Meet Me in Montana: A Shakespearean Odyssey
Shakespeare in Montana: Big Sky Country’s Love Affair with the World’s Most Famous Writer. Gretchen E. Minton (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2020).
Montana, like much of the American West, is much better known for its landscapes. Indeed, when Montanans are framed in the mind of the world, they are known primarily as doers as opposed to thinkers. From Jim Bridger and Sitting Bull to Evel Knieval and Deer Lodge’s own coach Phil Jackson, Montanans are known as men and women of action. Among recent post- 2008 housing crash and post-Covid arrivals to the state as well as the indefatigable tourists, it is assumed that Montanans merely part of the warp and woof of the land. In the contemporary deluge of internet images snapped by those who have had their first taste of the Treasure State, there is no shortage of the reluctantly Instagrammeable Indian or the confused cowboy who appears on the margins of a TikTok video snapped by the contemporary denizens of the new digital world.
However, the history of Montana is a literary history as well; it is the history of a people who are not only laborers or farmers, but who are actors and readers and thinkers as well. In her recent work, Shakespeare in Montana: Big Sky Country’s Love Affair with the World’s Most Famous Writer, Montana State University English Professor Gretchen E. Minton presents an exquisite chronicle of the history of Montana’s love affair with the man who is perhaps the world’s most famous (secular) author: William Shakespeare.
Much of Minton’s work (in fact, the prologue as well as Chapter 6) is inspired by Montana Shakespeare in the Parks (MSIP)—perhaps Montana’s most prominent connection to Shakespeare. Starting in 1973 under the helm of Dr. Bruce Jacobson, MSIP has been made famous by promotion in the New York Times as well as the NBC Nightly News and a 2015 PBS documentary titled Bard in the Background. The story of the Shakespeare in Parks is also the story of Shakespearean performance amidst the Montana landscape—as famous MSIP alumn as well as Hollywood actor and Montana native Bill Pullman quips in Shakespeare in Montana: “There’s nothing more magical than having the elements around you.”
Some of MSIP stories include several famous performances at Poker Jim Butte in little Birney, Montana that were attended by an odd assortment of cowboys and Indians, hippies, as well as millionaire ranchers. As Minton argues, Shakespeare’s works have corralled the diverse people of Montana into a common love of the language and spectacle of one of the world’s greatest playwrights.
There are several central threads that govern Minton’s work, including how the enormity of Shakespeare and his works parallels the immense size of the state of Montana itself as well as how Shakespeare’s works, although at the center of the canon of English literature, nonetheless found a home in the margins of the Montana frontier. Moreover, Minton argues, Montanans have a had a profound love of both watching and performing Shakespeare.
In the early nineteenth century after the Lewis and Clark exhibitions, Shakespeare was popular among mountain men and women such as Trapper Osbourne Russell, who formed a “Rocky Mountain College” with the works of Shakespeare as well as romantic poet Lord Byron, and the Bible. Such fascination with Shakespeare’s works was common along the American frontier as Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville noted in 1831.
Although illiterate, the iconic Montana man Jim Bridger (made famous to contemporary audiences by Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 2015 masterpiece The Revenant) was a devotee of the Bard, critiquing the moral tenor of Shakespeare’s villains such as King Richard III, whose wickedness inspired Bridge to remark that Shakespeare must have been as “mean as a Sioux [among the fiercest Native peoples to resist American expansion]” to have crafted such a harsh character.
Famous Montana pioneer Granville Stuart also, like Jim Bridger, was a devotee of the Bard from Stratford upon Avon. In 1860 Stuart traveled to the Bitterroot Valley to purchases a collection of books, which included the illustrated works of William Shakespeare. Another famous man who met his death in the Treasure State, George Armstrong Custer, had an intense devotion to Shakespeare, which, Minton argues, served as inspiration for General Custer’s own self fashioning as a romantic hero.
Montana Goldminers, who rushed to the state after the gold strikes at Grasshopper Greek and Alder Gulch, also enjoyed the see the bard on display. As Minton notes, scholars have speculated that the miners (like mountain and army men) saw in Shakespeare a projection of their own vision of the American West and the dreams that could be realized there. One of the centers of Shakespeare performance in Montana was the town of Virginia City, where newly transplanted Montanans could watch the work of famous 19th American Shakespeare performers like the Irish born John S. “Jack” Langrishe. Minton, with grim humor, notes that, on the way from Colorado, Langrishe’s company happened upon the skeleton of a killed pioneer, and an actor from the group purloined the skull from the body to use for performances of Hamlet. Despite the alleged use of human remains in productions, Jack Langrishe was a devout Christian, who like other 19th century producers, utilized tamer, censored versions of Shakespeare’s plays for performances. Nonetheless, Langrishe’s productions were a hit among the rough miners, who rewarded him for his work with gifts of gold.
Nineteenth century Montana women like Mary Sheehan Ronan and Laura Honey Agnes Stevenson, participated in the production and consumption of Shakespeare as well. Moreover, Montana women in Helena, Dillon, Deer Lodge, Butte, and even Livingston studied Shakespeare in a variety of reading circles and clubs. Minton demonstrates that Shakespeare’s works were utilized in the burgeoning suffrage movement (Montana would be the first state to elect a woman to federal office, becoming a US representative in 1916).
Although Montana began to settle and achieved statehood in 1889, Shakespeare served as a one of the intellectual foundations of the burgeoning state. Not long after statehood, Montana chief justice Decius Wade gave a speech in Helena in which he quoted from the Merchant of Venice. However, Wade was not the only Montana judge with an interest in Shakespeare. One of Decius Wade’s predecessors, Hezekiah Hosmer, appointed as chief justice of Montana territory in 1864 by President Abraham Lincoln, wrote the 1887 Bacon and Shakespeare in the Sonnets, arguing for Francis Bacon’s authorship of Shakespeare’s works—indeed, like contemporary conspiracy theories, the “Bacon Thesis” was once relatively popular in Big Sky Country.
As Minton notes, Shakespeare served as a sign of not only the wildness of Montana but of the triumph of what was perceived as civilization over the alleged barbarism of the untamed West Nonetheless, Shakespeare was still treasured by those who refused to yield to the yoke of Civilization. Philip Ashton Rollins, author of the 1922 The Cowboy: His Characteristics, His Equipment, and His Part in the Development of the West, noted that Shakespeare was beloved of cowboys while women allegedly preferred to read novels. Perhaps Montana’s most famous visual artist, Charlie Russell, sketched a scene of women rushing out of a 1902 Great Falls performance of a Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Throughout the twentieth century, Shakespeare served an important role in Montana schools. In the late 1940s, a pen pal program was established between schoolgirls in Montana and London in which two of the dominant topics of conversation were the lives of cowboys and the works of Shakespeare. Shakespeare was further enlisted by figures such as William Holmes McGuffey in the service of the formation of the morals of Montana school children. Great Falls’s Catholic Ursuline Academy staged elaborate production of Shakespeare in the 1910s, and this tradition is carried on into the twenty first century by the now world-famous Belt Valley Shakespeare Players.
To many in our digital age, it seems that not only print, but thinking itself is dead. Nonetheless, as Gretchen Minton masterfully demonstrates in Shakespeare in Montana, the Treasure State has always been (and will always be) a place not only for men and women of action, but men and women of thinking, and for much the state’s history, Shakespeare has been on Montana’s mind.
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