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“Gilding the Guilt”: The Gilded Age, Craft Production, and the Construction of Cultural Capital 

The story of “Shakespeare” in America is more than a history of books and performances. It is also a story of politics and society – of race, class, gender, and their intersections, of “culture” in the fullest sense of the word – all of which is deeply inflected by the real and imagined past of particular places.

In spring 2023 the Folger Institute partnered with University at Buffalo and Tulane University to offer weekend workshops to explore two significant cities and communities that exemplify chronological sweep and geographical reach in their broad cultural and specifically Shakespearean histories. Those studying the regional reception of Shakespeare in America, the tension and synergies between high and low culture in the United States, book collecting, performance, and other related topics were welcomed to participate.

2023 Workshop

Full workshop schedule available here

What role has “Shakespeare” played in reinforcing and contesting wealth and class, and how should scholars critically reconsider that tension at a moment when economic injustice has been so starkly underlined for all Americans?

This workshop considers these questions with the case study of Buffalo, New York, a regional city situated at a geographic and historical crossroads in America.

While Buffalo’s wealth and cultural opportunities were unevenly distributed, its elite’s ambitions were vast and included an aggressive practice of Gilded Age book collecting, focused on Shakespeare. Meanwhile major cultural countercurrents included the American Arts and Craft movement headquartered at the nearby Roycroft Campus.

Topics to be discussed include the tensions found in late-nineteenth-century American cities during the fraught economic, industrial, and cultural expansion of the Gilded Age, especially those involving studies into non-elite acculturation through Shakespeare and other signifiers of high culture, and creative American counter-responses to European art and culture that continue to resonate today.