Shakespeare in a Divided America

by James Shapiro

  PENGUIN PRESS

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  Copyright © 2020 by James Shapiro

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  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Shapiro, James, 1955– author.

  Title: Shakespeare in a divided America: what his plays tell us about our past and future / James Shapiro.

  Description: New York: Penguin Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019026000 (print) | LCCN 2019026001 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525522294 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525522300 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Criticism and interpretation—History. | Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Influence.—United States. | Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Appreciation—United States. | Literature and society—United States—History. | Theater and society—United States—History. | Politics and literature—United States—History.

  Classification: LCC PR2971.U6 S55 2020 (print) | LCC PR2971.U6 (ebook) | DDC 822.3/3—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019026000

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019026001

  Cover design: Stephanie Ross

  Cover image: Signature of William Shakespeare (1564−1616), 1616 (ink on paper) (b&w photo), English School (17th century) / Private Collection / Bridgeman Images

  pid_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  For my brother Michael

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER 1

  1833: Miscegenation

  CHAPTER 2

  1845: Manifest Destiny

  CHAPTER 3

  1849: Class Warfare

  CHAPTER 4

  1865: Assassination

  CHAPTER 5

  1916: Immigration

  CHAPTER 6

  1948: Marriage

  CHAPTER 7

  1998: Adultery and Same-Sex Love

  CONCLUSION

  2017: Left | Right

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ESSAYS

  CREDITS

  INDEX

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  American soldier in Vietnam, with the Folger Shakespeare The Taming of the Shrew in his helmet.

  Introduction

  Read by almost everyone at school, staged in theaters across the land, and long valued by conservatives as highly as by liberals, Shakespeare’s plays remain common ground, one of the few places where Americans can meet and air their disparate views. For well over two centuries, Americans of all stripes—presidents and activists, writers and soldiers—have also turned to Shakespeare’s works to give voice to what could not readily or otherwise be said.

  That engagement dates back to before the Revolutionary War, when Hamlet’s famous soliloquy—“To be, or not to be”—was appropriated both by defenders of British rule and by those seeking to overthrow it. Not long after, Shakespeare’s contentious histories offered the Founding Fathers, all too aware of the vulnerabilities of the government they had created, a road map for where the young republic might be heading. Those who read these plays “with a view to . . . the treachery, perfidy, treason, murder, cruelty, sedition, and rebellions of rival and unbalanced factions,” President John Adams warned, would “find one of the most instructive examples for the perusal of this country.” A prescient Adams even reworked a passage from Henry V to show how a foreign despot might collude in putting a more pliable leader in the White House.

  Yet in those early years of the republic it seemed improbable that Americans would adopt England’s national poet as their own. They had fought the British in 1776 and in 1812 would again be at war. Moreover, the strain of puritanism entrenched in the northern colonies was rabidly anti-theatrical. The Quaker William Penn, who founded the Pennsylvania colony, had attacked “the infamous plays” of writers like Shakespeare and helped enact laws suppressing their performance. In 1774 the first Continental Congress was still admonishing colonists to shun theaters. Pennsylvania only ended its ban on playgoing in 1789 and Massachusetts, the last holdout, in 1793.

  How Shakespeare won over America in the early nineteenth century is something of a mystery. The absence of rivals had a good deal to do with it. So too did the growing familiarity with his works. Actors from Britain toured the land with a repertory rich in Shakespeare while schoolbooks featured his famous speeches. One of them, McGuffey’s Reader, first published in 1836, sold more than 120 million copies over the next eighty years. Another, Scott’s Lessons in Elocution, found its way into the humblest of American homes, including the log cabin in which Abraham Lincoln was raised. Yet there was more to it than the lack of competitors and Shakespeare’s widespread availability in schoolbooks and cheap editions. The French author Alexis de Tocqueville, gathering material for his book Democracy in America, noted that he first picked up a copy of Henry V in a log cabin while touring the United States in 1831, and added that there “is hardly a pioneer’s hut that does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare.” A half century later, the German writer Karl Knortz said of America that “there is certainly no land on the whole earth in which Shakespeare and the Bible are held in such high esteem.”

  It helped that in a Bible-obsessed nation, Shakespeare’s language sounded so similar to that of the King James Version (1611), contributing to the sense that his plays were a kind of secular scripture. Yet it was more than the thees and thous of Elizabethan English that drew Americans to his words. Many of the issues that preoccupied Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the late sixteenth century—the dangers of autocratic rule; the imagined threat posed by those of different races, religions, or nationalities; the slippery boundaries of gender—were still unsettling to nineteenth-century Americans. Shakespeare had usefully framed these as conflicts (resolved through bloodshed in his histories and tragedies, and more peacefully, if provisionally, in his comedies), social and political collisions that could be readily viewed through the prism of America’s past and present. Yet much of the mystery of “Why has America embraced Shakespeare?” remains unsolved. All one can safely say is that Shakespeare took root in the United States because he spoke to what Americans cared about. But his plays were not interpreted by everyone in the same ways, especially as divisions deepened between social classes, between the industrial North and slaveholding South, between new waves of immigrants and earlier settlers, as well as between those who believed in America’s Manifest Destiny and those wary of such imperial ambitions.

  At first glance it seems almost perverse that Americans would choose to make essential to their classrooms and theaters a writer whose works enact some of their darkest nightmares or most lurid fantasies: a black man marrying then killing a white woman; a Jew threatening to cut a pound of a Christian’s flesh; the brutal assassination of a ruler deemed tyrannical; the taming of a wife who defies male authority. Hamlet alone touches on incest, suicide, drunkenness, adultery, and fratricide. As I write these words in November
2018, a news report describes how parents of students at Mitchell High School in Bakersville, North Carolina, were shocked to discover that a performance of the satirical 1987 adaptation The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) at the school included “suicide, alcohol consumption, and ‘bad language.’” What they seem to have found even more objectionable was a same-sex kiss. The troubled parents later gathered in a prayer circle before circulating a petition calling for the local school board to “ban any group from performing in the District if they promote ‘Homosexuality, Incest, Suicide, or any other [sic] that would be contrary to life.’” It’s hard to invent a better example of how Shakespeare speaks to the fears that divide us as a nation. Yet calls for censorship will not make those divisions (and what some may find disturbing) disappear. His writing continues to function as a canary in a coal mine, alerting us to, among other things, the toxic prejudices poisoning our cultural climate. At some deep level Americans intuit that our collective nightmares are connected to the sins of our national past, papered over or repressed in the making of America and its greatness; on occasion, Shakespeare’s plays allow us to recognize if not acknowledge this.

  It turns out that who gets to perform in Shakespeare’s plays is a fairly accurate index of who is considered fully American. As far back as the 1820s, when Ira Aldridge had to move from New York to London in order to play Othello, Shylock, and other roles denied to African Americans in the United States, those who aren’t accepted as truly American—because they don’t look or sound the part—have been rejected when it comes to being cast as one of Shakespeare’s heroes or heroines. Their experience is epitomized in a short story, “The School Boy Hamlet,” published in 1946 by the Japanese American writer Toshio Mori in the Pacific Citizen, a San Francisco–based newspaper that during the war moved to Utah’s Topaz War Relocation Center, a euphemism for what was more or less a concentration camp, where Mori and other Japanese Americans—most, like himself, American born—were incarcerated after the attack on Pearl Harbor. “The School Boy Hamlet” is about a young Japanese American living in San Francisco before the war who has an overwhelming desire to play Hamlet on Broadway. It’s a compulsion that takes over his life, which he spends rehearsing speeches from the plays. His family and even his only friend eventually abandon him because he cannot understand what everybody else sees but will never tell him directly: there’s no way that someone of his ethnicity will be cast as Hamlet. Mori’s story crystallizes the prejudices and unspoken assumptions that everybody in America in the 1940s understood—except, sadly, for the protagonist of the story, Tom Fukunaga, who doesn’t fit contemporary notions of what a hero like Hamlet should look like. Community in Shakespeare’s plays is often built on (and quietly critiqued for) its principle of exclusion—we need only think of the puritanical Malvolio in Twelfth Night or Shylock the Jew in The Merchant of Venice, who are both left out of the charmed circle of inclusion at play’s end. American identity has been formed on analogous lines: we define ourselves against those whom we reject, keep out, or lock up.

  To write a comprehensive history of Shakespeare in America that would take us from East Coast to West Coast and from Revolutionary times until our own is an impossible task. There is simply too much territory and too long a time span to cover, and individual and regional responses to his work are too varied to reduce to generalizations. As much as many want to believe in the universality of his plays, it is more accurate to say that while they may be read by almost everyone, we often disagree about what they mean and how they ought to be staged. The experience of seeing Othello performed in the antebellum South (where it was quite popular, though the title role was only played by white actors who darkened their skin color) could not have been more different than watching Paul Robeson play Othello in 1943 on Broadway (the first time an African American would do so). The pressure of the times matters. The “G.I. Hamlet” performed by and for infantrymen fighting in the Pacific in 1944 was a far cry from a production Abraham Lincoln saw during the Civil War in Washington. And Lincoln’s understanding of Macbeth was radically different from that of the actor and white supremacist John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated him.

  Instead of attempting a rushed survey, I have chosen to drill down more deeply into eight defining moments in America’s history, hoping that a sustained analysis of core samples from those years might reveal features of our past that are otherwise less visible to us. In the course of a career spent researching and writing about Shakespeare, I gravitated early on toward studying particular years in depth, devoting nearly a quarter century to learning all that I could about two consequential years in his life. I came to know more about the preoccupations of Londoners in 1599 and 1606 than I did about political concerns in my own nation’s past. But this focus shifted as my forays into advising local productions of the plays kindled an interest in Shakespeare in the United States. This led in turn to my assembling an anthology for the Library of America on what Americans had written about Shakespeare. While undertaking research for that volume I stumbled upon material I had never heard of or only knew about in a cursory way. It was a revelation. Reading the reformer Jane Addams’s 1895 essay “A Modern Lear” (on the recent Pullman workers’ strike) uncovered more about the bloody conflict between labor and management in Gilded Age America than anything I had ever been taught in school. Mary McCarthy’s skewering essay “General Macbeth” in 1962 exposed the hollowness of our military-industrial complex during the Cold War as powerfully as her friend Hannah Arendt would expose the banality of evil in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem the following year.

  This new direction in my work brought me into the orbit of Americans in positions of authority for whom Shakespeare clearly mattered. President Bill Clinton provided a foreword to my anthology in which he recalled his early engagement with the plays in Hot Springs, Arkansas, where memorizing lines from Macbeth in high school taught him about “the perils of blind ambition, and the emptiness of power disconnected from higher purpose.” I entered into an extended exchange over the politics of who wrote Shakespeare with retired Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens, who had written to me about it. I was invited to speak at Bohemian Grove, a secretive retreat north of San Francisco, where, it was my impression, mostly mainstream and wealthy Republicans (all men, as women were excluded), many of whom knew Shakespeare’s works well, gathered every July. And I was asked to participate in a mock appeal of Shakespeare’s Shylock, presided over by Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in Venice. My limited role there was to engage in conversation with fellow Shakespearean Stephen Greenblatt; we essentially stalled for time while Ginsburg and her fellow judges reached their verdict. But the event gave me an opportunity to observe the exacting and brilliant Justice Ginsburg closely, and it was hard to ignore the messages of gender equality and religious tolerance implicit in her rulings: she declared that Portia should go to law school, and Shylock was to have his loan returned to him and his coerced conversion to Christianity nullified. Supreme Court justices weren’t supposed to go around promoting their ideological views; I saw how Shakespeare proved an effective way of doing so indirectly.

  At the same time, I was learning more about how Americans with considerably less power or status responded to Shakespeare. Since 2012, in addition to my work as an English professor at Columbia University, I’ve served as the Shakespeare Scholar in Residence at the Public Theater in New York, assisting ninety-minute Mobile Unit performances of Shakespeare that tour local prisons and community centers. Shakespeare’s plays are rich in the extremes of experiences—injustice, separation, violence, revenge—and it was soon obvious that while I might have been more familiar with Shakespeare’s language, these playgoers grasped far better than I what was at stake in the plays. Some of those imprisoned, such as the women in the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility—as engaged and responsive an audience as I have ever witnessed—had seen a half dozen or more of the plays. Watching their reactions to professional pro
ductions of Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet was both humbling and illuminating.

  While all this deepened my interest in how Shakespeare mattered to Americans, it was the election of Donald Trump in 2016 that convinced me to write about Shakespeare in a divided America. After the election, I headed to some of the red states in the South—lecturing and talking with audiences about America’s Shakespeare in Alabama, Kentucky, Texas, and Tennessee—to grapple with what, from inside my blue state bubble, I had failed to understand about where the country was heading. I wasn’t the only one turning to Shakespeare to make sense of the moment. On the eve of the election, Stephen Greenblatt published a powerful op-ed in the New York Times likening Trump to a Shakespearean tyrant. And a month after Trump was elected, Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater, decided to respond to this seismic event by directing a production of Julius Caesar the following summer at the Delacorte Theater. The open-air Delacorte is located in Central Park, and since Joe Papp built it in 1962, spectators—by now, more than 5 million—have flocked to see Free Shakespeare in the Park. Fifty thousand more would see this timely Julius Caesar. Because that production, and reactions to it, powerfully shaped my understanding of much of what follows in these pages, it will help if I describe it here at some length.

  Julius Caesar hadn’t been staged at the Delacorte in many years, and Shakespeare’s account of the end of the Roman republic and the rise of autocratic rule (marking the end of democracy in the West for nearly two thousand years) spoke directly to the political vertigo many Americans were experiencing. As Eustis told New York magazine, “the election of Trump really reveals to us that what we thought of as norms were really historically limited and may change completely.” He hoped that staging Julius Caesar could “provide a cathartic experience for those of us who are losing our minds. What I could feel in myself and in the audience is that we were playing out this violent fantasy and, by playing it out, puncturing its power.”