Shakespeare in Immigrant New York

Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited

Folger Shakespeare Library

Arts

4.7 • 837 Ratings

🗓️ 15 October 2019

⏱️ 32 minutes

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Summary

In the 19th century, a new influx of immigrants from Eastern Europe and Italy arrived in the United States. Many of them settled in the Lower Manhattan. Reformers wondered how these new arrivals could be assimilated into American culture. Their solution? Give ‘em Shakespeare. But at the same time, these recent immigrants were staging Shakespeare’s plays themselves, in their own languages and adapted for their own cultures, sharing performance spaces and loaning one another costumes and props in a vibrant Lower East Side theater scene. We talk to Dr. Elisabeth Kinsley about her new book, Here in this Island We Arrived: Shakespeare and Belonging in Immigrant New York. In it, Kinsley, an associate Dean at Northwestern University, explores American national identity and cultural belonging through Shakespeare. Kinsley is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published October 15, 2019. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, “We Being Strangers Here,” was produced by Richard Paul. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Ben Lauer is the web producer. We had technical help from Paul Luke at Voice Trax West in Studio City, California, and Kayla Stoner and Kristin Samuelson of Northwestern University's Global Marketing and Communications Department.

Transcript

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0:00.0	It's a question that repeats and repeats in America.
0:04.0	Immigrants are coming in, in huge numbers.
0:08.0	Some people just say, close the doors.
0:11.0	Others say, no, take them in.
0:15.0	But then those people have a debate.
0:18.0	Once we take them in, how do we make them Americans? Like I said, it repeats
0:24.6	and repeats. The last time it happened, they thought they had an easy answer. How do you make
0:30.8	immigrants into Americans? Simple. Give them Shakespeare. From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited.
0:45.3	I'm Michael Whitmore, the Folgers director.
0:48.3	As the 19th century came to a close, immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe flooded into America, many settling
0:56.1	in New York's Lower East Side. During this time, there was a strain of progressive reformer who
1:02.3	thought that, of all things, it was Shakespeare, his language and his characters, that
1:07.9	held the key to teaching these immigrants English, and more importantly,
1:11.9	making them into Americans. Meanwhile, at the same time, sometimes only blocks from where
1:18.2	these reformers ran their settlement houses, immigrants themselves were performing and adapting
1:23.3	Shakespeare in their own native languages. All of this is a piece of American history that hasn't
1:29.7	been deeply explored until now. In a new book, Dr. Elizabeth Kinsey, an associate dean at Northwestern
1:36.9	University, looks at precisely why and how Shakespeare was interwoven into the lives of three
1:43.5	European immigrant groups in the late
1:45.7	19th century in New York. Her book is called Here in This Island We Arrived, Shakespeare and
1:52.6	Belonging in Immigrant New York, and she came into the studio recently to talk to us about it.
1:58.4	We call this podcast, We Being Strangers Here.
	...

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