AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
More than that, they looked to him not only for good stories, fascinating characters, and a wondrous literary style, but also for insights into social behavior, political institutions, varied customs, and the meaning of life itself. They read and reread Shakespeare with mounting appreciation and went out of their way to attend productions of his plays time and again. Unlike Theodore Roosevelt, they were drawn to his plays when they were young and remained ensorcelled the rest of their lives. I still balk at three or four of Shakespeare’s plays but most of them I have read or am reading over and over again.” 4įour presidents-John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, and Abraham Lincoln-may be called Shakespeare-lovers. “I have never before really cared for more than one or two of his plays but for some inexplicable reason the sealed book was suddenly opened to me on this trip. “You will be both amused to hear that at last, when fifty years old, I have come into my inheritance in Shakespeare,” he wrote Henry Cabot Lodge and his wife. He began his career by dismissing Shakespeare’s plays as crude and vulgar, and, then, in 1909, when he was on a safari in Africa after leaving the White House, he began dipping into the Shakespeare collection he took along with him and, almost to his own surprise, was soon swept into the Shakespeare orbit. Bush, it was reported, “did three Shakespeares” one summer when he was president. Bill Clinton liked to quote a passage from Macbeth that he memorized as a boy, because as an adult the words were “still full of power for me.” And George W. He called him “the great William” and took his children to see the plays after reading Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare to them. Garfield took Shakespeare more seriously. Kennedy-read and studied him in school and college, and as adults attended his plays from time to time without becoming passionate devotees. Harding-seem to have had little or no interest in Shakespeare. Some-James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. His successors varied widely in their interest. George Washington had a collection of the Great Bard’s plays in his library at Mount Vernon, and he attended at least two of the plays when he was in New York and Philadelphia. Some of America’s presidents were enchanted by Shakespeare, too. The American people, according to the Shakespeare scholar Lawrence Levine, “were able to fit Shakespeare into their culture so easily because he seemed to fit it-because so many of his values and tastes were, or at least appeared to be, close to their own.” 2 Some Americans, still fiercely anti-British after the American Revolution and the War of 1812, thought that the way Americans spoke English was closer to Shakespeare’s language than the way the snobbish British spoke. Many a household owned just two books: the Bible and Shakespeare. In the nineteenth century they quoted him in letters, read his plays aloud, and turned out in large numbers, even in the newly settled West, whenever presentations of his plays were available. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, when England’s Shakespeare performers began coming to the United States to make the rounds, citizens of the new republic gradually became ardent fans of the great playwright, and some Americans came close to making him an honorary citizen. Not Homer, not Dante, not Goethe, not Chaucer, not Spencer, not even Milton, but Shakespeare was made the chief object of their study and veneration.” 1 Professor Adams announced that with the new Folger Library, the capital city now had three great memorials that “stand out, in size, dignity and beauty, conspicuous above the rest: the memorials to Washington, Lincoln, and Shakespeare.” He went on to point out that for the American people, the “great English dramatist” had become, through the years, “the supreme thinker, artist, poet. The main speaker was Joseph Quincy Adams Jr., a descendant of Presidents John and John Quincy Adams who taught English literature at Cornell University and adored William Shakespeare. On April 23, 1932, Shakespeare-lovers from around the country flocked to Washington, D.C., to attend the dedication of the handsome new Folger Shakespeare Library, with President Herbert Hoover and First Lady Lou Henry Hoover sitting on a platform to watch the ceremony.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |