It's 1852, and a dusty, covered wagon creaks along a dirt road.

Just past the town we now call Rancho Cordova,

39 miles east of Sacramento on the south fork of the American River.

The wagon isn't filled with settlers.

It's not carrying beans, books, or whiskey.

This is a remarkable wagon, though it won't stay remarkable for long.

This is a wagon full of Shakespeare.

From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I'm Mike Whitmore,

the Folgers director. We call this podcast

The West yet glimmers with some streaks of day. Gold was discovered in California in 1848.

Within months, a flood of people poured into the state. Some came to find their fortunes mining.

Others came to make a fortune off the miners themselves, people like saloon keepers, prostitutes,

and from a very early time, actors and performers. When we think of Shakespeare in the American West, the mind immediately

focuses on Hollywood. But as you'll hear, we can trace the history of Shakespeare's life on the

American West Coast to long before then. At the time we recorded this podcast, the Library

Foundation of Los Angeles had taken the Folger exhibition called

America's Shakespeare, enhanced it with a wealth of new material from the West Coast,

and retitled it, America's Shakespeare, The Bard Goes West,

following the quirks and turns of Shakespeare along the Pacific.

Stephen Dickie, a senior lecturer in the English department at UCLA, is the exhibition's curator.

He came into the studio recently to talk about it with Barbara Bogave.

You know, Stephen, when I first heard about the exhibit, I thought of a quintessential Los Angeles

...