**Herbert Whittaker and “Shakespeare In Canada”**

Herbert Whittaker

Link to Michael Langham and the Stratford Shakespeare Seminars

Herbert Whittaker was born in Montreal in 1910. He studied theatre design at the L’École des beaux-arts de Montréal (founded in 1922) and became active in the theatrical scene in 1933. Whittaker was a dynamic and enterprising member of the theatrical community in Montreal, a profile he was to create for himself wherever he lived in Canada. He designed early productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1934), Romeo and Juliet (1935) and the Taming of the Shrew (1937). Additionally, he worked as reviewer of film, ballet, and theatre at the Montreal Gazette from 1935 to 1949. He was a member of the short-lived Montreal Shakespeare Society, designing their first production of Much Ado About Nothing in 1945. Whittaker was offered the job of reviewer with the Globe and Mail in 1949, a post he held until his retirement in 1975. Whittaker chronicled the onset and evolution of the Stratford Festival beginning in 1953 in his column. Apart from criticizing theatrical works, Whittaker became deeply involved with them as well. He worked as a director and designer for numerous productions at the Crest Theatre and at the University of Toronto, including productions of Much Ado About Nothing and King Lear in 1953. Whittaker firmly established his role as a Canadian designer when he created and designed the Northern setting for the 1961 production of the “Eskimo” Lear with the Canadian Players, starring William Hutt. This production stands out as one of the first large scale Shakespearean plays adapted to a unique Canadian setting.

In August of 1964, Herbert Whittaker delivered a speech at the fourth annual Seminar on Shakespeare, held at the Stratford Festival. The purpose of these seminars was to merge academic, theatrical, and everyday views on Shakespeare and his role within Canada. Whittaker’s essay was entitled “Shakespeare in Canada,” anticipating what was to become a much wider field of study evidenced in the work of the Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project in the early part of the twenty-first century. In the essay, Whittaker delves into the often neglected history (at that point in time) of Shakespearean productions since Canada’s colonial beginnings. While Whittaker celebrated the Stratford Festival, he despaired at the thought that many history and reference books were citing the founding of the Stratford Festival as the real onset of Shakespearean production in Canada: “I do not wish it to be thought that this country was backward that it knew nothing of Shakespeare before … Dr. Guthrie drew him to our attention” (Shakespeare in Canada, 72). Following on this statement, Whittaker examines the history of Shakespeare, including the onslaught of colonialism and predominantly British values, but also painting a colorful picture of drunken leading ladies, winter storms, and First Nations reactions that bore witness to his claim that there were multiple precedent Canadian Shakespeares prior to the Stratford Festival and that Shakespeare played a distinctive role in the unique evolution of theatrical culture in Canada.

Shakespeare’s presence in Canada dates back to as early as 1779, when British gentry performed the Merchant of Venice in Montreal. In 1786, a traveling troop called the First Eleven crossed the ice from Albany to Montreal to perform The Taming of the Shrew. The first Canadian actors on stage in a Shakespeare production were critiqued for their “vulgarity,” “drunken[ness]” and “mangl[ing]” after a “sozzled shrew” brought down the house in 1805 (Shakespeare in Canada, 74). These stereotypes of inferior Canadian theatre would persist in the history books, and amongst traveling British actors who came to Canada to perform in a more “civilized” manner. This colonial baggage of using Shakespeare as the ideal emblem of Western power and English imperial culture is one that began in the United States and Canada and persisted through India, Australia, and Africa.

Whittaker states that Shakespearean interaction with the First Nations peoples dates from 1826, when renowned English actor Edmund Kean reputedly recited Shakespeare to members of a Huron tribe in his Quebec hotel room as they “gazed in awe” (Shakespeare in Canada, 76). He was reportedly made Chieftain of the tribe and disappeared to “find peace in the forests of Canada” (Shakespeare in Canada, 76). This moment was recorded pictorially in Joseph Légaré’s portrait Edmund Kean Reciting Before the Hurons (1826), a painting whose subject matter is still the subject of an ongoing dispute among art historians. Additionally, Whittaker tells historical antidotes of Shakespeare in Canada, including that of a lost Englishman shouting lines from the Tempest into a harsh Muskoka storm, and John Wilkes Booth reciting scenes from Hamlet in Montreal eleven days before shooting American president Abraham Lincoln.

Despite Canada’s early adaptations of Shakespeare, such as The Fair Grit (1876) by Nicholas Flood Davin, Canada Fair Canada (1902) by Albert Ernest Knight, and a burgeoning theatrical culture, Canadian theatre was still considered relatively primitive. Some respectability was gained when the Hart House Theatre (opened in 1919), the Shakespeare Society in Toronto (1912), and the Montreal Repertory Theatre (founded in 1930) began putting on productions of Shakespeare with both Canadian-born and foreign actors. Whittaker cites a production of Hamlet in 1932 as one of the first pre-Stratford productions to gain “national attention.” Not surprisingly, the work that was hailed as the “beginning of National theatre in Canada” was shaped by upper class colonial influences (Shakespeare in Canada, 84). Lord Bessborough, the Governor General, organized this early pre-Stratford version of Hamlet, and Viscount Duncannon played the role of Hamlet. The play so delighted then Prime Minister William Lyon MacKenzie King that he wrote to Duncannon stating his pleasure at seeing “one of Shakespeare’s plays by real artists; after having been parched in the barren theatrical land,” presumably of Canada (Shakespeare in Canada, 86).

Whittaker’s essay details a fascinating timeline of Shakespeare in Canada that, up to that moment in Canadian scholarship, had largely been ignored. The history of colonial culture’s influence on the production of Shakespeare in Canada lingered on well into the first decades of the Stratford Festival, which began under the direction of English-born Tyrone Guthrie, to be followed by the leadership of Michael Langham, also English-born. This Anglicization of Shakespearean culture in Canada may perhaps be seen as one of the reasons behind the multitudes of adaptations that have responded to this influence with diverse forms of interpretation that explore other cultural influences, other sites of cultural production.

Danielle Van Wagner (with Daniel Fischlin)

Link to Shakespeare In Canada essay

Link to Michael Langham and the Stratford Shakespeare Seminars

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Fischlin, Daniel. Canadian Adaptations of Shakespeare Project. University of Guelph. 2004. <http://www.canadianshakespeares.ca>.