In his 1885 memoir Behind the Footlights, W. C. Day recalls with an almost palpable wistfulness the ending of a certain seaside summer many years gone by. “The autumn of 1847 had far advanced,” Day writes, “the Margate steamers had ceased running for a fortnight, and the wagonettes, promising tourists a trip round the Isle of Thanet for half-a-crown, had all been taken off the road, and the horses turned out to grass and rheumatism.” ¹ The passing of summer marks both the ending of the resort season and the impending arrival of yet another long winter, with its cold and its storms: the “ramshackle caravans … had been many days since stowed away in moss-roofed outbuildings,” and all of the “bathing machines had been removed from the lonely beach to secure them from the damaging storms of winter” (Day, 60). All seems desolation: “In a word, the season had gone, the year’s holiday was at an end, and everyone was preparing to get back to town and resume the business of everyday life” (Day, 60). And even the thought of “everyday life” strikes for Day a somber note, since the end of the holiday season would mean financial hard times for this amateur actor and theater producer. One can linger at the seaside for only so long, caught in the “labyrinth of perplexity,” as Day evidently was, before of necessity having to decide “how the budget for the coming winter was to be framed so as adequately to provide the needful ways and means” (Day, 60).

Day’s mentions of budget and “ways and means” feel at first a bit of an intrusion, the cold realities of insufficient cash shouldering aside an autumnal melancholy, but as the recollection continues to unfold, these intrusions of the real world of income and outflow also appear to function as a pivot upon which the tone and the direction of the memoir turn. While out walking and “Brooding” on his financial state of affairs—the rent due, the money owed the butcher and the laundress—Day has the happy good fortune to stumble upon a Bow Street bookseller’s shop that contains (among the portraits, newspapers, and playbills) a large trove of old playbooks and among these volumes “of such remote date as to claim the distinction of curios” Day finds one in particular—“a dark blue paper covered pamphlet, whose worn and greasy condition bore unmistakable evidence of antiquity” and labeled by the bookseller with a most arresting notice: “[t]he last production of the immortal Shakespeare, 2 s. 6d. only” (Day, 61). Day is transfixed; he carefully and with great detail describes the elaborate title page of his discovery:

‘Double Falsehood ; or, The Distrest Lovers.’ A Play as it is acted in the Theatre Royal in Drury-lane. Written originally by W. Shakespeare; and now revised and adapted to the Stage by Mr. Theobald , the author of ‘Shakespeare Restor’d.’ London: Printed by J. Watts, at the Printing-office in Wild-court, Lincoln’s-inn-fields. MDCCXXVIII. (Day, 61) ²

Thence follows an inventory the paratextual matters: the dramatis personae, the prologue, and epilogue spoken on the play’s opening night, Theobald’s Preface in which he details how he came into possession of the text upon which he dedicated his adaptive labors. In what we quickly come to recognize as mock amazement (for this discovery has now chased away the autumnal sadness—and with it the immediate worries of budget, for he senses opportunity) Day declares, “Here was an El Dorado; an original play of the ‘Divine William’—his last production, too—lost to the stage for 120 years, and last, though not by any means least, its authenticity guaranteed by the autograph of a monarch!” (Day, 61–62). ³

Day mocks not only at Lewis Theobald’s claim to a lost Shakespearean original for his play but also the attempt to legitimize that claim in the form of a royal patent, issued in the name of King George II, granting Theobald exclusive rights to the play for a term of fourteen years. ⁴ Day’s dismissive irony is not sufficiently serious, however, to prevent him from following what he clearly understood to be Theobald’s lead in both forgery and opportunistic self-promotion, determining immediately that “[s]uch an opportunity for the manufacture of a little ‘sugar’ was not to be heedlessly thrown aside” (Day, 62). ⁵ Day and an associate lease the Theatre Royal Olympic for one night’s performance (with “the option of indefinite continuance should the public trout accept the fly”) and promote the event through “a flaming playbill [that] let the cat out of the bag in the following interesting terms: SHAKESPEARE’S LAST PLAY” (Day, 62). The playbill then offers a further account of the play that reads, in part:

The last production of the Immortal

SHAKESPEARE!

Discovered in MS., in the handwriting of Downes, the famous prompter, sixty years after his death, by the celebrated LEWIS THEOBALD, and by him presented to His Majesty George I., in 1726, whose successor, George II, in the ensuing year, approving its authenticity, granted to its restorer His Royal Letters Patent for its publication; who accordingly produced it at Drury-lane Theatre forthwith; embracing in its cast the names of Booth, Wilks, and other celebrated actors of that day. Its immense success and brilliant reception only received a check in the lamented death of its patron, since which time

The Play has been lost to the world! (Day, 62–63) ⁶

The evening of the performance arrives and the players are prepared to bring the doubly lost play to the stage. But recalling the lead up to the curtain, Day also confesses to having had an early omen of the impending disaster: mingling anonymously with the people gathered outside the doors of the theater beforehand, Day overhears in the “buzz of conversation” what he calls “ominous epithets”—“‘a get-up,’ ‘swindle,’ a ‘do,’ ‘humbug,’ ‘another Ireland forgery’”—that collectively serve to give “fearful presage of a looming storm” (Day, 64). Day begins to suspect that he has traded the winter storms at the seaside for a theatrical tempest in the city, one reminiscent (as the invocation of “another Ireland forgery” makes clear) of an even more notorious theatrical disaster, the April 1796 catastrophe of Vortigern and Rowena , an event that perhaps haunts Day’s own presentation. ⁷

And indeed, almost immediately the prospects of success for Double Falsehood sour: upon the first entrance of Duke Angelo, his son Roderick, and a number of courtiers, one of the latter is recognized by a member of the audience who calls to him, “Hallo, Jim!” and this call is acknowledged by the player who “deliberately singled out his friend and returned the salutation with, ‘All right, old boy,’ and a familiar nod of the head” (Day, 65). Though recalling the event from some forty years on, Day “can vividly remember, even at this lapse of years, the effect this sally produced, and recall the sudden sinking of my hopes as the conviction flashed across me that the game was up, and Double Falsehood an irretrievably gone coon” (Day, 65).

The succeeding several paragraphs of Day’s memoir recount many similar moments in which the players and, he is quite clear, the play itself fail to “silence the jokers and master the discontents” (Day, 65), culminating in the moment at which “Miss Fanny Hamilton ([playing the part of] Violante),” “a lady to whom Nature had been no niggard in the matter of flesh and muscle, as she scaled about fourteen stone,” appeared disguised as a shepherd boy “attired in light green-coloured pants.” On her exclamation, “How his eyes shake fire, and measure every piece of youth about me,” the audience, Day reports, “was … thrown entirely out of balance, and all hope of attention and enlisting further interest in the story at an end” (Day, 66).

After the final curtain, Day and his partner are counting receipts in their dressing room when they hear laughter, “slight applause,” and the cry of “Manager,” followed immediately by the cry of “Author.” This was an idea, Day offers, that “so tickled the audience that the majority refused to leave without a response being made” (Day, 66). The suitably theatrical—and comical—response comes from Day’s (unnamed) partner, who “hurried to the green-room, where on a rickety shelf over the fireplace figured a life-size plaster bust of the Immortal Bard. Hastily reaching it down, covered with dust an inch thick which he did not wait to remove, he strode majestically on the stage and held it out to the audience. Such a peal of laughter greeted this audacity as completely drowned the indignant hisses of a few reverential malcontents. … And thus ended our stage representation of SHAKESPEARE’S LAST PLAY” (Day, 66–67) (Fig. 1.1).

Day’s account of his staging of Double Falsehood —like his memoir recalling a lifelong engagement with the theater more generally—is one of countless such narratives that fueled the popular press throughout the nineteenth century and beyond; at the same time, however, it provides an uncannily apposite epitome of a constellation of issues and challenges that obtain in the history of our cultural engagement with Shakespeare. This is especially true with regard to what can be called the afterlife of Shakespeare, a phrase (and a concept) that includes a vast array of desires, motivations, and dreams that have defined and continue to define our understanding of “Shakespeare” and, more particularly still, what we have been willing to undertake in Shakespeare’s name. The self-consciously theatrical gesture of offering the plaster bust of Shakespeare in response to the audience’s ironic call of “Author,” for instance, is an effective piece of comedy, but in order for that comedy to function, the bust itself has to have occupied a place within a complex network of significations. The bust can stand as a figure of the author because it is a monument to that author. And the Shakespeare monument is itself embedded with a complex set of practices dedicated to memorializing a literary figure who has—as a consequence of our adulation—become, in effect, a literary demigod.

The fact that Day’s narrative culminates in a parodic gesture by which he comically locates the metaphorics of the monument not in the literary but in the literal—in the plaster bust of Shakespeare—in no way lessens the significance of this drive. Indeed, there is nothing so Shakespearean in Day’s entire narrative as this gesture. For both the literary and the literal monuments in Shakespeare’s works are nearly always (even if sometimes unwittingly) parodic in nature. The most conspicuous instances of this are those burial monuments th...