In the decade from 1850 to 1860, twenty-two of Shakespeare’s thirty-eight plays were performed in San Francisco. This site has pictures of the old programs. https://www.californiapioneers.org/shakespeare-in-19th-century-san-francisco/

In Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain writes about a pair of swindlers who decide to perform Romeo and Juliet for towns along the Mississippi which shows that Mark Twain thought it would be profitable to perform Shakespeare for regular people. Also they mangle the soliloquy of Hamlet and that would only be funny to readers if they know the real language.

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~drbr/levine.html

From the article linked above: ”in the 19th century, Shakespearian dramas are more frequently played and more popular in America than in England. Shakespeare's dominance can be attested to by what Charles Shattuck has called "the westward flow of Shakespearean actors" from England to America. In the nineteenth century, one prominent English Shakespearean actor after another-George Frederick Cooke, Edmund Kean, Junius Brutus Booth, Charles Kemble, Fanny Kemble, Ellen Tree, William Charles Macready- sought the fame and financial rewards that awaited them in their tours of the United States.

During his travels through the United States in the 1830s, Tocqueville found Shakespeare in "the recesses of the forests of the New World, and observed, "There is hardly a pioneer's hut that does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare. I remember that I read the feudal drama of Henry V for the first time in a log cabin.”

Five decades later, the German visitor Karl Knortz made a similar observation:

“There is, assuredly, no other country on earth in which Shakespeare and the Bible are held in such general high esteem as in America, the very country so much decried for its lust for money. If you were to enter an isolated log cabin in the Far West and even if its inhabitant were to exhibit many of the traces of backwoods living, he will most likely have one small room nicely furnished in which to spend his few leisure hours and in which you will certainly find the Bible and in most cases also some cheap edition of the works of the poet Shakespeare.

My grandfather’s family (he was born in 1909) had a Shakespeare volume along with the family Bible just like Karl Knoetz said.”

“If miners could not always come to San Francisco to see theater, the theater came to them. Stark, Buchanan, Edwin Booth, and their peers performed on makeshift stages in mining camps across the west.”