Sure can Sing and Dance

Writing in 1850 in the Boston-based Literary World, an anonymous reviewer of Thomas De Quincey’s Biographical Essays expresses the fear that, however much Shakespeare has triumphed upon the mid-nineteenth-century American stage, Americans cannot truly comprehend the language of the Bard (Anon. 1999: 159). ¹ An American audience, still in its cultural infancy, requires both literalism and spectacle: “the story must be told as to children; every circumstance made out and presented with a literal fidelity; instead of having it suggested that ‘the flask is red with wine,’ we must be informed that there is ‘just one pint and a half in that bottle there upon that table, which you see standing in the middle of the stage’” (160). However many productions of Shakespeare they attend, Americans thus prefer theatrical entertainments of a much baser sort: “We want to see and hear everything. Our amusements must be served up to us in solid ‘chunks’. … Of this we have a capital and favorable illustration – in the unvarying patronage of the Ravels, in pantomime, and the black-featured minstrelsy of Christy” (160). Unconscious of the finer points of Shakespearean verse, “of a difference between Shakespeare and Bulwer,” Americans turn to preliterate entertainment: minstrelsy and pantomime, song and dance (160).