Shakespeare in History, History through Shakespeare: Caliban by the Yellow Sands

Percy MacKaye’s community masque, Caliban by the Yellow Sands, was performed in front of thousands of spectators between May 24th and June 5th, 1916 at New York Lewisohn Stadium, as part of American celebrations of the three-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. The play is a fascinating example of a Shakespearean appropriation intended for a particular historical moment and specific socio-political purposes. Not only does it comment on America’s contemporary situation, but also intervenes in it, proposing solutions to current problems, most notably the huge increase of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe. This paper investigates two interconnected methods which Caliban by the Yellow Sands employs to respond to the historical moment: the play’s representations of history and its uses of Shakespeare and the Shakespearean canon. It argues that, while the main thrust of the masque is an attempt to harness Shakespeare’s cultural authority in the service of promoting American cohesion based on the alleged supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon cultural heritage, the text reveals significant ambiguities and contradictions that this operation produces. Shakespeare’s art is shown as a force that can both liberate and subjugate, and Shakespeare as a curiously insubstantial and malleable figure, whose work only fully comes into being with each interpretation and is available for different kinds of appropriation. Despite glorifying the Bard, the masque simultaneously empties him of inherent meaning and transfers his power to those who interpret him

Shakespeare and 'Native Americans': forging identities through the 1916 Shakespeare Tercentenary

This article examines the celebrations organised for the 1916 Shakespeare Tercentenary in three American locations: Wellesley, MA; Atlanta, GA; and Grand Forks, ND. By focusing on these hitherto neglected events, the article extends the investigations, initiated by Thomas Cartelli and Coppélia Kahn, into the ways in which the Tercentenary activities in the U.S. participated in the contemporaneous debates concerning American national identity. These investigations have until recently concentrated almost exclusively on the Tercentenary festivities organised in the metropolitan centre of New York City. An examination of the provincial celebrations in regions as diverse as New England, the South, and the Midwest, indicates that the Shakespeare Tercentenary provided a platform for the negotiation of a complex network of interrelated, and sometimes conflicting, national and local identities

Spartan Daily, June 11, 1954

Volume 42, Issue 159https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/12053/thumbnail.jp

The protectorate playhouse: William Davenant's cockpit in the 1650s

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Boston University Wind Ensemble, October 10, 2013

This is the concert program of the Boston University Wind Ensemble performance on Thursday, October 10, 2013 at 8:00 p.m., at the Tsai Performance Center, 685 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts. Works performed were Masque by Kenneth Hesketh, Serenade No. 10 in Bb Major "Gran Partita", K. 361 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Watchman, Tell Us of the Night by Mark Camphouse, and Dance Movements by Philip Sparke. Digitization for Boston University Concert Programs was supported by the Boston University Humanities Library Endowed Fund