Cannon, Charles D.

English

eGrove (Univ. of Mississippi)

Studies in English, New Series Volume 4 Article 24 1983 Kolin, Shakespeare in the South: Essays on Performance Charles D. Cannon University of Mississippi Follow this and additional works at: https://egrove.olemiss.edu/studies_eng_new  Part of the American Literature Commons, and the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Cannon, Charles D. (1983) "Kolin, Shakespeare in the South: Essays on Performance," Studies in English, New Series: Vol. 4 , Article 24. Available at: https://egrove.olemiss.edu/studies_eng_new/vol4/iss1/24 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Studies in English at eGrove. It has been accepted for inclusion in Studies in English, New Series by an authorized editor of eGrove. For more information, please contact egrove@olemiss.edu. PHILIP C. KOLIN. ED. SHAKESPEARE IN THE SOUTH: ESSAYS  ON PERFORMANCE. JACKSON: UNIVERSITY PRESS OF MISSISSIPPI, 1983. 297 pp. $20.00.Ably edited and introduced, Shakespeare in the South: Essays on Performance is an attractive, well-finished book with  thirteen essays  in addition to Kolin’s preliminary “Overview,” disposed under two  rubrics: “Histories of Shakespearean Performances in the South” and “Some Southern Shakespeare Festivals.” Remedying the neglect of earlier histories of the theater that focused on the northeast, the essays treat performances in what are largely coastal or river cities.Though the first performance in Virginia of Shakespeare was in  Williamsburg, according to Aronson, with The Merchant of Venice in 1752, Aronson believes that Richmond’s significance has been over­looked, a number “of sources” having cited Junius Brutus Booth’s “American debut as being in New York when, in fact, it was in Rich ­mond.” In his account of Shakespearean production in Maryland, Thaiss notes that the presence of players in Maryland at Annapolis depended to a large degree on the reception actors received in Philadel­phia and New York.  When Quakers  in  Philadelphia or Calvinist min ­isters in New York made for a hostile reception, the players found Annapolis with its “more relaxed moral climate” a friendlier place to  act. In Jonas Green, editor  of the Maryland  Gazette, there  was one in  colonial Maryland “who supported the stage more strongly than any other colonial journalist.”Alone of the cities treated in Part I of the book, Charleston has two essays. Though Nalley in treating the 1764-1799 period believes there has been too much emphasis on “one brilliant season,” 1773-1774, and  by the 1790s the actors who came to Charleston “were not America’s best,” she notes nonetheless that “Available records from New York and Philadelphia indicate that neither city had a season of Shakes­peare to equal Charleston’s in the early 1770s.” Continuing the chroni­cle for Charleston from 1800 to 1860, Holbein notes the popularity of Hamlet of the tragedies, “the first performance of The Winter's Tale in the United States,” and the possibility that Romeo was played by a woman in Charleston before in New York. In a performance of Mac­beth in 1844 the ghost of Banquo rose from a “trap door immediately at the seat designated” for him. Finally Holbein notes the perceptive­ness of an unnamed editor who protested in print the adaptation (standard procedure at the time) of King Lear: “ ‘We put our veto against the vile alteration which this play has undergone....’ ” Though the City Council may have interdicted a proposed perfor-1Cannon: Kolin, Shakespeare in the South: Essays on PerformancePublished by eGrove, 1983198 REVIEWSmance of Othello in Charleston in 1807, between 1809 and 1860 there were sixty-four performances.In New Orleans Othello was Shakespeare’s first play to be per­formed. Although here and elsewhere in the south the tragedies  were  most often performed, Two Gentlemen of Verona (26 December 1831) and Antony and Cleopatra (8 March 1836) were, according to Roppolo,  first performed in the United States in New Orleans. The Merchant of  Venice, notes Toulmin, was the first “professional performance” of Shakespeare in Mobile on 1 June 1822. A play by Shakespeare was often only part of the entertainment for a night in Mobile and else­where, with entertainment sometimes lasting for four or five hours, but J. Purdy Brown in Mobile had a custom which may be unique. When “a play—be it tragedy, comedy, or melodrama—appeared to 'drag,’ ” he would send on stage “horses and circus riders 'to end the piece.’ ”Concentrating on the “river cities” of Natchez and Vicksburg, where most of the performances of Shakespeare occurred before the Civil War, with more “than  40 percent of Shakespeare’s plays” before  1860 “enacted in the brilliant three-season span of 1836-1839,” Orange  notes the first performance of Shakespeare in Natchez to be of Othello by local actors on 15 April 1814. Two playhouses were built in Natchez  (the first one, completed in “1812 or 1813,” burned in 1821); the second  one accommodating seven hundred as opposed to five hundred for the  first. The new playhouse, “constructed on the site...of a graveyard,” provided support for the staging of Hamlet. Orange notes that Sol Smith said “ ‘Human bones were strewn about....In digging the grave  of Hamlet, I experienced no difficulty in finding bones and skulls....” Sixty miles “up the river” in Vicksburg the Citizens Theater was completed “for the 1836-1837 season.” During the 1837-1838 season plays were presented “five (occasionally six) nights per week during the season....” Beginning his collegiate survey of performances of Shakespeare with a performance at the  University of Mississippi on  20 June 1899, Orange notes the participation of Alfred Hume and Stark Young. Hume later became Chancellor of the University and Young became a distinguished critic of the drama and a novelist. Orange concludes his account by noting a memorable performance, illustrated with a picture of the cast, of The Taming of the Shrew with  a “showboat setting” at the University of Southern Mississippi, 160 years after “a presentation of it at Natchez” in what “was probably  the first of all showboat performances” of Shakespeare.2Studies in English, New Series, Vol. 4 [1983], Art. 24https://egrove.olemiss.edu/studies_eng_new/vol4/iss1/24REVIEWS 199Othello was the first play performed in Houston, (as it was in New Orleans and in Mississippi), performed on 12 February 1839. “Scalpers” got as much as twenty dollars for tickets to Edwin Booth’ s Hamlet in 1887, a highly admired performance of Shakespeare in Houston in the nineteenth century. Rice University has contributed to the performance of Shakespeare, first with Professor Axson’s long  reviews of the performances of Fritz Leiber, whose performance in Hamlet was held in high regard in Houston. McNeir said Axson’s reviews “revealed the virtue of the reviewer and the virtuosity of the reviewed.” In recent years there have been interesting performances of Shakespeare out of doors on the campus at Rice “on the lawn beside  Lovett Hall,” “by the Chemistry Building,” “by the Physics Build­ing,” and elsewhere. Noting that Shakespeare has been presented in Houston “for nearly a hundred and fifty years,” and that he “has had bad times and good times,” McNeir believes “The best times for  him  probably lie ahead.”Lower believes critics have sought to simplify the complex prob ­lem of the color and makeup of Othello and the audience’s perception  of and response to Othello. Lower considers it too easy a solution to see antebellum southerners responding to the play as a warning against “miscegenetic love” with the Moor having no more than “a good tan.” The first play performed in three southern states, Othello was only “slightly less popular” than Richard III, Macbeth, and Hamlet. As Lower sees it, “Theater was separate from the affairs of the day...Antebellum southern audiences regarded theatrical performances as Art, quite distinct from life.” Othello could, and “did move those audien­ces.” On the other hand, “No antebellum southern audience would have been prepared for the ‘untheatrical’ experience of a black actor as Othello.” Concluding his account of Othello on the southern stage, Lower describes the successful performance in Atlanta of the black actor Paul Winfield, who in “ritual robes of native Africa” in one scene chanted “over a pile of...bones, squatting to beat the stage floor rhyth­mically, eventually collapsing from the intensity of the ceremony.” The success of the play contributed to increased support for the arts in Atlanta.Champion’s “ ‘Bold to Play’: Shakespeare in North Carolina” is the first essay in the second grouping treating southern Shakespearefestivals. Beginning with some mention of the earliest dramatic activ­ity in Wilmington near the end of the 1790s “on the lower floor of Innes Academy” and in Fayetteville “on the lower floor of the Masonic3Cannon: Kolin, Shakespeare in the South: Essays on PerformancePublished by eGrove, 1983200 REVIEWSLodge Building in 1801,” he moves to a questionnaire he sent to 111 institutions to ascertain whether “recent productions have been slanted...for particular regional appeal.” Conceding a response of “18 of 111” was a disappointment, Champion indicates that the responses nonetheless indicate “a rather vigorous Shakespeare tradition.” The most “significant Shakespearean news” now is “coming from High Point, the home of the newly formed Shakespeare festival.” With some  sensitive assessments of performances in his essay, Champion con ­veys his enthusiasm for an operation which has combined “rapid artistic maturation” with “prudent economic policies guiding each stage of its development....” He commends the festival as “an excel­lent model for other stages interested in developing such cultural programs.”Kay’s account of the origin and success of the Alabama Shake­speare Festival notes “certain hallmarks” of this festival: “little tam ­pering with the text (usually the Arden edition of the play); gorgeous  costumes; spare effective sets on a thrust stage; a rapid pace, and exuberant sophisticated staging of the comedies.” Less effective with the tragedies (Lear an exception) and histories, Kay notes that no Roman plays have been produced and comedies have been produced twice as often as all other genres. Though it is typical for one of the  comedies or romances to be “relocated from its typical setting” during  a season of the festival, Kay has found two of the ten to be wholly successful. This “astonishingly successful festival” began with a five-  hundred-doll ar loan and a first-night performance attended by twenty-four people in a high school  auditorium that was not aircondi ­tioned. It has developed into a festival with an attendance of 20,000 for  a season and “national recognition from the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Shakespeare Quarterly.”The Globe of the Great Southwest in Odessa, Texas, is largely attributable, according to Dachschlager, to Mrs. Marjorie Morris, “a one-time English teacher, life long devotee of Shakespeare, and an indefatigable money raiser....” The initial performance in 1966 after several years of intermittent construction (until more money could be raised) was Paul Baker’s “six performances of Julius Caesar by his Dallas Theater Company.” Among Dachschlager’s conclusions about the performances in this 418-seat replica of the Globe is that “the comedies are easily the most popular,” with A Midsummer Night's  Dream the most popular. When in 1980 the National Shakespeare Company presented Much Ado about Nothing and Julius Caesar,  the4Studies in English, New Series, Vol. 4 [1983], Art. 24https://egrove.olemiss.edu/studies_eng_new/vol4/iss1/24REVIEWS 201Odessa American hailed the performance of Much Ado as having exceeded “all previous efforts at the theater, both directorially and dramatically.” Illustrating the predominance of the comedies is the fact that of the tragedies only Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and Romeo and Juliet have been staged more than once.Omans and Madden’s final essay treats “Shakespeare in His  Age,” an institute originating with the University of Central Florida  and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. With “Know thyself’ as the theme, conference members presented a concert of Elizabethan music, staged A Midsummer Night's Dream, and pre ­pared a 200-page guide “for the teaching of Shakespeare.” Consequent on the success of the enterprise, a second institute is being planned with “the question of the outsider” as the theme.From the essays as a whole it may be learned that tragedies predominated among plays staged in the antebellum South but come ­dies predominate in the contemporary festivals. Southern audiences then and now have responded favorably to good acting of Shake­speare and do not need—and rarely get—performances calculated to  appeal to the region. For some plays of Shakespeare, as noted earlier,  the first performance in the South was the first performance in the United States. For a brief period performances of Shakespeare in Charleston may have rivaled those in Philadelphia and in New York  in quantity and quality. Finally, contemporary southern festivals have, on occasion, achieved national recognition for the quality of their performances.Charles D. Cannon The University of Mississippi5Cannon: Kolin, Shakespeare in the South: Essays on PerformancePublished by eGrove, 1983

Kolin, Shakespeare in the South: Essays on Performance

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Kolin, Shakespeare in the South: Essays on Performance

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