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Probably J. P. Davis, Ward’s Statue in Central Park, N. Y., c. 1971, engraving in Shakespeare: Ward’s statue in the Central Park, New York, (New York: T. H. Morrell, 1873), p. 1.
The Shakespeare Monument of
A Microcosm of American Shakespeareanisms
From the introduction
On April 23rd, 1864, on the tercentenary of William Shakespeare’s birth, the cornerstone for a statue of the Bard was laid in New York City in Central Park. On the East side between 66th and 67th streets, it would be one of the first statues erected in this park since its opening in 1858.[1] Eight years and one month later, on May 23rd, 1872, the statue was unveiled from draped American flags by its sculptor—Ohioan, John Quincy Adams Ward—and the architect of its pedestal—Englishman, Jacob Wrey Mould.[2]
This essay is an interrogation of the Shakespeare statue and the concentric circles around it, finding that this work is the epicenter of American Shakespeareanisms, the particular and peculiar way that Americans have reckoned with Shakespeare since the nation’s birth. This term, ‘American Shakespeareanisms,’ is an inversion of the title of Henry Cabot Lodge’s 1895 essay “Shakespearean Americanisms” in which he tries to claim linguistic affinity between Shakespeare’s language and American slang, refuting English claims to linguistic/Shakespeare-appreciating superiority.[3] Embedded in this phrase, then, is an American Shakespeareanism in and of itself.
[1] “The Shakespeare Tercentenary: Interesting Commemorative Exercises,” New York Times, Apr 24 1864, p. 8; “Park History” Central Park Conservancy website.
[2] R. H. Stoddard, “Shakespeare: Dedication of the Statue in the Central Park,” New-York Tribune, May 24, 1872, p.2.
[3] Henry Cabot Lodge, “Shakespearean Americanisms,” in James Shapiro, Shakespeare in America: An Anthology, pp. 254-281.
From the body: Harriet Hosmer and the possibility of ‘female Shakespeareanisms’
At least two articles covering the laying of the cornerstone in 1864 predict the sculptor of the Shakespeare monument to be Harriet Hosmer.[1] Probably the first successful ‘sculptress’ in the United States, Hosmer, born in Massachusetts, had already made success with a Shakespearean sculpture, a marble Puck from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Though she was living back and forth between Europe and the United States, her biography records her as in the country during 1864, celebrating the success of her sculpture Zenobia in Chains which was being shown in New York.[2]
Hosmer had interacted with Shakespeare since her girlhood when actress Fanny Kemble would invite schoolgirls to attend readings at her home in Lenox, Massachusetts.[3] In the 1850s up until 1865, Hosmer lived with another well-known Shakespearean actress, American, Charlotte Cushman, and Kemble remained a part of their circle of learned English and American women living in Rome.[4]
Charlotte Cushman is the context necessary for this analysis, as perhaps the strongest example of gender mediated through Shakespeare. Before the Civil War, Cushman’s stardom was made by her cross-dressed performances as Romeo, when she catered to a very period-specific conception of gender, what James Shapiro articulates as “its confused craving for and repudiation of a manly manhood.”[5] This desire for fluid gender was sublimated into an interrogation of Shakespeare, as critics argued Shakespeare had written this inherent feminine conflict into the character of Romeo, “there is in the delicacy and gentleness of Romeo’s character something which requires a woman to represent it. And unfits almost every man for its personation.”[6] Thus, Cushman was a site of American Shakespeareanisms as she used Shakespeare, and American culture used her, to play with gender.
The format is similar for Harriet Hosmer. She was unmarried and, like Charlotte Cushman on- and off-stage, entered into romantic relationships with women (though this was not part of a public persona).[7] Her occupation as a sculptor was masculinizing, with hands-on, physically exertive work. Like the “confused” craving/repudiation that Cushman embodied, Hosmer satisfied entirely opposed archetypes, simultaneously “strong and dainty, talented and unaffected, girlish and masculine, cosmopolitan and a ‘Yankee.’”[8] In proclaiming her as the sculptress of the Shakespeare statue, writers followed the precedent of Cushman’s critics, using a masculinized woman to interpret Shakespeare and reflect the gendered repudiations/cravings of the period.
However, it was too late for female Shakespearean stardom. As Shapiro argues, the age of female Romeos like Cushman ended as the Civil War began and marshal manliness became less fluid.[9] As such, did the incredibly short-lived age of female Shakespearean sculptors, as Harriet Hosmer disappeared from all discussions of the monument within days of the cornerstone unveiling.[10]
[1] “Local Intelligence: The Shakespeare Tercentenary,” NYT, Apr 23 1864, p. 3; "The Shakespeare Tercentenary: Interesting Commemorative Exercises," NYT, Apr 24 1864, p.8.
[2] Harriet Hosmer, Letters and Memories, ed. Cornelia Carr (New York: Moffat, Yard and Company, 1912), pp. 191-192
[3] Ibid, p. 6. Fanny Kemble played Juliet across from another female actress, Ellen Tree, as Romeo.
[4] “Harriet Goodhue Hosmer,” Archival Gossip Collection; Elisa Rolle, “Fanny Kemble,” Queer Places.
[5] James Shapiro, Shakespeare in a Divided America (London: Faber & Faber Ltd, 2020), p. 70.
[6] “Amusements,” NYT, Nov 16 1860, p. 5.
[7] “Harriet Goodhue Hosmer,” Archival Gossip Collection.
[8] Kate Culkin, Harriet Hosmer: A Cultural Biography, (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), p. 6.
[9] James Shapiro, Shakespeare in a Divided America, p. 72.
[10] The mystery of this lost commission is fascinating and frustrating. Though she mentions being in the US at the time, her biography nor any other biographies mention the Shakespeare statue. She continued to be a successful sculptor, though losing out on a commission for the Emancipation Monument that she was working on around the time of Ward’s appointment as sculptor. (see: Patricia Miller, “The Missed Opportunity to the Emancipation Monument.”) Many thanks to Lilienne Shore Kilgore-Brown for her interesting conversations and resources on Hosmer’s involvement in the statue.
From the body: male homosociality in ‘the Club’ and Shakespeare
While Harriet Hosmer lost out on the commission for the statue, it seems that the sculptor was being selected behind closed doors. Despite The Art Journal reporting that the competition for submissions had begun in 1866, with models submitted in 1867, a letter from Henry Kirke Brown evidences Ward already developing sketches for the monument in 1865.[1] In a letter from Edwin Booth, a member of the executive committee for the statue, to Ward, he refers to “the promise I had made you,” before exclaiming “your design was the only one looked at with any degree of patience.”[2] It is possible to assume that there was an informal understanding between Ward and the executive committee that emerged from a conflict of interest: their being clubmates.
An article from the cornerstone unveiling specifies the executive committee for the monument as “composed of members of the Century Club.”[3] This committee at the time comprised James Henry Hackett, William Wheatley, Edwin Booth, and Charles Patrick Daly, all ‘Centurions’ aside from Wheatley. By the unveiling of the statue, 14 out of 18 executive committee members and 38 out of 81 donors were Century Members, including William C. Bryant, one of the club’s “founding fathers.”[4] Most significantly, John Quincy Adams Ward became a Centurion on the 5th of March 1864, a month before the laying of the cornerstone.[5]
The Century, as Mark Twain reportedly called it, “the most unspeakably respectable club in New York,” was (and still is in a slightly different iteration) a private gentleman’s club on West 43rd street, just above Bryant Park, founded in 1847.[6] Their self-published history of 1856 begins,
The proposal to form an association, to be composed of artists and men of letters, and of others interested in the promotion of a taste for the Fine Arts, and which should also unite in its purposes a facility for social intercourse among gentlemen of cultivated and liberal pursuits, was made at a meeting of the members of the Sketch Club…
To men of letters, to whom the pleasures of social intercourse with men of congenial tastes and pursuits are always healthful sources of recreation, such an organization was, in every respect, desirable…[7]
The Association grew out of a previous homosocial institution, the Sketch Club, with the explicitly gendered and classed ideal of the all-rounded, artistically minded, patriarchal/patronizing gentleman. Being “men of letters,” they were the people in this period who, like Abraham Lincoln, were able to conjure pithy Shakespeareanisms at will, over cigars, during dinner conversation, or while promenading around Central Park.[8] We can see this peppering of Shakespearean phrases in Ward’s biographer’s use of Macbeth, seen previously, or in his memorial addresses at the Century, where The Winter’s Tale is used to describe Ward’s deterioration from illness, “I think affliction may subdue the cheek / But not take the mind.”[9] But perhaps the most hilarious, and most relevant to the Shakespeare monument, is the Shakespeare-themed menu the Century used for the six-toast, seven-course dinner celebrating the inauguration of the statue on the evening of May 23rd, 1872.[10] For each dish of each course, there is an associated Shakespeare quotation: for clams on the shell, Taming of the Shrew’s “And kissed their lips with such a clam-orous smack,” for filet of beef with mushroom sauce, “O my sweet beef, I must still be good angel to thee” from Henry IV, Part I. And, like any homosocial dream, the Centurions end with coffee, “The Duke of Berry,” liqueurs, “I never did apply hot and rebellious liquors in my blood,” and cigars, “Whose smoke like incense doth perfume the sky.”[11] In a time before Command-F or Google and even before specialized Shakespeare professors, being able to pluck a beef-related quotation from memory was a status indicator, revealing just how much Shakespeare was stored in these men’s brains.
John Quincy Adams Ward was not just a Century member or a butt-in-seat at their dinners, he was a true ‘man’s man:’ at home in this and other homosocial institutions for ‘men of letters.’ Ward was the Vice-President of the Century from 1906 until his death and was a member of many other clubs such as the National Academy of Design, the Union League, the Lambs Club, the National Arts Club, the Sculpture Society, and the trustee groups at the Metropolitan Museum and the American Academy in Rome.[12] In his memorial address, Edward Cary emphasizes Ward’s characterization as a club socialite, confessing that he didn’t know Ward much outside of the walls of the Century and stressing “there are Century types, and Ward was one of the most satisfactory.”[13]
[1] “Shakespeare,” The Art Journal, vol. 4 (1878), p. 26; Letter from HKB to Mrs. HKB, dated only “N. York, Tuesday 1865,” HKB Papers, p. 1764, Library of Congress. Henry Kirke Brown was Ward’s teacher and mentor in the 1850s.
[2] Letter from E. Booth to JQAW, n.d., typed copy, Department of American Paintings and Sculpture, The Metropolitan Museum, NYC.
[3] “Local Intelligence: The Shakespeare Tercentenary,” NYT, Apr 23 1864, p. 3; “The Shakespeare Tercentenary: Interesting Commemorative Exercises.” NYT, Apr 24 1864, p.8. For a hilarious repudiation of the Century’s involvement in the Shakespeare monument, see “Shakespeare and the Century Club,” The Round Table, Mar 12 1864, p. 194.
[4] “Circular.—No.2” Monument Commemorative of the Tercentenary Anniversary, of the Birth of Shakespeare, in the Central Park, New York. It was Century archivist, Brynn White, who used the term “founding father” to describe W. C. Bryant.
[5] All information on Century membership comes from the convenient “Search Members” function on the Century Association Archives Foundation website. Ward was promoted for membership by his mentor, Henry Kirke Brown, previously mentioned, who was also a Centurion.
[6] Mark Twain, quoted on the Century’s current website.
[7] John H. Gourlie, The Origin and History of “The Century” (New York: WM C. Bryant & Co., 1856), pp. 5-6.
[8] Lincoln was reported as growing up in a house with only a Bible and a couple works of English literature, including works of Shakespeare, and throughout his life is recorded as being able to give Shakespeareanisms at will, for example, Francis Carpenter’s memory of Lincoln reciting Richard III while bored of sitting for a painting. A good introduction to Lincoln’s relationship with Shakespeare is Shapiro’s preface to Lincoln’s letter to James Hackett, Shakespeare in America, p. 181.
[9] Edward Cary, John Quincy Adams Ward: Memorial Addresses, p. 10. [Winter’s Tale IV, iv, 651]
[10] The Century Club Dinner In Honor of the Unveiling of Shakespeare’s Statue, in Central Park, New York, May 23rd 1872. Courtesy of the Century Association Archives Foundation. Many thanks to Brynn White, archivist and executive director of the Century Archives Foundation, for finding this for me and being helpful with my many questions.
[11] The Shakespeare lines, respectively, are: Taming of the Shrew III.ii.178, Henry IV Part I III.ii.2186, King John II.i.166, Antony and Cleopatra II.ii.240, Henry V II.iv.4, As You Like It II.iii.49-50, and Titus Andronicus II.i.142.
[12] Adeline Adams, John Quincy Adams Ward: An Appreciation, p. 23; R. H. Stoddard, “Shakespeare: Dedication of the Statue in the Central Park,” Tribune, May 24, 1872, pp. 53-54.
[13] Edward Cary, John Quincy Adams Ward: Memorial Addresses, p. 8.