Shakespeare and Mass Marketing

KIM STURGESS: Shakespeare becomes a mass-market item. Effectively, he becomes a celebrity. I mean, he's dead, of course, but he becomes a celebrity in the United States and he becomes a brand. He is useful. He is recognized, the plays are recognized. So if you do have a product that you are trying to advertise, if you're trying to actually get a message across, if you use the language of Shakespeare, or the imagery of Shakespeare, you will get more recognition from your target market. So, yes, patent medicines. Almanacs used quotations of Shakespeare to run through various important dates throughout the year.

Several gold mines, particularly in Nevada, when claims were being staked and they were looking for names, they called them, like, Desdemona, Ophelia. There is actually a city, now a ghost town, unfortunately, in New Mexico called Shakespeare. So he is used by a wide range of people.

We also then, of course, get outside of the theater, we have novelists start writing, and when you're sitting, trying to write a story, it's very easy again to pick on something you think your wide readership would know. And we have a book in 1855, Border Beagles. And this particular book is all about cowboys and about detectives fighting outlaws in the southern states. And yet the hero protagonist is a young man who actually performs Shakespeare on the stage in between fistfights, and quotes Shakespeare to people as he shoots at them. And this is 1855.

We get Shakespeare used in dime novels, a type of publishing which is aimed at a young audience, at possibly a young male audience, we have Shakespeare incorporated in here as well, as well as in burlesques and all forms of art. Shakespeare appears as a subject, as a muse, as a means of selling the product.