By Cecilia Rubino
If Shakespeare had been born “just a few centuries later, he would have been an American,” wrote the novelist Willa Cather in 1894. On the occasion of the Bard’s 330th birthday, Cather lamented that few Americans would take note but rhapsodically continued: “Perhaps some day [they]… will realize what Shakespeare did for them, how he dignified their language, exalted their literature…If I were asked the riddle of things, I would as lief say ‘Shakespeare’ as anything.”
I read Cather’s words last month and laughed. I mean, I agree but I’m known for being a little dramatic. I’m a professor of Theater at Lang College at The New School and I have a passion for Shakespeare “as deep as the Bay of Portugal,” so I have to keep my “Bardolatry” tendencies in check. But I’ve always thought of Willa Cather, who wrote My Antonia in her West Village apartment, as someone who was level-headed. Her friend Elizabeth Sergeant in a memoir wrote that Cather wouldn’t even go see a play by Eugene O’Neill because she was “offended by his stark revelations of extreme emotions.” What, I wondered, would Cather make of the depths of human emotion exposed in the many recent New York productions of Lear?
But I really had a laugh when I recently read Cole Porter’s and his librettist Bella Spewack’s “Brush Up Your Shakespeare.” Since I was invited to give a series of lectures on Shakespeare in August at The Jefferson Market Library (which has an auditorium named after Willa Cather) and feeling the need to brush up on my own Shakespeare, I had downloaded a slew of recent texts about the Bard onto my phone. Cather’s article and Porter’s lyrics are selections in a lovely new book, Shakespeare in America: An Anthology From the Revolution to Now edited by Public Theater Shakespeare Scholar in Residence, James Shapiro, which also includes many unexpected gems.
An arresting chapter is an anonymous account of the infamous Astor Place Opera House. In May 1894, one of the deadliest riots in New York City history occurred at what is now the site of the Starbucks on Astor Place. The melee was instigated by an argument between two actors who were performing in competing productions of Macbeth, British performer William Charles Macready and his rival Edwin Forest, an American. Their dispute over who was the better actor and therefore the rightful interpreter of Shakespeare spiraled into violence when working-class crowds from the Lower East Side, who supported Forest, tried to prevent Macready from performing Macbeth at The Opera House. The NY militia fired on the mob and twenty-five people were killed and over 100 injured.
Shapiro, of course, had to be selective about what he included in his anthology. But a significant omission for me was the poet W.H. Auden. While preparing for my upcoming lectures on Shakespeare at The Jefferson Market Library, I have been reading and re-reading Auden’s astonishing Lectures on Shakespeare. After working for the US Strategic Bombing Survey in Germany at the end of WWII and getting a sense of the war’s devastation and the impossible horrors of the Holocaust, Auden decided to return to New York. In 1946-47, he taught a two-semester course on Shakespeare at The New School, which at the time was also a haven for Jewish intellectuals who’d fled from Nazi persecution. At the end of his final lecture, Auden reportedly said:
“I find Shakespeare particularly appealing in his attitude towards his work. There’s something a little irritating in the determination of the very greatest artists, like Dante, Joyce, Milton, to create masterpieces and to think themselves important. To be able to devote one’s life to art without forgetting that art is frivolous is a tremendous achievement of personal character: Shakespeare never takes himself too seriously.”
So whether you are serious about your Shakespeare or just want to “brush up,” it’s the Bard’s 450th anniversary and you are invited to Shakespeare in Action, Saturdays, 3pm at The Jefferson Market Library this August.
Bio:
CECILIA RUBINO wrote and directed ‘From the Fire’ (music composed by Elizabeth Swados) which won the UK/Music Theater awards for best music, best production and best new musical at the Edinburgh Fringe Theater Festival. In April, 2014, she moderated a panel on ‘Shakespeare Around the World’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At Lang College/The New School, Cecilia regularly teaches an Acting Shakespeare class and has recently directed productions of ‘As You Like It’ and ‘The Tempest.’
