A Joy

25 June 2007



Cliff’s Shakespeare Riots Shines Spotlight on Early US Theatre

President Harry S Truman once said, “The only thing new in the world is the history you don't know.” And this journal profoundly believes that there is no greater intellectual joy that learning something. Thus, Nigel Cliff’s The Shakespeare Riots: Revenge, Drama, and Death in Nineteenth-Century AmericaThe Shakespeare Riots: Revenge, Drama, and Death in Nineteenth Century America is heartily recommended summer reading. A dusty tome of history it is not, but an exciting journey through a piece of American and British cultural heritage that never seems to have been taught in classrooms.

Mr. Cliff is one of those individuals whom one is predisposed to hate on the grounds of his superior talent. He took a double first at Oxford and won the Beddington Prize for English literature. He’s a past film and theatre critic for The Times and is a contributor to The Economist. He writes with an intelligence that makes one feel comfortable yet challenged, and this is only his first book. If his personal life is not on the rocks, it is only proof that the world is grossly unfair.

Mr. Cliff takes the reader back to the first half of the 1800s, to a time when English theatre was beginning to recover from the Regency silliness and when America began to think of itself as a cultural entity (as opposed to merely a republic or a market) in its own right. He writes of Kean and Kemble as if they may appear at Her Majesty’s or the Barbican later this week, betraying a comfort with his subject matter that none could fake.

Even more interesting, though, he also writes of an America that gets lost in the usual texts on American history. One learns that the frontiers of Tennessee and Kentucky were the stomping grounds of itinerant actors who performed Shakespeare in exchange for a few apples or a bottle of whiskey. British actors who visited were astonished to find that when they blanked, the audience of ruffians and pioneers knew the plays well enough to prompt them. The Bard’s language posed no difficulties to those backwoodsmen who grew up with the Bible in the tongue of King James I.

The tale covers the friendship and rivalry of Briton William Charles Macready and America’s first internationally acclaimed theatre star Edwin Forrest. It also reviews the history of Shakespeare in both lands, the political feelings between the two (the Special Relationship was a more than a lifetime away), and in the end, the actual riots that occurred in New York during Mr. Macready’s farewell tour. Mr. Cliff has done the theatre, in both America and Britain, a great service with this work, and one only hopes his next book is nearing completion. In the dark days of the 21st century, it is comforting to know that one springs from a land in which people were once prepared to riot over the proper way to play Hamlet, Lear or MacBeth.

© Copyright 2007 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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