Anne, 

Check out Lawrence Levine's book High Brow/Low Brow: The Emergence of
Cultural Hierarchy in America.  He makes an excellent case that
Shakespeare, along with the Bible, was the best known literary text in
nineteenth-century America, and it was widely performed to mixed-class
audiences.  Some evidence he gives of this (from memory):

Newspapers routinely quote Shakespeare without attribution and made
constant reference to characters from the plays.  Think of Nast's
potrayal of Andrew Johnson as Iago.  

Major actors, such as the Booths, toured America's major cities but also
performed in every little town in the American hinterland.  Sometimes
locals would perform the minor characters.

Audiences were very "interactive," yelling the correct lines at actors
who made a hash of their part.  Working-class people heavily attended
the theatre, as evidenced by the Astor Place riot against the English
actor--I believe Forest.

If you look at typical theatre broadsides from the 1850s, you will see
what we understand as "high" culture (Shakespeare, opera, Ole Bull,
etc.) mixed in with a plethora of things we would consider "low"
culture: comedic routines, minstrelsy, etc. 

Levine argues that the change to Shakespeare as "high brow" culture
didn't happen until the late nineteenth century.

Gregg Kimball
 

-----Original Message-----
From: Discussion of research and writing about Virginia history
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Anne Pemberton
Sent: Sunday, June 24, 2007 8:33 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [VA-HIST] Shakespeare in Virginia

On an online forum, we are discussin the book The Shakespeare Riots, and
a discussent who is either British or Australian, seems surprised that
Shakespeare was so well attended in the "antebellum" period. He was
under the impression that after the Revolutionary War, Americans tended
to discard Shakespeare and consider his works unworthy of study.

Can anyone elighten me as to whether the works of Shakespeare were
typically a part of libraries in Virginia between the Revolutionary and
Civil Wars?

Thanks muchly for shedding any light on this issue!

Anne

Anne Pemberton
[log in to unmask]
http://www.erols.com/apembert
http://www.educationalsynthesis.org