ABSTRACT

Theatres in mid-nineteenth-century America served much the same function as the Internet today. They were places where audiences drawn from different socioeconomic groups could gather to be entertained, to argue about social and political issues, and to express opposition to the tastes and values of one another. Lawrence W. Levine writes:

How closely the theater registered societal dissonance can be seen in [working-class] audiences’ volatile reaction to anything they considered condescending behavior, out of keeping with the unique nature of American society. Anything even bordering on unpatriotic or aristocratic behavior was anathema.

(Levine 1988: 60) This jingoistic attitude posed a particular problem for English actors, whose tours had dominated Shakespearean performances in America since the eighteenth century and who were widely recognized as the most skilled interpreters of a playwright whom Americans were in the process of claiming as their own. These actors increasingly were viewed as representatives of a culture not only effete and élitist, but fundamentally at odds with the rugged individualism and democratic self-determination that Americans prized.