Bard in the USA: America’s Shakespeare at Folger
America's Shakespeare at the Folger documents the Bard's New World connection
“I like Shakespeare, but I’m not passionate about Shakespeare, to be perfectly honest,” Georgianna Ziegler laughs.
It’s a surprising admission, coming from the head of reference and associate librarian at the Folger Shakespeare Library, who is also a past president of the Shakespeare Association of America. Ziegler even taught the Bard at the University of Pennsylvania. “I’ve taught a lot of other things besides Shakespeare,” she says. “My personal interest tends to be women writers, early modern women. I’m interested in Shakespeare and women, and I’ve done some work on that.”
Passionate or not, Ziegler is enthusiastic about the new exhibition she has curated at the Folger, focused on Shakespeare in America. “Shakespeare entered this country very early, coming in with the English immigrants to the New World,” Ziegler says. “To be taxt or not to be taxt, that is the question,” is how American colonists spun one popular phrase from Hamlet. French political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville famously wrote about seeing copies of Shakespeare alongside copies of the Bible in log cabins on his tour of the U.S.
“Shakespeare’s language, like the language of the Bible, became part of the currency of American English,” Ziegler says. “And was used all through, from early times to the present.” Although English immigrants may have been the ones to seed Shakespeare, the America’s Shakespeare exhibition includes examples showing the language of the world’s most famous playwright/poet sprouting among other immigrant and ethnic groups, including Italian, Jewish and African-American. It also documents Shakespeare’s influence on several notable American works, from Leonard Bernstein’s musical West Side Story to Measure for Measure, a 2014 poem by Rowan Ricardo Phillips. Shakespeare has even inspired American advertising copywriters.
“I think Shakespeare was often used to sell things because of the idea of class,” Ziegler says. “It brought a cachet to whatever you were selling. We have a good example of that with a Coke ad. It shows that Coca-Cola is American, but it’s also classy.” And the cultural exchange wasn’t just one-way. In the early 17th century, pamphlets reported on a shipwreck off the coast of Virginia. “It’s pretty obvious that he knew these reports about the New World, and that that influenced him when he wrote The Tempest,” Ziegler says.
The exhibition doesn’t include anything related to Ziegler’s personal interest, or to LGBT matters. “It is an important issue in this country, but I just didn’t deal with issues of gender and sexuality,” Ziegler says. But she agrees that it could prove interesting fodder for another exhibition, one “beginning with the whole idea of boys performing as women on Shakespeare’s stage, and then you just kind of take it from there.”
America’s Shakespeare runs through July 24 in the Great Hall in Folger Shakespeare Library, 201 East Capitol St. SE. Free. Call 202-544-7077 or visit folger.edu.
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