- Early returns
- Lost and found
- On the radio
- Faculty awards and activities
- A geologist’s work in progress
- Buried treasure
- From the Folger
- From the Archives
- Verbatim
President Herbert Hoover (left) and George Arthur Plimpton, chairman of the Amherst trustees, outside the new Folger Shakespeare Library in 1932. From the Folger
The Folger Shakespeare Library turns 75 on April 23, 2007. As the nation’s leading Shakespeare institution, we will focus our celebration on one deceptively simple idea: Shakespeare in American life. Exploring the fascinating story of how the national poet of Britain became an integral part of American life and culture has already led us into many unexpected byways and deepened our understanding of both Shakespeare and the American identity. At the same time, by documenting the Americanization of Shakespeare, we find ourselves commemorating the impulse that led to the founding of the Folger. For Henry Clay Folger, Class of 1879, and his wife, Emily, the love of Shakespeare that led them to amass the world’s largest Shakespeare collection dovetailed naturally with establishing a major Shakespeare institution in the U.S. capital.
In March, an exhibition in our Great Hall, co-curated by Alden Vaughan ’50 and Virginia Mason Vaughan, will cover such topics as Shakespeare in the New World, Shakespeare and the African-American experience and Shakespeare’s influence on American musical comedy (think Kiss Me, Kate and West Side Story, for starters). The exhibition will also document a ferociously debated topic in 19th-century America: whether Shakespeare espoused republican values or was a monarchist who had little to contribute to American ideals.
We’ve also worked with award-winning documentary producer Richard Paul to create an ambitious radio documentary. Narrated by Law and Order actor Sam Waterston, Shakespeare in American Life will be broadcast in three one-hour segments on PRI public radio stations beginning in April. The documentary will allow us to bring documents alive through sound and to add to the story the voices of American educators, directors, producers, scholars and politicians. To complement the shows, we’ve produced a Website packed with photography, audio and video material, games for children and lesson plans for teachers. The Website will include a timeline of Shakespeare’s progress through American history and culture. We hope that teachers especially will find its materials useful and new.
But that’s not all. We’re also exploring the curious tale of the history of teaching Shakespeare in the United States. The subject, we were surprised to discover, is practically untouched as a focus of research and study. Our research division is organizing a March 2007 conference on “Shakespeare in American Education, 1607-1934” (spanning the time period from the founding of Jamestown to the performances of popular, ultra-short versions of Shakespeare at the 1934 Chicago World’s Fair). Participants will discover fascinating connections among the teaching of Shakespeare, the history of American oratory, the standardization of high school curricula and the assimilation of new Americans.
Funds for the radio documentary and Website have come from a variety of sources, including the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, which has designated both the radio documentary and the conference as parts of its “We the People” program.
The message implicit in all our anniversary programs is, in the end, quite simple: Shakespeare occupies a central place in American culture, and has done so virtually from the beginning. And since 1932, the Folger Shakespeare Library has itself played a central role in the Americanization of England’s national poet.
—Gail Kern Paster
Photo: Folger Shakespeare Library Archives