Shakespeare in a Divided America

by James Shapiro

  Shakespeare’s habit of presenting both sides of an argument is especially characteristic of his Roman tragedies: Does Lucius mount a coup at the end of Titus Andronicus, backed by foreign soldiers, or is this simply a restoration of order? Are Antony and Cleopatra tragic figures or rather “a strumpet’s fool” and a “Triple-turned whore”? (1.1.13; 4.12.13). Does Coriolanus celebrate the defeat of authoritarianism or lament its loss? In so habitually offering competing perspectives, and in assuming that his audiences were capable of appreciating this, Shakespeare was very much of his age, a product of an Elizabethan educational system that trained young minds to argue in utramque partem, on both sides of the question. Eustis, in urging us to confront the moral quandaries of Julius Caesar and in injecting oppositional voices that challenged the violent action of the conspirators, assumed that contemporary audiences were no less up to the task. In an age in which so many were quick to dismiss the views of the other side that was a risky assumption.

  Watching the production’s tipping point, when first Brutus and then Antony speaks directly to the crowd, I often thought of this. One was trying to justify the conspirators’ violent actions, the other turn an increasingly frenzied onstage crowd against them. It felt like changing the channel from MSNBC to Fox News. Elizabeth Marvel’s Antony at first fails miserably when addressing her “Friends, Romans, countrymen” (3.2.75); she seemed stiff, almost robotic, in her delivery. The supernumeraries, initially swayed by Brutus, now shout her down. Marvel could barely be heard as she slumped to the ground, utterly defeated. But she then suddenly shifted tactics and slowly won the crowd to her side.

  It was a bravura performance, one of the highlights of the production. Marvel’s Antony briefly mentioned Caesar’s will but only returned to it when the crowd around her was fully primed. The last time I had seen a group of people so itching with expectation—“read us the will! Caesar’s will!” (3.2.150)—was when Oprah Winfrey told her television show’s live audience that small gift boxes would be passed to everyone, one of which would contain a key to a new car. When she gave them permission to open the boxes, everyone screamed for joy—for each box contained one of those car keys. It was much the same with the dozens onstage gathered around Antony when Marvel read from the will and described what Caesar had left them. The emotional appeal of a savvy political leader and that of a television personality became indistinguishable:

  Moreover, he hath left you all his walks,

  His private arbors, and new-planted orchards,

  On this side Tiber; he hath left them you,

  And to your heirs forever—common pleasures,

  To walk abroad and recreate yourselves.

  Here was a Caesar! When comes such another? (3.3.248–53)

  In rehearsals, Marvel started pronouncing the verb recreate (in the sense of “walking abroad and enjoying yourselves”) in the next-to-last line as re-create. Her choice was inspired, and tapped into that American conviction that we can easily re-create ourselves—personally, religiously, politically. The moment in which the dozens of supernumeraries, drunk with the excitement of it all, raced off wielding makeshift weapons to do Antony’s bidding—driving Brutus and Cassius from Rome—marked a political re-creation and the end of the republic.

  On opening night, Oskar Eustis took to the stage before the performance began, and had this to say about how both theater and democracy depend upon competing points of view:

  This play . . . warns about what happens when you try to preserve democracy by nondemocratic means. And . . . (spoiler alert) . . . it doesn’t end up too good. But at the same time, one of the dangers that is unleashed by that is the danger of a large crowd of people, manipulated by their emotions, taken over by leaders who urge them to do things that not only are against their interests, but destroy their very institutions that are there to serve and protect them. This warning is a warning that’s in this show, and we are really happy to be playing that story tonight. . . . I am proud to say . . . that we are here to uphold the Public’s mission. And the Public’s mission is to say that the culture belongs to everybody, needs to belong to everybody, to say that art has something to say about the great civic issues of our time, and to say, that like drama, democracy depends on the conflict of different points of view. Nobody owns the truth. We all own the culture.

  His insistence that democracy depends on the expression of competing viewpoints echoed the language of one of the principles guiding public discourse since the end of World War II. The war and its immediate aftermath had taught Americans about the threat to democracy in countries where the people were fed only a single version of what passed for truth. In 1946 the Federal Communications Commission, which controlled licenses to America’s media frequencies, issued an extraordinary ruling, which came to be called the “Fairness Doctrine”:

  If, as we believe to be the case, the public interest is best served in a democracy through the ability of the people to hear expositions of the various positions taken by responsible groups and individuals on particular topics and to choose between them, it is evident that broadcast licensees have an affirmative duty generally to encourage and implement the broadcast of all sides of controversial public issues over their facilities.

  Radio and television stations were now required to present a diverse set of viewpoints as a way of best serving the American people and preserving democracy from demagoguery. Though challenged from time to time, the Fairness Doctrine would remain in force until the 1980s, when it came under assault under Ronald Reagan’s push to deregulate. It was further undermined in 1986 by a 2–1 ruling by the DC Circuit of the US Court of Appeals; the two judges in the majority, Robert Bork and Antonin Scalia, declared that the doctrine was only a doctrine, not a law. Enforcement soon stopped and it was repealed a year later.

  It doesn’t take much imagination to predict what followed: the rapid rise of partisan programming and the emergence of echo chambers, as Americans retreated to their respective camps, some turning to right-wing media, others to liberal commentators and websites. Talk during the Obama years of restoring the Fairness Doctrine was met by stiff resistance from the Right; nothing came of it, as Sean Hannity characterized the effort as “an assault on the First Amendment” and Newt Gingrich dismissed the Fairness Doctrine as “Affirmative Action for liberals.” By the time that Eustis urged that “democracy depends on the conflict of different points of view” on opening night, it was too late. Those on the political Right could only see one side of the story being enacted onstage: the brutal assassination of President Donald Trump. And they were bent on stopping it. I’ll return to that—and its implications for the future of Shakespeare in America—in the final chapter.

  * * *

  • • •

  WE MAY EXPERIENCE Shakespeare’s plays communally in classrooms and theaters, but we react to them in highly personal ways, and in the chapters that follow I have tried to be especially attentive to that. Each of these chapters delves deeply into how (in most cases) a pair of individuals have experienced Shakespeare. The focus of each chapter is limited to a play or two, and each revolves around a significant social or political conflict in the nation’s history. My choices also reflect a desire to capture the extraordinary range of ways in which Americans have experienced Shakespeare, through solitary reading, amateur and professional performances, and adaptations of the plays in musicals, movies, and large-scale civic spectacles. My hope is that, taken together, these stories offer a fresh perspective on the history of the United States over the past two centuries, one that may shed light on how we have arrived at our present moment, and how, in turn, we may better address that which divides and impedes us as a nation.

  The Fruits of Amalgamation, E. W. Clay.

  CHAPTER 1

  1833: Miscegenation

  On New Year’s Eve of 1835, former president John Quincy Adams wrote a long letter to a friend about Othello. Three months later most of th
at letter appeared in American Monthly Magazine as an essay on “The Character of Desdemona.” In it, Adams vilifies Desdemona for desiring and then marrying a black man:

  My objections to the character of Desdemona arise not from what Iago, or Roderigo, or Brabantio, or Othello says of her; but from what she herself does. She absconds from her father’s house, in the dead of night, to marry a blackamoor. She breaks a father’s heart, and covers his noble house with shame, to gratify—what? Pure love, like that of Juliet or Miranda? No! Unnatural passion; it cannot be named with delicacy. Her admirers now say this is criticism of 1835; that the color of Othello has nothing to do with the passion of Desdemona. No? Why, if Othello had been white, what need would there have been for her running away with him?

  Adams has little patience for critics who accuse him of misreading the play in light of the increasingly fraught racial politics of America in 1835, and even less for those who in recent years had begun to claim that Desdemona’s “love for Othello is not unnatural, because he is not a Congo negro but only a sooty Moor.” Othello himself says that he is black (and had been “sold to slavery” (1.3.140) earlier in his adventurous life). For Adams, there can be only one conclusion: “the passion of Desdemona for Othello is unnatural, solely and exclusively because of his color,” and because of this “her elopement to him, and secret marriage with him, indicate a personal character not only very deficient in delicacy, but totally regardless of filial duty, of female modesty, and of ingenuous shame.”

  Contemporaries may well have been surprised to see these words appear under the former president’s familiar initials—“J.Q.A.”—and not simply because of the harsh views expressed here. Adams, a tireless writer, whose correspondence and daily journal entries totaled many thousands of pages, was widely admired as one of the most literate individuals of his day. But he was also a cautious politician, extremely reticent about expressing his opinions in print, especially controversial ones, so published surprisingly little in his long career, and absolutely nothing on interracial marriage.

  Stranger still, he was doubling down on a companion piece he had just published (that had prompted the attack on the “criticism of 1835”). This too was on Shakespeare—“Misconceptions of Shakspeare Upon the Stage”—and had appeared earlier that month in the New England Magazine. While this first essay dealt with his views on King Lear and Juliet, it included a few choice words for Desdemona’s interracial marriage that anticipated his subsequent and longer diatribe. As this earlier essay unfolds, it becomes increasingly clear that it is Desdemona’s physical intimacy with Othello that so discomforts Adams: “her fondling with Othello is disgusting.” That essay similarly concludes that “the great moral lesson of the tragedy of Othello is, that black and white blood cannot be intermingled in marriage without a gross outrage upon the law of Nature; and that, in such violations, Nature will vindicate her laws.” Insistent on being understood, Adams puts this even more bluntly. Any pity we might feel as we watch Othello kill Desdemona must give way to the grim satisfaction that she got what was coming: “when Othello smothers her in bed, the terror and the pity subside immediately into the sentiment that she has her deserts.”

  Why had a former president and now member of Congress felt it necessary to weigh in publicly not once, but twice, and so unflinchingly, on Desdemona’s interracial marriage? It’s the sort of claim that we might expect from a Southern slaveholder. But John Quincy Adams was from Massachusetts, which as far back as 1783 had renounced slavery. More puzzling still, Adams was widely recognized as one of the leading abolitionists in the land. He had spearheaded the opposition to the Gag Rule (intended to prevent petitions against slavery from being acknowledged by Congress), would fight against the annexation of Texas and thereby the creation of additional slave states, and would soon successfully argue the Amistad case (in which he defended captured African slaves) before the Supreme Court. Adams’s advocacy led to a spate of death threats. His congressional opponent (and later Confederate general) Henry Wise called him “the acutest, the astutest, the archest enemy of southern slavery that ever existed”—and Wise didn’t mean this as a compliment.

  Disturbing prints by the Philadelphia artist E. W. Clay that circulated in 1839 tried to stir up racial antagonism through depictions of interracial mingling, called at the time amalgamation (the term “miscegenation” was not invented until 1864). In one of those prints, “Practical Amalgamation,” a black man and woman are seated on a couch, each with a white lover. Behind them, in framed portraits, three men look down approvingly on the scene: Arthur Tappan (a fierce abolitionist about whom it was reported, falsely, that he was married to a black woman); Daniel O’Connell (who was the Irish leader of the Catholic Emancipation movement and another strong abolitionist); and, on the right, J. Q. Adams.

  How could a man seen by opponents of interracial union as one of their greatest foes publish a pair of essays condemning Desdemona for marrying a black man and claiming that in her murder at his hands she got what she deserved?

  Practical Amalgamation, E. W. Clay.

  A partial answer, at least to what precipitated Adams’s surprising decision to publish his views on Desdemona, can be traced back to a disastrous encounter at a dinner party a few years earlier. The occasion was the arrival in the United States of one of the most celebrated Shakespeare actors of the day, Fanny Kemble. The Kembles were British theatrical royalty. Fanny Kemble’s uncle and aunt, John Philip Kemble and Sarah Siddons, had been the greatest Shakespeare actors of their time, and Fanny’s father, Charles Kemble, who had performed alongside his famous siblings in minor roles, was a notable actor in his own right, and joint owner of the Covent Garden Theatre. Her mother acted as well. When threatened with bankruptcy in 1829, her parents persuaded the nineteen-year-old Fanny Kemble to enter the family business. She studied the role of Juliet for three weeks, then made a triumphant debut at Covent Garden in October 1829. She was an immediate success, and the family’s financial ruin was averted. Fanny Kemble was quick at learning parts (a new one every month, including those of Portia and Beatrice) and was enormously popular, both onstage and in London’s social scene, where as a well-informed and engaging conversationalist she more than held her own. With the retirement, decline, and deaths of John Philip Kemble, Sarah Siddons, and the no less celebrated Edmund Kean, Fanny Kemble stood at or very near the pinnacle of the London theater world.

  By 1832 she was not only acting in plays but also writing them. By then, however, insolvency again threatened. Charles Kemble persuaded his reluctant daughter to accompany him on what turned out to be a lucrative two-year tour of the United States. Fanny Kemble was at the peak of her career when she arrived in the States, a celebrity as much as a star performer. Her warm reception in prominent circles in Britain had ensured that even in American states known for their suspicion of actors she would be a much-sought-after guest.

  The Kembles set sail in August 1832 and the following month began performing in New York. Audiences (as well as suitors) flocked to see Fanny Kemble. The praise in the New York Evening Post was typical: Fanny Kemble conveyed “an intensity and truth never exhibited by an actress in America.” A young Walt Whitman, only thirteen or so at the time, secured a seat and later recalled, “Fanny Kemble! . . . Nothing finer did ever stage exhibit.” At subsequent stops in Philadelphia and Washington, DC, she met with prominent writers and politicians, including President Andrew Jackson (and let slide his complaints about “scribbling ladies” who fomented political controversy).

  Her arrival in Boston in April 1833 was keenly awaited. Securing the Kembles as dinner guests during their brief stay could not have been easy, but George Parkman, a wealthy physician, managed to do so. Because it was true, or because he knew that he had to flatter the former president to get him to travel the nine miles from Quincy for the dinner, Parkman told him that Fanny Kemble had requested his presence. Either way, it worked. Adams wrote in his journal that “the youn
g lady was desirous of being introduced to me. And I could but say that it would be very pleasing to me. . . . As a sort of personage myself, of the last century, I was flattered by the wish of this blossom of the next age, to bestow some of her fresh fragrance upon the antiquities of the past.” While acknowledging here the great gap in their ages—he was now 66, she 23—Adams doesn’t admit to other gulfs separating them. Kemble represented a British perspective on the morality and politics of the plays, he an American one. She embodied Shakespeare onstage; the only Shakespeare he cared about was on the page. She mingled with leading writers and politicians on both sides of the Atlantic and confidently expressed her views; he remained convinced of women’s “imperfections” and “the frailties incidental to their physical and intellectual nature.” Adams seems to have decided before they met that Kemble was overrated, her handsome looks and fine mind overpraised; he noted snidely in his journal a few days before the dinner that “Fanny Kemble [passes here] for a great beauty, and a great genius, both of which with the aid of fashion and fancy, she is.”