5 March

Shakespeare comes to America. Very slowly

1750 There is dispute as to where and when the first Shakespeare was performed in the American colonies – much of the confusion arising from the difficulty of distinguishing between amateur and professional performance.

The first permanent playhouse was built in Williamsburg, Virginia in 1716. It is hard to believe that some Shakespeare productions did not grace its boards. An amateur performance of Romeo and Juliet is recorded as having taken place there on 23 March 1730.

The first professional performance of a Shakespeare play is commonly assumed to have taken place on 5 March 1750, when the scratch Murray and Kean troupe performed Richard III in New York. Louis Hallam’s wholly professional ‘Company of Comedians’ performed The Merchant of Venice at Williamsburg in 1752, which is taken by the Cambridge Guide to American Theatre as the true starting point.

What is clear is that theatre – and specifically Shakespearian theatre – was slow to take hold in the Colonies. Two reasons are put forward: the strong residual antagonism of Puritanism, which regarded the theatre as a sink of iniquity; and republican resistance to England’s national poet (the anti-monarchical Richard III might have appealed on that ground).

Puritan hostility was probably the stronger factor (there is, for example, no volume of Shakespeare in the 1682 Harvard Library catalogue, compiled by Cotton Mather). Lingering Puritanism also inhibited the growth of any native theatre culture. The first professional performance in America of a play by an American playwright was as late as 1767 (Thomas Godfrey’s The Prince of Parthia – until well into the 19th century, the company of American dramatists is as wholly undistinguished as Godfrey).

Hostility to the stage climaxed in the period immediately preceding the Revolution. The first Continental Congress, held on 20 October 1774, banned:

every species of extravagance and dissipation, especially all horseracing, and all kinds of gaming, cock fighting, exhibitions of shows, plays, and other expensive diversions and entertainments.

No American cakes and ale. But not, thankfully, for long.