Before television, film and professional sport were developed to satisfy American needs for mass entertainment, there was just theatre. It has been said that in the nineteenth century every new American town had to have a church and a theatre and sometimes the theatre arrived first. While in the ‘old world’ of Europe innumerable stage plays had by then been written and were performed, the work of just one single playwright, William Shakespeare, can be seen to have attracted a mass American audience. Americans did not passively watch the plays; they actively consumed Shakespeare and everything that carried his name.

ON STAGE

As new cities prospered and their populations increased, ‘Macbeth was performed at Lexington, Kentucky in 1810, Richard III in Cincinnati in 1815; and Othello in Louisville in 1817.’ In Pittsburgh, in 1818, the theatre audience was offered both Hamlet and the Hamlet Travestie within a few days. On the east coast between 1800 and 1860, the population of Charleston had the opportunity to see ‘600 performances of twenty-three of Shakespeare's plays’. Theatre records show that Othello was performed forty-one times in Mobile, Alabama, between 1832 and 1860, twenty times in Memphis between 1837 and 1858, and twenty-two times in Louisville between 1846 and 1860.

By 1857, theatre had become a key element in the social life of San Francisco, the important ‘gateway city’ to California and the territories of the West.