Nonfiction SHAKESPEARE IN A DIVIDED AMERICA What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future By James Shapiro America is massive. Shakespeare is massive. When two such cultural hyper-objects meet, they’re bound to create a black hole strong enough to suck in and warp just about anything around them. James Shapiro analyzes the effects of their collision in his terrific new book, “Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future.
” If Jill Lepore and the late Tony Judt had collaborated, this taut, swift and insightful tract might have been the offspring. Yet Shapiro’s subtitle is misleading: His subject is us, the U. S. , not Shakespeare plays.
If you’re worried about the current state of the Republic, this is a book that will stoke your fears — while educating you on why you might justifiably be having them. Shapiro is already a master of creating Shakespeare treats for the literate common reader. His “1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare” and “Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? ” are as entertaining as any nonfiction of recent years.
Now he’s outdone himself — no surprise, given his qualifications for this new volume. He not only teaches English and comparative literature at Columbia, he serves on the board of directors of the Royal Shakespeare Company and is the Shakespeare scholar in residence at the Public Theater in New York. He also edited the comprehensive “Shakespeare in America” anthology. Here, his combined scholarship and theatrical experience help him examine — brilliantly — the notorious 2017 “Julius Caesar” in Central Park, in which a Donald Trump look-alike as Caesar was assassinated nightly to fierce outrage from the political right.
Did you know there was an epidemic of men spanking women in movies in the decade after 1938? That young, pre-bearded Ulysses S. Grant was cast as Desdemona in an Army production of “Othello” and rehearsed but never went on because of what amounted to homosexual panic among the producing officers in a national manliness crisis? Did you know that Steve Bannon wrote a screenplay for a sci-fi “Titus Andronicus” as well as an alt-right “Coriolanus”?
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(Neither was produced. ) That Abraham Lincoln’s favorite play was “Macbeth,” one that helped secure the reputation of John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln’s own Macbeth-to-be? It’s all here and much more. Each of the book’s eight chapters centers on a year with a different thematic focus.
“1833: Miscegenation” examines contemporaneous reactions to “Othello,” almost all racist, some wildly screwy, like a female Shakespeare scholar’s attempt to prove that Othello was, as she effused, “a white man! ” “1849: Class Warfare” provides a blistering account of New York’s deadly Astor Place riots, demonstrations against the English actor William Macready that were fueled by rising economic inequality and nationalistic fervor. When police forces fired into a massed crowd, more than 20 people died and dozens were wounded. “1916: Immigration” shows how Caliban got used as a token in arguments about assimilation at a moment when racism was intensified by support from fake “science” and the United States was closing its borders.
The chapter details, among other things, wacky efforts to make Shakespeare into an American. Why not? Wasn’t he an “Anglo-Saxon,” like all true Americans?
“One Charles Mills Gayley of Berkeley published a popular book in 1917 arguing that Shakespeare should “be considered one of the founders of liberty in America” because of his connection to a “liberal faction” of Elizabethan capitalists.”
In an earlier poem, Gayley had saluted Shakespeare as “Born of the Mayflower, born of Virginia. ” Such buffoons litter the book. In “1948: Marriage,” “Kiss Me, Kate” goes under Shapiro’s lens. The story of how Bella Spewack, the main book writer, wrestled the oft-reviled “Taming of the Shrew” into a musical, how the show shadowed gender-role preoccupations of the time, and how the change from the ’40s to the ’50s caused the politically bold Broadway show to be tamed for the Hollywood movie provides cultural history at its most diverting.
The 1998 chapter is worth the price of the book alone. Examining American anxieties about adultery and same-sex love, it chronicles how “Shakespeare in Love,” originally a progressive script written by Marc Norman, got rewritten by Tom Stoppard so that elements of Shakespearean homosexuality, bisexuality and marital infidelity were fudged. Ironically, Stoppard had been hired to soften such areas by the producer Harvey Weinstein, the moral paragon with decades of alleged sexual assault and now a rape conviction behind him. We watch Weinstein trying to massage the film into a template of his own relationships with women by leaving its heroine as now-successful Will’s piece on the side.
(Instead, she goes to America, of course. ) As a bonus we’re privy to a “cringe-inducing” Stoppard skit at Miramax’s pre-Oscar party. Juicy? But to the point?
Hell, yes. We meet a character of truly Shakespearean contradictions in John Quincy Adams, who plays the lead in the 1833 chapter on racial mixing. “Recognized as one of the leading abolitionists in the land” and a victim of death threats for his views, Adams nonetheless went into print twice to express at length his horror at the mere idea that a white woman, Desdemona, might fall for a black man. Indeed, he thought she got her just deserts by being murdered for it.
It’s in the final chapter, “2017: Left | Right,” on the Public Theater’s Trump-as-Julius-Caesar production, where Shapiro really soars, analyzing the pitfalls of applying contemporary politics to a famously double-edged play. With “Julius Caesar,” Shakespeare strewed ambiguities like tacks on a highway, creating a play designed to multiply and complicate our responses. How are we to take Caesar? Or Brutus, or Cassius?
If you don’t like Trump and Caesar is Trump, do you actually approve of seeing him butchered? When right-wing media screamed about the production (and why wouldn’t they? or shouldn’t they? ), the Public realized it had set off a firestorm for which it was unprepared.
A Shakespeare play is not a political statement, it’s a mosh pit of subjectivities, and here the audience was expected to sit back and rationally parse a theatrical Rorschach blot. This “Left | Right” chapter will feed annals of the Trump era a hundred years from now — if after the wildfires and the rising oceans anyone’s still here to write them. Shapiro’s book is history, but not past history. It’s ongoing and all too painfully still-relevant history.
As he bounces back and forth between 1833 or 1916 and today, the similarities between Then and Now overwhelm the differences and Shapiro’s title resonates anew, reminding us how divided we’ve been since our very beginnings, with historical-tragical constantly muscling out pastoral-comical. Ultimately there rises the familiar suspicion that, for a country in love with the future, it’s always yesterday in America. Among all the fine words currently being spilled examining the American mess, James Shapiro has outshone many of our best political pundits with this superb contribution to the discourse. He upped the wattage simply by bouncing his spotlight off a playwright 400 years dead who yet again turns out to be, somehow, us.
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