Shakespeare in a Divided America

by James Shapiro

  Some of those who knew John Wilkes saw Shakespeare’s hand behind his act. In 1878, the theater manager John T. Ford told a journalist that “John Wilkes Booth was trained from earliest infancy to consider the almost deified assassin Brutus, just as Shakespeare immortalized him.” Ford imagined Booth thinking, “If I failed to serve the South in my conspiracy to abduct, I can now be her Brutus.” Booth’s mind, Ford believed, “was turned by the poetic and dramatic glamour which transmitted the story of the Roman assassination.” Others who knew Booth shared this view, including George Alfred Townsend, a harsh critic of the South, who published the first popular book about Lincoln’s murderer in 1865. Townsend had seen Booth perform and spoke with him not long before the assassination. He too subscribed to the belief that Shakespeare was somehow behind it all, that Booth “had rolled under his tongue the sweet paragraphs of Shakespeare referring to Brutus . . . until it became his ambition . . . to stake his life upon one stroke for fame, the murder of a ruler obnoxious to the South.” Townsend also believed that Booth “burned to make his name a part of history, cried into fame by the applauses of the South,” and “that whatever minor parts might be enacted—Casca, Cassius, or what not—he was to be the dramatic Brutus.”

  Thirty-six years after the assassination, when it was safer to say such things, Edward M. Alfriend recalled that Booth had told him: “Of all Shakespeare’s characters I like Brutus the best, excepting only Lear.” Alfriend also implicated Shakespeare in the assassination. He had “no doubt” that Booth’s “study of and meditation upon those characters had much to do with shaping that mental condition which induced his murder of President Lincoln,” and “that if the truth could be known, John Wilkes Booth, in his insanity, lost his identity in the delirious fancy that he was enacting the role of ‘Brutus,’ and that Lincoln was his ‘Julius Caesar.’”

  But efforts to recast the assassination of Lincoln as a reenactment of Julius Caesar found little purchase among the vast majority of Americans, even in the defeated South. The play that the nation settled on to give voice to what had happened, and define how Lincoln was to be remembered, turned out to be Macbeth. As news of the president’s murder swept through the land and Americans struggled to put their feeling into words, lines from Act 2, scene 3 of Macbeth came immediately to mind: “O horror, horror, horror! / Tongue nor heart cannot conceive nor name thee,” wrote Benjamin Brown French, who would be responsible for planning Lincoln’s funeral, adding, “We have supped full of horrors.” The same words echoed in the mind of Fanny Seward, whose father had been stabbed as part of the larger plot to eliminate the nation’s leaders, and who recorded the line in her diary as well. There was even an attempt to implicate Jefferson Davis in the conspiracy to assassinate Lincoln by claiming that he quoted from Macbeth upon hearing that the president had been shot; John A. Bingham, who served as the assistant judge advocate at the trial of Booth’s coconspirators, quoted sources in those proceedings who had heard Davis say, upon learning from a telegram that Lincoln was shot, “If it were to be done, it were better it were well done.”

  While lines from other plays were tried out, including passages from Hamlet and King John, it was Macbeth to which those mourning Lincoln found themselves turning time and again, especially those likening him to the slain Duncan, who

  Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been

  So clear in his great office, that his virtues

  Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against

  The deep damnation of his taking-off. (1.7.17–20)

  These four lines were repeatedly recited in eulogies. They appeared on banners strung from storefronts. They were printed on illustrations, such as The Martyr of Liberty, in which they offer a commentary on the moment of the assassination. And they formed the centerpiece of the black-bordered funeral broadside that circulated: “Shakespeare Applied to Our National Bereavement.” The words became, as Richard Wightman Fox puts it in Lincoln’s Body, “virtually the official slogan of the mourning period.”

  To mourn Lincoln as another Duncan was to move away from Booth’s violent understanding of Macbeth as much as from Lincoln’s introspective one. True, the play was about an assassination, but, unlike the one in Julius Caesar, not ideologically driven, so better suited to the story that America preferred to tell itself now that the war was over but what was to follow unclear. Some wanted to celebrate Lincoln as a radical who gave his life to free the slaves; others chose to memorialize him as a moderate who fought to save the Union, and whose death was a setback for Reconstruction and the reconciliation of North and South. Likening Lincoln to Duncan papered over the vast gap between these positions, for Duncan was something of a cipher in Macbeth. He may be the only ruler in all of Shakespeare’s works whose limitations are overlooked, one of those rare instances where Shakespeare did not build on the hints provided in his source, Holinshed’s Chronicles, where a “soft and gentle” Duncan is criticized for having been “negligent . . . in punishing offenders,” leading “many misruled persons” to “trouble the peace and quiet state of the commonwealth, by seditious commotions.” In aspiring to die like Macbeth (though not to reflect on his crime, as Macbeth himself had done), John Wilkes Booth had failed to anticipate that the man he cold-bloodedly murdered would be revered like Duncan, his faults forgotten. For a divided America, the universal currency of Shakespeare’s words offered a collective catharsis—once the story of Lincoln’s assassination was successfully recast as a national tragedy of Shakespearean dimensions—permitting a blood-soaked nation to defer confronting once again what Booth declared had driven him to act: the conviction that America “was formed for the white not for the black man.”

  Shakespeare Tercentenary Celebration, Caliban by the Yellow Sands, by Percy MacKaye, 1916.

  CHAPTER 5

  1916: Immigration

  The Tempest is staged so often nowadays in America that it’s hard to imagine a time when it wasn’t. Yet for a very long stretch—from before the Civil War until the end of World War II—American productions were few and far between, and mostly forgettable. When William Davidge staged it in New York in 1869 it hadn’t been seen there for fifteen years, and nearly thirty more years would pass before Augustin Daly—America’s first great theater director—would stage it in New York in 1897. Two Tempest-less decades later a local theater critic complained that for “the present generation” the play “is virtually unknown on the stage.”

  It didn’t fare much better elsewhere across the land, didn’t yet speak to the concerns of American audiences in the ways that plays like Macbeth, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, or Othello seemed to. Not a line from it appeared in either Scott’s Lessons in Elocution or McGuffey’s Reader. When James McVicker staged The Tempest in Chicago in 1889 the Chicago Times noted that until now it “had never been tried in this country west of New York.” A San Francisco company undertook a western tour in 1902, and the British actor Ben Greet toured the eastern seaboard with his imported production a few years later. Otherwise, with the exception of a few scattered and amateur performances and a brief revival in Boston in 1928, that seems to have been it until 1945. In that year, first in Boston, then in New York, Margaret Webster, fresh from her success directing Paul Robeson in a Broadway production of Othello, cast Canada Lee, another leading black actor, as Caliban—a first. It wasn’t until after World War II, then, that American productions began engaging the darker side of authority and global power that British ones had been wrestling with since Victorian days, and not until the 1970s that The Tempest joined the mini-canon of Shakespeare’s plays frequently taught and staged in America.

  In contrast, in modern Britain, the play never lost its popularity; from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century alone more than twenty-five productions were staged there, including major ones by Frank Benson, William Poel, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, and Tyrone Guthrie. British critics and biographers wrote extensively about the play, and two years a
fter Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man appeared in 1871, Daniel Wilson published Caliban: The Missing Link, suggesting that Shakespeare in The Tempest had more or less anticipated Darwin. Wilson’s Caliban “seems indeed the half-human link between the brute and man,” the “ideal anthropoid in the highest stage of Simian evolution.” The book would have an oversize influence on productions on both sides of the Atlantic, including that of Frank Benson, who spent hours at the zoo studying monkeys and baboons in the 1890s to prepare for what many now saw as the play’s most challenging role.

  But before the 1970s there was a brief moment when The Tempest really mattered in America: 1916. That year, in addition to a “doublet-and-hose” revival by New York’s Drama Society, there was a large-scale adaptation by Percy MacKaye, Caliban by the Yellow Sands, the centerpiece of both national and metropolitan celebrations of the three-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. A broad range of ethnic groups participated in this community drama, which came to be called simply Caliban. With a total of seven thousand local performers in New York and Boston, these were the largest theatrical performances of all time in either city; more than three hundred thousand spectators went to see it staged. It was hoped that a national tour as well as public recitations would follow. The story of Prospero’s attempts to educate Caliban rose to prominence that year for a reason few explicitly acknowledged. Through its portrayal of Caliban, and in its reliance on large groups of performers from different ethnicities, the production spoke to one of the most divisive issues of the day—immigration—a concern that was being fiercely debated in Congress, discussions that would lead to the passage of groundbreaking legislation shortly after the tercentenary ended, redefining who could be an American.

  Until the 1880s, America had welcomed successive waves of immigrants and saw itself as a haven for those seeking religious, economic, and political freedom. But attitudes began to shift by the end of that decade, in which 5.2 million foreigners arrived, raising the percentage of those who were born abroad to nearly 15 percent of the population. Anxieties about foreigners intensified in the 1890s, when the number of those arriving from eastern and southern Europe surpassed that of those from northern European lands. By 1907 these “new” immigrants constituted 85 percent of all those entering the country, and efforts to curb their influx intensified (Asian, African, and Central and South American immigrants remained a small fraction of those admitted, and a Chinese Exclusion Act had been in place since 1882). Between 1880 and 1920 an unprecedented number of those seeking opportunity or refuge—nearly 24 million—landed on America’s shores.

  Immigration authorities began to distinguish not only between what they deemed the “white, black, yellow, brown, and red” races but also between what were imagined to be over a score of white European races as well. At the turn of the century, national census reports very nearly adopted, as immigration officials at Ellis Island had, a table of “Races and Nations” to categorize new arrivals. Until the early 1890s those seeking admission to America had been asked about their nationality, mental and physical health, occupation, where they had come from, where they were heading, if they had any relatives in the US, and whether they had been imprisoned or in a poor house. The scope of such questions would change in 1898, when a supplemental list was added that reflected the emerging scientific racism of the day. Potential immigrants were now required to answer additional questions about their color, place of birth, mother tongue, and religion—which, taken together, spelled race. This in turn led to Jews (of whatever nationality) being categorized as Hebrews, while Italians from Naples or Sicily were racially demarcated from their “Teutonic” fellow countrymen from Milan or Venice. The shift in questions and categories was subtle, but significant: potential Americans were no longer judged on their character but on their lineage.

  As one polemicist at that time (of “old,” “Anglo-Saxon,” “Teutonic,” or “Nordic” stock—the terms were used more or less interchangeably) declared: “Our immigration has, until lately, been chiefly made up of the most intelligent and of the most desirable races of Europe, but recently the numbers have greatly increased of those who are without question the most illiterate and the most depraved people of that continent.” Those words were written by Robert DeCourcy Ward, one of three recent Harvard graduates who in 1894 founded the Immigration Restriction League, an influential lobbying group committed to preserving the nation’s Anglo-Saxon identity. As that organization’s first president, John Fiske, put it: a community of people “have a perfect right to build a wall around it and exclude such people as they do not wish to have among them.”

  How Shakespeare and especially The Tempest were conscripted by those opposed to the immigration of those deemed undesirable is a lesser-known part of this story. In retrospect, it is unsurprising that a Shakespearean comedy would be appropriated in this way, since his comedies almost always end with the creation of a new social order defined by who is included and who is kept out. The wrong skin color, religion, or sexual orientation, or simply the unwillingness to act and sound like everyone else is enough to warrant exclusion. The pattern is repeated in one comedy after another. The sexually rapacious Falstaff cannot be accommodated into the domestic world of suburban Windsor. A melancholy Jacques refuses to join the rest as they make their way from the Forest of Arden back to court at the end of As You Like It. Though he has agreed to convert, Shylock is repudiated at the end of The Merchant of Venice, while Portia’s unsuccessful wooer, that dark-skinned Muslim, the Prince of Morocco, is rejected as well. Community in Shakespeare’s comedies depends—much like immigration policy—on who is barred admission as much as on who is accepted. So too in The Tempest, although here the geography of inclusion is reversed: Prospero, Miranda, and the courtiers, clowns, and sailors all abandon the island and sail home to Italy. Even the traitorous and unrepentant Antonio, because of ties of blood, is included in the group. Ariel flies off to freedom. At masque’s end it is only Caliban, eager for companionship, who is excluded, left alone on the island. The hint of cruelty in all this, the self-justification of those who do the excluding, even our own complicity in watching this unfold, is overshadowed by the feel-good ending. But make no mistake: a more hopeful community at the end of a Shakespeare comedy typically depends on somebody’s exclusion.

  Despite this, the role assigned to Shakespeare in the debate over immigration in early-twentieth-century America is surprising. Few would have been more amused than Shakespeare to learn that he was “Anglo-Saxon” (let alone a “white man,” another term that doesn’t appear in his works and was only beginning to enter the vocabulary during his lifetime). He would have known that the first advocate of Anglo-Saxonism as a racial and political category was his contemporary, the London-born Richard Rowlands, a Catholic apologist who was himself of immigrant stock (his Dutch grandfather had sought refuge in England around 1500). Shakespeare likely knew that Rowlands became a refugee; he fled religious persecution in England, settled in Antwerp, took the name Verstegen, and in 1605 published the wildly influential Restitution of Decayed Intelligence, which argued for Teutonic racial purity and superiority. Rowlands’s case for England’s Germanic-Saxon roots—which was essentially a Catholic’s thinly disguised attack on King James’s claim to lead a British and Protestant nation—would be appropriated three centuries later by American Protestants bent on excluding Catholic immigrants.

  Positioning Shakespeare as a foe of immigrants is all the more surprising given what he himself had written about refugees. Victorian scholars first identified the playwright’s handwriting, “Hand D,” in a collaborative manuscript of a play called Sir Thomas More. Shakespeare’s likely contribution concerned More’s reaction to the violent anti-immigrant riots in London in 1517. He wrote a powerful scene in which More admonishes nativists who would “put down strangers, / Kill them, cut their throats, possess their houses” (including, perhaps, the throats of Richard Rowlands’s immigrant ancestors). “Imagine,” Mo
re says, “that you see the wretched strangers,”

  Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage,

  Plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation,

  And that you sit as kings in your desires,

  Authority quite silent by your brawl,

  And you in ruff of your opinions clothed. (2.4)

  It is an extraordinarily empathic speech, all the more so given the xenophobia of Shakespeare’s own day. By the 1880s Shakespeare could have been seen as a pioneering advocate for refugees, especially those who had fled religious and political persecution on the Continent. But that never happened. Instead, Shakespeare’s reputed Anglo-Saxon identity, along with his plays, were marshaled by influential scholars and politicians frightened by the threat that unrestricted immigration posed to America’s identity.

  * * *

  • • •

  NONE WAS MORE instrumental in this effort than Henry Cabot Lodge, for more than a quarter century the leading voice in Congress for curbing immigration. Lodge was born in Massachusetts in 1850 and traced his family’s roots on both sides back to English ancestry. Lodge attended Harvard, where he received a doctorate in history, one of the first to be awarded there. His thesis was on Anglo-Saxon law, part of a collaborative effort to show that racial traits were behind the transmission of ancient laws and liberties. He briefly taught history at Harvard before embarking on a political career, first serving in the House of Representatives from 1886 to 1893, then in the Senate until his death in 1924.