Shakespeare as Popular Entertainment in the 1800s

KIM STURGESS: I think there was a very wide consumption of Shakespeare. And the reason why I use the word "consumption" is I'm suggesting people ate large volumes of the plays. It didn't necessarily mean that they thought very carefully about everything they consumed. It didn't mean they had developed a refined taste and they were able to actually separate the different types of words coming from the actors. They looked at it, they absorbed it as a whole. They saw the plays not unlike the way the seventeenth-century London Bankside audience did, who were also not necessarily the best educated population in the world.

And I think they saw it as entertainment. They identified themselves with certain characters, they could see human aspects, they could see the tragedy, they could see the pain and the pathos, and they absorbed and enjoyed it—those elements. What I'm not suggesting is that every American who saw a play in the year 1820 in Cincinnati understood every aspect that a modern twentieth-century scholar might understand. So they took what they needed from Shakespeare, they enjoyed it, but of course we could also say that they were seeing Shakespeare at a time long before we have the twentieth-century complicated cultural theories much loved by professional academics. So they saw Shakespeare quite simply, and I would suggest that Shakespeare performed simply is very simple.

There's a lovely, a small little anecdote of a person who we do know was illiterate who paid somebody to read Shakespeare to him, and this is a gentleman called Jim Bridger, the man who founded Fort Bridger in Wyoming. And he's known to actually have traded a pair of cattle worth about 125 dollars to a passing wagon train, so that he could get their copy of Shakespeare. But he couldn't read, he was illiterate, and he then had to pay a local boy to read this to him. And it was remarked by people who later knew him, he wandered around quoting great swathes of Shakespeare for all sorts of points in his life. But this was a man, of course, who couldn't read a thing.