The Shakespeare Riots

A couple of years ago I managed to score a couple of tickets to see the Irish comedian Graham Norton at the Coronet Theater in Hollywood. If you’ve never seen Graham Norton, you owe it to yourself to try and watch one of his shows. He had a chat show on BBC 4. BBC 4 is the commercial channel in the United Kingdom. That’s the channel that shows all the reality TV shows and the imports from America. It used to be aired here on BBC America, but now you can catch it on the LOGO channel. The LOGO channel is the channel that is aimed primarily for those with alternative lifestyles. Graham’s lifestyle is about as alternative as it gets. He makes the guys in the Village People seem butch.

This wasn’t the first time I’d been to the Coronet Theater. One year I took my first wife to see the play “Bullshot Crummond” at the Coronet. We got there early because we’d never been there and had no idea how long it would take to get there and park, so we decided to go across the street to get dinner and drinks at a restaurant that looked quite inviting, and ritzy. We came in and the host gave us a funny look and then seated us in sort of an out of the way corner. I wasn’t too surprised at this because we didn’t have reservations or anything, so that’s what you expect at a nice restaurant when you just walk in. They waiter, however, also gave us kind of a funny look when he took our order. While we waited for our dinners, we both had sort of a funny feeling of not really belonging there. I couldn’t quite put my finger on why, but I felt ill at ease. So did my wife (Patrick’s mom). Then finally it hit me. “Have you noticed,” I mentioned to Patricia (my first wife), “that we are the only male-female couple in the restaurant?”

It was true. All the tables accommodated loving couples, all of them of the same gender. We had stumbled into a gay restaurant/bar. That wouldn’t be a big deal nowadays, but back then, in the late seventies, it was a little odd. The service was great, however, and the food was fantastic. It was a shame we would never have felt comfortable enough to go back in those days. When we left, we noticed a lot of gay newspapers and magazines in the racks by the door. I shall always remember the Coronet for that experience, even though it was really at the restaurant across the street. After dinner we went to see the play and it was very funny. All in all, it was one of the good memories from that time in my life. But it has nothing to do with this blog.

Thirty some odd years later, I would come back to the Coronet to see this Graham Norton fellow. Graham is sort of an Irish ex-patriot. He lives in England now and loves to chide the Irish about things. It is not easy being gay in Ireland, or at least it wasn’t. I think things are getting easier now. Graham seldom comes to America, so I was surprised that he was playing in Los Angeles. I made a point of wearing my Manchester United jersey the night we went to see the show. I thought Graham would notice it, and it worked. He did talk to us during the show. He teased us for living by the beach.

I am one of the few Americans who enjoy soccer–football, as the rest of the world calls it, and Man United is my team. As happened so many years before, we arrived (this time my wife, Becky and I) well early, so once again I suggested we go to the restaurant across the street for drinks. It was no longer the same restaurant. And as we were leaving the bar, some guys started to give me a hard time about my Man United Jersey. They were Liverpool fans. This was my first experience of football hooliganism. My next experience would be when we went to a Man United vs. Club America game at the Los Angeles Coliseum. There were whole busloads of people shouting insults at each other. I saw two large groups of people hurling football songs at each other. People get intense when it comes to football. Americans don’t get so emotional about soccer. It takes other things to get Americans angry enough to fight. It takes something like Shakespeare.

This may surprise you but Shakespeare does not belong solely to scholars. In the 19th century, his words were on the lips of ordinary Americans, who, in an era passionate about political oratory and religious sermons, regarded Shakespeare as a source of moral instruction and immortal speeches. On one fateful night in 1849, popular adulation turned violent in a deadly episode recreated by Nigel Cliff in “The Shakespeare Riots,” a new book recently published about the bard of Avon (not the cosmetics line).

During the 1800s America was a new country and was desperately trying to improve her image around the world. People here wanted to appear educated and cultured. We wanted the world to know we were more than a country of crusty frontiersmen and wild Indians. Ragged theatrical companies, performing on riverboats or in local taverns, took their audiences to Venice and Verona, accepting payment in potatoes or bacon if money was scarce. Shakespeare counted for a quarter of all plays performed in the United States in the 19th century, and on the frontier his popularity was second to none.

Edwin Forrest was the premier American Shakespearean actor. According to Mr. Cliff, “His fans wanted a larger-than-life hero who gave them electrifying emotions and stirring sentiment, and Forrest was the genuine article, the fearless, self-reliant republican, the Jacksonian giant from the woods.” In a nation throbbing with a sense of cultural inferiority and overrun by English actors, he represented a new beginning. “Let us support this tender sapling and prove to the pedants of Europe that that our soil is fertile in genius and that her children know how to cherish and reward it,” a New Orleans newspaper wrote after a Forrest appearance.

William Charles Macready was the chief rival of Mr. Forrest. Macready was an English actor who played his parts with a bit more restraint in stark contrast to Forrest’s emotive, physical approach. The world was not big enough for both of them, and when the two, formerly friends, fell out, their quarrel took on international dimensions.

Who owned Shakespeare? Which country deserved to rule the future? Class tensions complicated the picture. Forrest was the darling of the working classes. Sophisticates in Boston and New York preferred Macready. When the two actors turned up in New York at the same time, Macready at the snooty Astor Place Theater, Forrest at the Broadway Theater, the stage was set for violence, and New York’s groundlings delivered it, in rioting that claimed as many as 30 lives.

Who would have thought that Americans would be passionate about Shakespeare? “That fellow Shakespeare could sure spill the real stuff,” one ranch hand said after hearing Julius Caesar’s “dogs of war” speech. “He’s the only poet I ever seen what was fed on raw meat.”

A lot of people shy away from Shakespeare, but I find that usually happens only when people read the plays without giving them a good viewing. Try Mel Gibson’s Hamlet, or Kenneth Branagh’s, although Lawrence Olivier’s Hamlet is good too. Hamlet, by the way, was a total rewrite of an earlier Shakespeare play, Titus Andronicus, which is just terrible. It is recognized by most scholars as being just simply awful. For some reason Anthony Hopkins recently did a film version of this play called “Titus”. It got bad reviews also.

Many people do not realize that the great love story “Romeo and Juliet” was meant to be a play showing (a) the evils of the Roman Catholic Church, and (b) the absolute folly of romantic love which was considered a bad idea that could only lead to unhappiness. The purpose of the play was to convince young people NOT to fall in love. Our attitudes have changed a little since those days, although it would seem that many love affairs end nearly as tragically.

So in honor of the bard, go rent Hamlet, or Hamlet, or Hamlet, or Much Ado About Nothing, or a Midsummer’s Night Dream, or even West Side Story and tip one back for Willy. You can’t go a day without saying one of the words he invented, so give him his due. As the ranch hand said, he could “spill the real stuff.” Let’s show the world that Americans still love Shakespeare. Damn straight. And we’ll beat the crap out of anybody who says we don’t.