Shakespeare in Montana: Big Sky Country’s Love Affair with the World’s Most Famous Writer

By Gretchen E. Minton

Tracing more than two centuries of history, Shakespeare in Montana uncovers a vast array of different voices that capture the state’s love affair with the world’s most famous writer. From mountain men, pioneers, and itinerant acting companies in mining camps to women’s clubs at the turn of the twentieth century and the contemporary popularity of Shakespeare in the Parks throughout Montana, the book chronicles the stories of residents across this incredible western state who have been attracted to the words and works of Shakespeare. Minton explores this unique relationship found in the Treasure State and provides considerable insight into the myriad places and times in which Shakespeare’s words have been heard and discussed. By revealing what Shakespeare has meant to the people of Montana, Minton offers us a better understanding of the state’s citizens and history while providing a key perspective on Shakespeare’s enduring global influence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Release date: May 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9780826361578

Gretchen E. Minton

Gretchen E. Minton is a professor in the Department of English at Montana State University. She is also the editor of several books and critical editions, including Timon of Athens and The Revenger’s Tragedy.

Book preview

SHAKESPEARE IN MONTANA

Shakespeare

IN MONTANA

BIG SKY COUNTRY’S LOVE AFFAIR WITH

THE WORLD’S MOST FAMOUS WRITER

GRETCHEN E. MINTON

© 2020 by the University of New Mexico Press

All rights reserved. Published 2020

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Minton, Gretchen E., 1970– author.

Title: Shakespeare in Montana: Big Sky Country’s love affair with the world’s most famous writer / Gretchen E. Minton.

Description: Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019053551 (print) | LCCN 2019053552 (e-book) | ISBN 9780826361561 (paperback) | ISBN 9780826361578 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Appreciation—Montana. | Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Stage history—Montana. | Theater—Montana—History.

Classification: LCC PR3105.M56 2020 (print) | LCC PR3105 (e-book) | DDC 792.09786—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019053551

LC e-book record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019053552

Cover illustrations courtesy of Vecteezy.com

Designed by Felicia Cedillos

For Kevin,

who taught me about the American West,

who told me about the mountain men,

who researched in advance of me as well as by my side,

who drove me across our vast state time and again,

who pictured this project both metaphorically and literally,

who made it possible, in every way, for me to write these words.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Preface

Prologue. Waiting for the Shakespeare

1. Men of the Mountains

INTERLUDE 1 | COWBOYS

2. The Golden Age

INTERLUDE 2 | CIPHERS

3. Women’s Roles

INTERLUDE 3 | ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATIONS

4. Travelers and Settlers of the Theatre

INTERLUDE 4 | THE MARGINS

5. In the Schoolhouses

INTERLUDE 5 | ARTISTS

6. Freeing Shakespeare

Epilogue. Saved by Shakespeare

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

Map 1. Map of Montana

Figure 1. Lightning storm on Poker Jim Butte, 2019

Figure 2. View from the Poker Jim Butte fire tower, 2019

Figure 3. MSIP performance on Poker Jim Butte, 1974

Figure 4. A boy watches the actors put up the stage on Poker Jim Butte, 2014

Figure 5. Jim Bridger, circa 1859–1875

Figure 6. Granville Stuart, 1883

Figure 7. Sketch of a Great Falls performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1902, by Charlie Russell

Figure 8. Thomas Dimsdale’s schoolhouse in Virginia City

Figure 9. 1802 edition of Shakespeare’s plays

Figure 10. John S. Jack Langrishe

Figure 11. Mary Sheehan Ronan, circa 1873

Figure 12. Remains of a bank in the ghost town Kendall

Figure 13. Owen’s Cipher Wheel

Figure 14. West Side Shakespeare Club program from 1899 to 1900

Figure 15. Ellen Terry headline from Missoula newspaper, 1910

Figures 16a and 16b. Watercolors from the Fortnightly Club’s performances

Figure 17. Copper-covered program from West Side Shakespeare Club, 1936–1937

Figure 18. Helena Modjeska as Rosalind, circa 1893

Figure 19. Daniel Bandmann as Shylock, circa 1863

Figure 20. Frederick Warde and Louis James

Figure 21. A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Butte’s Columbia Gardens, 1900

Figure 22. Ledger book from the Dunbar Art and Study Club, 1922

Figure 23. Jess Lee Brooks as Macbeth, 1937

Figure 24. Ursuline Academy production of The Winter’s Tale, 1916

Figure 25. Program for "The Merchant of Venice: Up to Date," 1920

Figure 26. Springhill Elementary School production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 2017

Figure 27. Poster from the Belt Valley Shakespeare Players Tempest production, 2017

Figure 28. Photograph of swans by Evelyn Cameron, 1913

Figure 29. Norman Maclean lecturing at the University of Chicago, 1970

Figure 30. First season of MSIP, 1973

Figure 31. Children watching MSIP’s production of Macbeth, 2017

Figure 32. MSIP’s Taming of the Shrew production, 2015

Figure 33. MSIP actor and truck near White Sulphur Springs, 2005

Figure 34. MSIP stage at Makoshika State Park, 2015

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

When I was offered a tenure-track position in the English Department at Montana State University in 2006, I felt like I had won the lottery: I would be pursuing the only career I had ever wanted in a state I had always appreciated for its natural beauty. At that time, however, I never imagined that my research on Shakespeare would have any special relationship to the state that would be my new home. It was my husband, Kevin Brustuen, who first told me that the mountain men of the nineteenth century were avid readers of Shakespeare, which prompted me to wonder how and why Shakespeare has a rich history in this state, beginning with the first white explorers of this region and continuing to the present with Montana Shakespeare in the Parks.

This book reflects over a decade of exploration as Kevin and I ranged over Montana’s archives, newspapers, libraries, towns, landscapes, and communities in order to understand the story of Shakespeare in Montana. Over the course of these years many people and institutions have assisted in bringing this book to its completion, and although I do not have sufficient space to name each individual, I would like to acknowledge the most significant of these contributions.

Grant funding from Humanities Montana, MSU, and the Ivan Doig Center for the Study of the Lands and Peoples of the North American West was crucial for travel, archive visits, and research support. This funding also allowed me to hire two exceptional research assistants: Chase Templet uncovered valuable resources and completed the Index, and Abby Lake also dedicated herself to this project in ways that proved invaluable. I also owe a debt of gratitude to all of the archivists and librarians who have provided assistance along the way, especially those at the Montana Historical Society, Butte-Silver Bow archives, the Dillon Public Library, Fort Benton’s historical research center, the Ursuline Academy, and MSU.

MSIP is not only the inspiration for the first and last chapters of this book but an organization full of current and past actors, directors, and staff who have given me a great deal of insight into this remarkable cultural treasure. I wish to thank Kevin Asselin, and especially Susan Miller, for providing access to the MSIP archives, information about the company’s history, and help in locating and identifying many photos. MSU photographer Adrian Sanchez Gonzalez also graciously enhanced some old prints that serve as a window into past performances.

Several colleagues at MSU have enhanced my understanding of the American West, including Susan Kollin, Linda Karell, and Jan Zauha. The two external readers of the Shakespeare in Montana manuscript were Mary Murphy (a historian from MSU) and Paul Prescott (a Shakespearean from the University of Warwick). Both were generous and thorough with their feedback, which inspired and challenged me to expand and revise the book, and I appreciate that their suggestions have made this a better work than it would have been otherwise. In the final stages of revision, I was lucky enough to have one more thorough reading from Heather Easterling (Gonzaga University).

I have given public lectures on much of this material, and each presentation to an audience has enabled me to rethink and revise in productive ways. For these opportunities, I am grateful to Linda Woodbridge, Bob Mokwa, Nicol Rae, Mark Vessey, and Mike Cok (Mike and Kathy Cok additionally gave me the ideal writer’s retreat in Big Sky). An early version of the chapter on women’s reading groups appeared in an essay collection entitled Women Making Shakespeare (Bloomsbury, 2013). Finally, my gratitude goes to the production staff at the University of New Mexico Press for working with me throughout the publication process, especially the senior acquisitions editor, Elise McHugh.

Shakespeare in Montana is dear to me because it represents the perfect marriage between my favorite author and my favorite state. I’ve told several people that I would follow up this book with one that tells the story of what it was like to write it—a story of research and road trips that Kevin and I took (usually with our son, Luke, an ever-eager participant in literal and metaphorical journeys) in order to better understand Montana and its multifaceted fascination with Shakespeare. I won’t write such a book, of course, but if I did it would be full of anecdotes about the Montana landscapes we traveled through, but even more about the many fascinating Montanans that we have talked to along the way.

The dedication of this book could never have been to anyone but Kevin. There is as much of him in these pages as there is of me. To say that I am grateful for everything he has given to Shakespeare in Montana, but especially to Luke and me, would be the most ridiculous of understatements.

PREFACE

There lies your way, due west.

—Twelfth Night

I was waiting in line to check in to a resort hotel in Whitefish, Montana, when the friendly and talkative manager welcomed me and asked the purpose of my visit. As we stood in the lobby with the typical Montana decor—rustic wooden furniture, a large fireplace, displays of stuffed and mounted animals—I told him I would be giving a talk about Shakespeare, and he posed a series of questions that made it clear he had very little knowledge about the author to whom I had dedicated my life’s work. The question he asked that initially shocked me the most was: Where was he from? Was he American? While most people of course would immediately answer in the way I did (No, he was English . . .), now that I reflect upon the question, it’s more interesting than I at first thought. While William Shakespeare, who was born in 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon, was most certainly English, Shakespeare, which is the sum total of his works and cultural influence, has long since come to be recognized as a global phenomenon.

The United States, a country founded upon rejecting most things English, nonetheless adopted Shakespeare as its own. James Fenimore Cooper, one of the earliest voices of a distinctively American literature that romanticized life on the frontier, famously asserted that Shakespeare was the great author of America.¹ As that frontier shifted ever westward, it was in fact Shakespeare that the restless settlers carried with them, both physically and metaphorically. As Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden Vaughan write in their book Shakespeare in America, Shakespeare was demonstrably the favorite playwright at almost every location on the moving frontier.²

This phenomenon has been endlessly fascinating to scholars and journalists alike, thus there are several books on Shakespeare in America and several articles and occasional monographs dedicated specifically to the popularity of Shakespeare in the American West.³ Such works abound with a fascinating array of anecdotes about unlikely encounters between mountain men such as Jim Bridger and the stories of Shakespeare. When I learned of such stories, I was equally fascinated, but I also wanted to understand something more about Shakespeare’s place in my own corner of the West. Although others have asserted that Shakespeare’s popularity in the American West dwindled as the West was settled and ceased to be wild,⁴ the history in Montana suggests something different: a prolonged and multifaceted fascination with the words and works of the quintessential English author.

Shakespeare in Montana focuses on the people and lands of this Northern Rockies region, but it does not limit its chronological scope to the nineteenth century. Indeed, much of the vibrant Shakespeare culture in Montana took place at the turn of the twentieth century, and the love affair between residents of this region and Shakespeare’s works has not waned even in the twenty-first century. A case in point is a book entitled State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America (2008), which features a map of the country with icons to epitomize what each state is known for. Iowa has an ear of corn, Arizona a cactus, Kentucky a racehorse, and so on. Surprisingly, Montana is emblazoned with Shakespeare’s face. Why? If there is one thing all Montanans have in common, other than a disdain for speed limits and a thing for huckleberries, it is a love of William Shakespeare.⁵ This unexpected statement is prompted by the popularity of Montana Shakespeare in the Parks (MSIP), which has had a profound impact upon the state’s cultural scene since its inception in 1973. For this reason, Shakespeare in Montana begins with a prologue that situates Montana’s love of Shakespeare in the present, explaining the five-decade odyssey of MSIP’s actors to the most remote area of the state. After this prologue that attests to the continued fascination that Montanans have with Shakespeare, Shakespeare in Montana takes up the journey with the earliest mountain men in this region, then proceeds in a rough chronological fashion, but with overlapping and doubling back that allows for connections across decades and regions of the state. Some shorter pieces of the story that do not fit naturally into the larger narratives are told separately, as interludes between the chapters.

Shakespeare in Montana is necessarily full of anecdotes, including frontier stories of mountain men and settlers with Shakespeare books in their saddlebags. But it also traces parallel histories—of itinerant actors and actresses, of women’s reading groups, of educators and their students, of diverse performances and readings of Shakespeare’s works. Looking at the history of Montana from the Shakespearean perspective allows for unusual insights, just as looking at the cultural phenomenon of Shakespeare against the backdrop of this geographical place adds to how we understand his global influence. Tracing more than two centuries of history over a huge geographical area results in a vast array of different voices, so it is not possible (or desirable) to provide a neat schematic of what Shakespeare has meant to Montana. Several common threads, however, suggest themselves across these narratives, including:

•a need to tell and retell stories, to participate in the creation of myths about Shakespearean encounters in the West;

•an impulse to perform the stories of Shakespeare, both on and off the stage;

•a desire to take ownership of Shakespeare, co-opting his works to speak for the readers’ morality and aspirations;

•a heightened awareness of how Shakespeare, the largest of authors, can fill the vast and supposedly empty landscapes of Montana;

•a nostalgia for a lost past in which both the frontier and its romantic encounters with Shakespeare have receded.

All of Montana is a stage, allowing for repeated performances that, in the words of ethnographer Norman Denzin, forge a bond between an imagined past and the present, where performers stand on both sides of history at the same time.⁶ Shakespeare has always been the author, and the symbol, that allowed them to do so.

Shakespeare imagined his country’s geography most movingly in John of Gaunt’s sceptered isle speech in Richard II, calling Britain a fortress built by Nature for herself, a little world, and a precious stone set in the silver sea (2.1.40–46).⁷ Shakespeare’s evocative landscapes invariably capture his Montana audiences; he not only wrote of islands like Britain, but he imagined places in Europe and the New World where he had never set foot. Sometimes, too, the mysteries of an ancient past are conveyed through the land, such as the awesome cliffs of Dover or the hostile barrenness of the heath in King Lear. In the American West, the real and imagined landscapes tend toward the open, the vast, the raw and dangerous expanses of the unknown. Those who have read and seen Shakespeare in Montana have been endlessly fascinated by the ways in which his characters negotiate analogous places.

Map 1. Map of Montana.

The Shakespearean play that perhaps covers the broadest geographical scope and is infused with the most nostalgia is Antony and Cleopatra. Just before Cleopatra’s death she speaks of the departed Antony, depicting him as a colossus whose qualities exceeded imagination itself. She alternately upholds this as fiction and insists upon its truth, saying that if there ever were one such, / It’s past the size of dreaming (5.2.95–96). Shakespeare in Montana unfolds in a way analogous to Cleopatra’s memory of Antony: past the size of dreaming.

PROLOGUE

Waiting for the Shakespeare

But look, the morn, in russet mantle clad,

Walks o’er the dew of yon high eastward hill.

— Hamlet

In 1980, Joel Jahnke had just taken over as the artistic director of Montana Shakespeare in the Parks (MSIP), an outreach organization of Montana State University that had begun in 1973 with the mission to perform Shakespeare’s plays—free and outdoors—to communities across Montana. Already he knew that there was one place everyone always talked about: a performance site in the southeastern part of the state atop a 4,300-foot butte on state forest land, ten miles outside a tiny ranching community called Birney, situated in the Tongue River Valley and a stone’s throw from the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation. For anyone connected with MSIP, Jahnke’s story of his first journey to Poker Jim Butte is legendary:

I was driving on dirt roads and kept getting further and further away from anything. And then there was that damn sign: Birney, Montana, Population 17. I pulled up at the general store and saw two kids sitting by the mailbox. I walked over to them and said hi . . . and then I asked, What are you doing? They responded, We’re waiting for the Shakespeare. . . . It’s like they were waiting for the circus.

At that moment, Jahnke realized that this was something bigger than what I thought I would ever do.¹

Poker Jim Butte is still a stop on the eleven-actor tour, which now performs two plays in repertory for sixty-two communities across Montana and the surrounding states. MSIP is one of Montana’s most cherished cultural institutions, for over the course of forty-seven seasons the company has reached three quarters of a million audience members.² Many have told, in brief, the rich history of MSIP; it has been featured in the New York Times, on NBC Nightly News, on PBS’s Backroads of Montana, and in a 2015 PBS documentary entitled Bard in the Backcountry. Every time the company receives news coverage, however, the most prominent focus is always Poker Jim Butte; this location and the legends associated with the performances there have gained mythic status.³ I have been to the Poker Jim Butte performances many times, and I too am drawn to the allure of the place—its landscape, its community, and the improbable continuation of Shakespeare in the most isolated and underpopulated countryside imaginable.

The residents of Birney and its surrounding areas are proud people. Settlers from the American South and homesteaders from Norway moved into the region in the last two decades of the nineteenth century immediately after the indigenous people were forcibly removed, setting up cattle operations and eventually dude ranches that attracted visitors who wanted a taste of the authentic West. Photos from the mid-twentieth century depict a thriving community, boasting not only a post office and general store but the Corell Dance Hall and saloon, where weekly Saturday dances were enormously popular.⁴ The vibrancy of this community was palpable, but by the 1970s things had begun to change. As in many rural communities, the population declined as more people moved to cities and never returned; the dance hall and saloon closed, and although the general store was still operating when MSIP started performing in the 1970s, by the ’90s it was gone too. Meanwhile, heavy disputes over coal and methane in the area divided the community. By the time that MSIP came to town, this one- or two-evening performance on the butte was the sole annual community event—the only excuse for gathering the far-flung residents of Rosebud County together into a semblance of