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Shakespeare, Immigration, and American Identity
The Tempest, now frequently staged in America, was rarely performed in the country from before the Civil War until after World War II. In 1916, it briefly captured American attention through Percy MacKaye's adaptation Caliban by the Yellow Sands, the centerpiece of national celebrations marking the tercentenary of Shakespeare's death. This massive community drama featured seven thousand performers from diverse ethnic backgrounds in New York and Boston, drawing over three hundred thousand spectators. The production, focused on Prospero's attempts to educate Caliban, spoke to one of the era's most divisive issues-immigration-as Congress debated legislation that would soon redefine American citizenship.
America's self-image as a haven for immigrants seeking religious, economic, and political freedom began shifting in the 1880s when 5.2 million foreigners arrived, raising the foreign-born population to nearly 15 percent. Anxieties intensified in the 1890s as immigrants from eastern and southern Europe outnumbered those from northern Europe, reaching 85 percent of all arrivals by 1907. Between 1880 and 1920, an unprecedented 24 million immigrants reached American shores.
Shakespeare's comedies, with their pattern of creating new social orders by including some and excluding others, were appropriated by those opposing immigration. In The Tempest, Caliban alone is excluded at the end, left on the island while everyone else departs. This pattern of community-building through exclusion made Shakespeare's works surprisingly useful to immigration restrictionists.
The irony of positioning Shakespeare as anti-immigrant is striking given his own writing about refugees in Sir Thomas More, where he crafted a powerful speech admonishing nativists who would "put down strangers" and urging empathy for "wretched strangers" with "their babies at their backs and their poor luggage." Yet rather than being seen as an advocate for refugees, Shakespeare's supposed "Anglo-Saxon identity" was marshaled by scholars and politicians seeking to restrict immigration.
Henry Cabot Lodge, the leading Congressional voice for immigration restriction for over twenty-five years, was particularly instrumental in this effort. Born in Massachusetts in 1850 to a family with English ancestry, Lodge earned one of Harvard's first doctorates in history with a thesis on Anglo-Saxon law. Lodge's political shift from supporting open immigration to opposing it reflected his racial views. In 1891, he published three linked essays arguing that recent immigrants posed both economic threats and "threatened deterioration." His solution was a literacy test requiring immigrants to read and transcribe passages from the Constitution in their native language.
The notion of Shakespeare as an American hero emerged gradually. In 1877, Joseph Watson claimed Americans could better appreciate Shakespeare's works "untrammeled by monarchical surroundings," though British actors rejected Americans' claim to Shakespeare, calling them "a race of yesterday, mere upstarts." By century's end, however, the concept of racial inheritance had shifted-Americans were now considered racially Anglo-Saxon from their founding, making Shakespeare's inheritance rightfully shared.
Charles Mills Gayley of UC Berkeley, alongside Lodge, did the most to connect Shakespeare to America's racial identity and immigration restriction. His 1917 book Shakespeare and the Founders of Liberty in America authorized the xenophobic version of American history that Lodge had been promoting in Congress. Gayley's work portrayed new immigrants harshly as "superstitious," "grasping," and potentially "anarchists," while insisting America was and must remain Anglo-Saxon.
By 1916, Shakespeare's Caliban had become a common metaphor for immigrants in American discourse. Sociologist Edward Alsworth Ross, after observing immigrants in New York's Union Square, wrote that "the Caliban type shows up with a frequency that is startling," describing them as "hirsute, low-browed, big-faced persons of obviously low mentality." In his 1914 book The Old World in the New, Ross claimed these "sub-common" immigrants had physical defects in every face and warned that admitting them was "racial suicide."
In 1915, playwright Percy MacKaye was commissioned to create Caliban, a large-scale outdoor masque for Shakespeare's tercentenary. MacKaye saw The Tempest as the perfect vehicle for his didactic approach, with its four main characters-Prospero, Miranda, Caliban, and Ariel-offering a framework for celebrating literary culture while demonstrating Caliban's education. Yet MacKaye's interpretation was problematic. He portrayed Caliban as a bestial Missing Link, casting the six-foot-four Lionel Braham who appeared in production photos as fanged and subhuman, with blackened skin, thick body hair, and clawlike fingers.
On May 24, 1916, ten thousand New Yorkers filled Lewisohn Stadium to witness MacKaye's Caliban. The production portrayed Caliban's journey from primitive beast to civilized being through exposure to great cultural works, particularly Shakespeare's plays. In his first entrance, Caliban crawls on his belly, barely able to speak, hissing and stuttering. The production concludes with Shakespeare himself replacing Prospero onstage. Caliban prostrates himself at Shakespeare's feet, urging the audience to join him: "You millions that are me...Bow down, bow down, and on this bed of clay/Together let us dream another world." As the orchestra breaks into "The Star-Spangled Banner," the production seamlessly shifts from bardolatry to patriotism.
Shakespeare continued to be implicated in American immigration debates long after MacKaye's production. At the 1932 opening of the Folger Shakespeare Library, the institution's first director of research, Joseph Quincy Adams, delivered a lecture celebrating Shakespeare as a bulwark against immigration. He lamented how the "first great wave" of northern Europeans had begun "to alter the solid Anglo-Saxon character" of America, while later immigrants from southern and eastern Europe "swarmed into the land like the locust in Egypt." Fortunately, Adams claimed, compulsory education and the required study of Shakespeare's works had stemmed this tide.
