“Nor doth this wood lack worlds of company:” the American Performance of Shakespeare and the White-Washing of Political Geography

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DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-8530.26.08
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Keywords:

Shakespeare in performance, utopia, race, slavery, Early Modern history, Black, African American, Public Theatre, American Shakespeare Center, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Texas

Abstract

The paper examines the spatial overlap between the disenfranchisement of African Americans and the performance of William Shakespeare’s plays in the United States. In America, William Shakespeare seems to function as a prelapsarian poet, one who wrote before the institutionalization of colonial slavery, and he is therefore a poet able to symbolically function as a ‘public good’ that trumps America’s past associations with slavery. Instead, the modern American performance of Shakespeare emphasizes an idealized strain of human nature: especially when Americans perform Shakespeare outdoors, we tend to imagine ourselves in a primeval woodland, a setting without a history. Therefore, his plays are often performed without controversy—and (bizarrely) on or near sites specifically tied to the enslavement or disenfranchisement of people with African ancestry. New York City’s popular outdoor Shakespeare theater, the Delacorte, is situated just south of the site of Seneca Village, an African American community displaced for the construction of Central Park; Alabama Shakespeare Festival takes place on a former plantation; the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, Virginia makes frequent use of a hotel dedicated to a Confederate general; the University of Texas’ Shakespeare at Winedale festival is performed in a barn built with supports carved by slave labor; the Oregon Shakespeare Festival takes place within a state unique for its founding laws dedicated to white supremacy. A historiographical examination of the Texas site reveals how the process of erasure can occur within a ‘progressive’ context, while a survey of Shakespearean performance sites in New York, Alabama, Virginia, and Oregon shows the strength of the unexpected connection between the performance of Shakespeare in America and the subjugation of Black persons, and it raises questions about the unique and utopian assumptions of Shakespearean performance in the United States.

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Author Biography

John M. Meyer, University of Texas at Austin, US

John M. Meyer is an artist and scholar who studied at the University of Texas at Austin (Ph.D., 2020). He earned a three year graduate research fellowship from the National Science Foundation for his research on organized violence. His work as a playwright and an actor has been featured in the Austin Chronicle, The Austin American-Statesman, KUT radio, the BBC online, The Scotsman, and The List. His stage play American Volunteers won the 2010 Mitchell Award at the University of Texas, and subsequently made the long-list for the Dylan Thomas Prize in the United Kingdom. Alongside Karen Alvarado he is the co-artistic director of Thinkery & Verse, where he directed and performed in a four-actor “Much Ado About Nothing,” toured Manhattan living rooms with “The Priceless Slave,” and created “Bride of the Gulf,” a transnational collaboration with artists from Basra, Iraq that toured to the 2018 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

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2022-12-30 — Updated on 2023-12-20

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How to Cite

Meyer, J. M. (2023). “Nor doth this wood lack worlds of company:” the American Performance of Shakespeare and the White-Washing of Political Geography. Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance, 26(41), 119–146. https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-8530.26.08 (Original work published December 30, 2022)

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