Shakespeare in a Divided America

by James Shapiro

THE HARSH WORLD of current events and the fantasy one of Shakespeare in Love would collide on the eve of the Academy Awards, at the lavish Miramax party held on March 20, 1999. Tom Stoppard wrote a skit for the event, Two Gentlemen of Queens, based on Harvey Weinstein and his brother, Bob, an executive producer of the film. It was not a private performance; the press had been invited, and I draw on George Rush and Joanna Molloy’s detailed account of the skit that ran in the New York Daily News. Geoffrey Rush—who played Philip Henslowe in the film—slipped on a giant prosthetic stomach to play Harvey Weinstein, while Matt Damon put on a “frizzy black wig” to impersonate Bob Weinstein.

  In the skit the Weinstein brothers meet with Tina Brown, editor of the hot new magazine Talk, bankrolled by their company, Miramax. “When she gets here,” Harvey tells Bob, “let me do the talking.” Tina then enters, played by a “plummy-accented” Gwyneth Paltrow, who tells them that she has “this incredible, fantastic idea for the Christmas cover: Monica Lewinsky’s baby.” When Bob, stunned, asks whether Lewinsky is pregnant, Tina tells him: “This is what I have to talk to you about, Bob. I think Monica will have your baby if Harvey gives her the leading role in Elizabeth’s Loves.” And given Talk’s publication schedule, Lewinsky needs to give birth no later than November. To which Harvey responds: “We’re dead. I already asked her and she won’t do it unless I give up my producer’s credit.” A month after Clinton’s impeachment hearings, those attending the Miramax party were making light of it all—Stoppard, Damon, Rush, Paltrow, joking about sex with a producer in exchange for a role in a Miramax film, and of Bob Weinstein impregnating Monica Lewinsky in exchange for Harvey giving her a leading role in Elizabeth’s Loves and putting a photograph of their baby on the cover of Talk. For Frank DiGiacomo, who covered the event for The Observer, another “cringe-inducing” moment was when Matt Damon, in his role as Bob Weinstein, “said that Ms. Brown was basically into ‘English faggots.’” The Weinsteins reportedly loved the skit.

  It’s as if the shadowy presence of Harvey Weinstein’s transgressions and Clinton’s affair with Lewinsky had to be invoked, then exorcised. Stoppard is witty and Hollywood stars charming, but twenty years on, in the wake of the #MeToo movement, thinking about the damage done to the lives of so many actors mistreated by Weinstein, to Lewinsky, and to the country, it strikes a dispiriting note. There’s even the ghostly return of that illegitimate child that had first been introduced by Marc Norman, then cut by Stoppard, only to be restored and then cut again by him. Two Gentlemen of Queens was the doppelganger of Shakespeare in Love, fleetingly revealing many of the dark currents suppressed in the making of the film.

  The following evening Shakespeare in Love went on to win its many Academy Awards, including Best Picture. The film was a success because those who made it had worked hard, were exceptionally talented, and guessed right about the kind of story America wanted to be told about Shakespeare (who never reads a book in the course of the film) and about its values. Had Norman’s script been the basis of the film it would never have done this well; Stoppard, whatever his personal beliefs, had a surer finger on the pulse of American audiences. Seven years would pass before the first film to celebrate a gay relationship, Brokeback Mountain, would even come close to winning the Academy Award for Best Picture.

  Shakespeare in Love was justly celebrated as a very knowing film, one stuffed with allusions that even the most attentive moviegoer or scholar might not catch. Yet there are things, to paraphrase Madden, that those who made the film as well as those who loved it (and I count myself among them) didn’t see, or chose not to see, about where America was heading as the century drew to a close. That goes for America’s congressional leadership as well, more obsessed with the sex life of Bill Clinton and the bedroom preferences of citizens than with genuine threats to the nation. An astute critic at that time, Stuart Klawans of the Nation, thought “the most remarkable feature” of Shakespeare in Love and the other nominees that year for Best Picture was “a determination to keep their eyes shut tight against present-day American realities.”

  Early on in the film, Will, in a therapy session with Dr. Moth, complains about his creative impotence in Freudian terms: “the proud tower of my genius has collapsed.” The line, which might have gotten laughs in 1999, would no longer do so two years later, when it would be hard not to cringe when hearing of collapsing towers. The US embassy bombings in East Africa took place on August 7, 1998. And a week before the film opened, on December 4, 1998, the CIA warned President Clinton that al-Qaeda’s leaders were preparing for attacks in America and were training its members to hijack airplanes. The 9/11 terrorists also had their sights set on that Manhattan skyline, their plot “there for those to see who wanted to see it, and not for those who didn’t.”

  Cropped screen grab, assassination scene, Julius Caesar at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, June 2017, YouTube.

  CONCLUSION

  2017: Left | Right

  The late 1980s and early 1990s were a time of the Culture Wars in America, waged in op-eds, magazine articles, and in books like James Davison Hunter’s Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals, Ivo Kamps’s Shakespeare Left and Right, and Allan Bloom’s best-selling The Closing of the American Mind. Shakespeare was dragged into the quarrel as rival camps fought over his place in the college curriculum. Those at one extreme argued that as a dead white male and agent of imperialism, Shakespeare should no longer be taught; those at the other celebrated him as a pillar of a superior Western civilization and complained that traditional approaches to teaching his plays had been supplanted by a focus on race and gender. But this front in the Culture Wars turned out to be the site of a largely pointless skirmish; the number of students majoring in English had never been that high to begin with (in the single digits since at least the 1970s and currently below 2.5 percent). The real battles were being fought elsewhere.

  While the media was preoccupied with what was happening in college classrooms, it largely ignored a far more consequential cultural development: the rise of color-blind casting in American productions of Shakespeare’s plays. Shakespeare played a decisive role in dismantling this long-standing barrier, spurring the broader adoption of color-blind casting in mainstream theater, television, and film. Beginning in earnest in the 1960s (and with increasing frequency by the 1970s and 1980s), African American, Latino, and Asian actors in growing numbers were cast in major parts—no longer as just Othello or Caliban. Thanks especially to the New York Shakespeare Festival (where under Joe Papp’s leadership more than half of the productions were colorblind cast), playgoers were able to see such emerging stars as James Earl Jones, Gloria Foster, Rosalind Cash, Denzel Washington, Ruby Dee, and Raul Julia in leading Shakespearean roles. While most of those productions were still overseen by white and male directors, that began to change too—though at an even more glacial pace. By the twenty-first century the pace of change accelerated. Nowadays, transgender and disabled actors are being cast as well, and women in increasing numbers invited to play roles long the preserve of men. I cannot recall when I last saw an all-white Shakespeare performance in this country (which was the norm when I was growing up). In the past few years I have found myself working on American productions that have starred a black Hamlet, a transgender Maria in Twelfth Night, and a black woman as Prospero, and richly diverse productions of a dozen or so other comedies and tragedies, many directed, designed, and choreographed by nonwhite artists.

  The result has been that for the first time in more than two centuries of American history, actors speaking Shakespeare’s words have begun to resemble the nation. This wouldn’t make much difference if only the coastal elites went to see Shakespeare’s plays performed. But it turns out that lots of Americans across the land enjoy seeing them, so much so that in addition to theaters in most cities that regularly stage his plays, there are nearly 150 summer Shakespeare festivals (dwarfing the number held in Britain or anywh
ere else in the world), spanning all fifty states, quietly acclimating many Americans to greater diversity. Two decades ago, when diversity was still valued by compassionate conservatives, President George W. Bush appointed Dana Gioia, in 2002, to run the National Endowment for the Arts, and one of Gioia’s first large-scale initiatives was “Shakespeare in American Communities.” The program, still in existence, has sent dozens of theater companies touring Shakespeare’s most popular plays through the heartland where there are few or no permanent theaters—to schools as well as military bases—foregrounding diversity as one of its primary goals, and reaching several million Americans.

  That was then. Diversity, once considered worthy of support by both political parties, would become sharply partisan under Donald Trump, who was swept into office by a base that could barely conceal its hostility to racial and religious others. The face of the nation that Trump’s most avid supporters wanted to see reflected back at them from the stage was white, not brown or black. In such a political climate, diverse casting now looked like part of a provocative leftist agenda. It didn’t help that the Democratic side of the House of Representatives increasingly resembled the racial and gender mix of these modern-day Shakespeare companies, while the nearly all-white Republican side of the aisle looked like the Shakespeare cast of yore. The Right under Donald Trump—who may be the first American president to express no interest in Shakespeare—now found itself struggling to find anything in the teaching or performance of Shakespeare’s plays that aligned with its political and social agenda, and didn’t much seem to care.

  The future of Shakespeare in America can be predicted with no more accuracy than the future of the nation. But if Shakespeare continues to serve as a canary in the coal mine, one way of reckoning where things are heading is by looking at fresh controversies surrounding his work. It often takes a provocative event to reveal when a tipping point has been reached, signaling that something fundamental in the culture has changed, perhaps irrevocably. This chapter recounts in detail one such event: the right-wing protests against the Delacorte production of Julius Caesar in the summer of 2017. Those on the Right, who had counted on able Shakespeare defenders from Henry Cabot Lodge to William F. Buckley Jr., now found themselves ill-equipped to respond to what a progressive director like Oskar Eustis was doing at the Delacorte. And those on the Left found themselves ill-prepared to deal with the force of right-wing media and threats of violence. What ensued may well come to be seen, like the production that triggered the Astor Place riots, as a sign of the times, and of times to come.

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  ON SATURDAY JUNE 3, 2017, the Delacorte production of Julius Caesar was in its eleventh preview, with every show near or at capacity, and standby lines growing longer. That evening Laura Sheaffer went to see it. Sheaffer was a sales manager at Salem Media, a multimedia conglomerate “targeting audiences interested in Christian and family-themed content and conservative values.” She was troubled by what she saw and must have mentioned it to someone at work, for she was steered to Joe Piscopo’s AM radio show, owned by Salem Media. Piscopo, who had made his name on Saturday Night Live in the 1980s, was an early Trump supporter and served as an opening act for him on the campaign trail. By the time the program aired, he had been briefed on Sheaffer’s story and couldn’t resist asking leading questions about a production that he had not seen but called “dreck.” Piscopo assumed that she would confirm that the “audience must have roared with approval” when they saw the Trump-like Caesar “brutally murdered.” But Sheaffer refused to, saying only that the crowd “accepted” the assassination, adding that the production “kept the whole script true to William Shakespeare.” While she said at the outset that “Julius Caesar was Donald Trump,” she later qualified that claim, explaining that “they never actually said this was Donald Trump or this was Melania.” Though offended by what she had seen—saying, “This is not OK”—she stayed until the end of the performance.

  Sheaffer also compared what she had seen to an incident the previous week in which the comedian Kathy Griffin had posted an image of herself holding what looked like the severed head of Donald Trump, which drew the attention of the Secret Service. At the end of the interview Piscopo asked: “Imagine if you did it about Barack Obama?” It’s likely that without these two frames of reference, the glowing embers of protest would have died out. At this point, only a half dozen or so people had contacted the Public Theater to express their disapproval.

  Two days later, kindling was added to the fire when Sheaffer was again interviewed, this time by Mediaite, a news and opinion media website, which gave the story an eye-catching headline: “Senators Stab Trump to Death in Central Park Performance of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.” That was enough for the right-wing Breitbart to run a similar story later that day: “‘Trump’ Stabbed to Death in Central Park Performance of ‘Julius Caesar.’” Breitbart at least kept “Trump” in quotation marks but mostly rehashed the Mediaite interview, again relying on Laura Sheaffer as the sole eyewitness.

  Then two things happened. First, on June 7, the day after the Breibart story ran, an anonymous spectator at the Delacorte illegally filmed part of the assassination scene and shared it with the syndicated television newsmagazine Inside Edition, which quickly uploaded it to YouTube. For a story that didn’t have much content, the visuals were crucial. The production was now reduced to a twelve-second clip of the assassination, taken out of context, excising the pained silence and the storm of protest that followed. There has long been something toxic about Julius Caesar’s assassination scene on film; it has been controversial as far back as 1908, when the play was first translated from stage to screen. It was censored at that time by the Chicago police, who insisted on excising it from an early nickelodeon film because it so powerfully portrayed the commission of a crime. The clip of the Delacorte assassination was soon distilled in online media into a single off-kilter screen grab that kept white conspirators out of view and showed a pair of anguished white onlookers in the background. It carried a not-so-subliminal message: blacks were out to kill our president.

  Next, an unexpected player, the New York Times, entered the fray. It’s a time-honored practice not to run a theater review until opening night, one that newspapers across the ideological spectrum respect. Yet the Times ran its review on June 9, three days before the play’s official opening. It reads as if Jesse Green, their new theater reviewer, had been told to rework his review into a culture story. He began by noting other recent plays that take on Trump and warned that “some right-wing commenters are revving up their outrage over what they assume is an incitement to violence against the president.” In the online version, Green then linked readers to the inflammatory story in Breitbart. Laura Sheaffer’s displeasure with what she had seen the previous weekend was now the story of record.

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  • • •

  I WAITED FOR conservative critics and reviewers to object to the Delacorte production on grounds more substantial than disrespect for the president. Eustis, after all, had made himself vulnerable to attack by showing that in killing Caesar the conspirators had acted undemocratically in their desire to save democracy. This argument might easily have been pressed further: the production had unwittingly exposed the threat posed to American democracy by leftist agitators like Cassius.

  It never happened. Nobody even claimed that what was enacted was criminal (and if the Secret Service had considered it a genuine threat, it would have intervened). There was only anger and the assumption that those on the Left would have reacted the same way had the tables been turned: imagine the outcry from progressives had an Obama look-alike been assassinated. It soon came to light, though, that a well-reviewed 2012 production of Julius Caesar directed by Rob Melrose had a lanky Obama stand-in murdered onstage. It had opened at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and then, after a national tour, performed for a month in New York City. At the time, Melrose noted, the
“Tea Party was in full effect, the Birther movement well under way, and Mitch McConnell had stated that his main goal was to deny Obama a second term. It wasn’t hard to imagine one of these groups pushed to the point where they would consider violence.” Yet Melrose’s production had not generated any protests, by either the Right or the Left, nor had any corporate sponsors withdrawn their support.

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  • • •

  AT LEAST ONE PERSON on the Right knew how to invoke the play to his political advantage. Consider Steve Bannon’s “little riff on Plutarch and Shakespeare” when he spoke to a conservative audience at the Values Voter Summit in October 2017: “Up on Capitol Hill, it’s like the Ides of March, the only question—and this is just an analogy or metaphor, or whatever you want to call it—they’re just looking to find out who’s going to be Brutus to your Julius Caesar.” As far as Bannon was concerned (he had by now left the White House and returned to Breitbart), it was time to topple the old regime and metaphorically (or “whatever you want to call it”) assassinate Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. “This is our war,” he added. “The establishment started it. . . . You all are gonna finish it.” There was not a peep of protest after Bannon made this threat. I was surprised that nobody asked Bannon why he would urge his evangelical audience to side with the murderous conspirators of Shakespeare’s play. I suspect that in urging that Mitch McConnell be eliminated by some emboldened Brutus, Bannon’s unspoken desire was for what would ultimately follow—that the action he was encouraging, in Antony’s words, would “let slip the dogs of war,” unleash chaos that would overturn the established order.

  Support for this conclusion comes from Bannon’s own extended reflections on Shakespeare. Earlier in his career he had tried his hand at adapting Shakespeare for the screen, in collaboration with Julia Jones, his long-term screenwriting partner. After a science-fiction version of Titus Andronicus failed to attract interest, Bannon tried adapting Coriolanus. The screenplay—called Coriolanus: The Thing I Am—was given a reading at the Nate Holden Performing Arts Center in Los Angeles in 2006 but was never made into a film. It’s not hard to see why. Bannon’s adaptation is an incoherent mess, though in retrospect a deeply revealing one.