarely get into any of the bawdy nature, or the ambiguous nature, of some of the things Shakespeare presented. So in that period, even in the schools, the most popular play to teach was Julius Caesar. Partly because students were taking Latin then and would have been acquainted with Caesar's own depiction of the Gallic wars, but also because it is in some ways the quote-unquote "cleanest" of Shakespeare's plays. It has the least bawdy in it, so that it was okay for the ears and eyes of schoolchildren.