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All sorts of English oddities turn up in Hollywood.
-P G.Wodehouse, The Old Reliable (51)
I have a favorite quote about L.A., by William Shakespeare. He said: "This other Eden, demi-Paradise, / This precious stone set in the silver sea, / This earth, this realm, this-Los Angeles."
-L.A. Story
Is Shakespeare buried in Hollywood? Steve Martin's 1991 film L.A. Story asserts that he is, explaining that Shakespeare wrote "Hamlet, Part VIII: The Revenge" during his final years in Southern California and revealing his tomb in Hollywood Cemetery (right behind Paramount Studios). The scene familiarly lampoons the cultural acquisitiveness and ignorance that might allow an American to believe that Shakespeare was buried not far from the elaborate graves of Douglas Fairbanks and Tyrone Power, both of which are adorned with "Goodnight, sweet prince." But Martin is not the first to locate Shakespeare's grave in Los Angeles. Aldous Huxley does it too, in his Hollywood novel After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (1939). On first arriving in L.A., his main character, the British scholar Jeremy Pordage, is taken to a cemetery, the Beverly Pantheon (based on Forest Lawn), where he encounters
The Tiny Church of the Poet-a miniature reproduction of Holy Trinity at Stratford-on-Avon, complete with Shakespeare's tomb and a twenty-four-hour service of organ music played automatically by the Perpetual Wurlitzer and broadcast by concealed loud speakers all over the cemetery. (10)
In Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One (1948), which focuses more exclusively on Forest Lawn (here called Whispering Glades), Shakespeare is cited for frankly commercial purposes, as a mortuary hostess touts "BeforeNeed Arrangements" by saying, "As Hamlet so beautifully writes: `Know that death is common; all that live must die.' (53). In several other novels of Hollywood by British writers, Shakespeare (or another eminent representative of the British literary tradition) makes an appearance-- comically out of place and generally associated with mortality. As Stephen Greenblatt notes, Shakespeare has come to represent "'culture' as a whole" (1), and the theme associated with Shakespeare's grave in Hollywood literature often invokes other canonical texts as representative of an Anglo-European tradition to which Americans have only attenuated access (for example, Shelley functions in Huxley's Ape and Essence in much the same way Shakespeare functions in After Many a...