James Shapiro at the Dalkey Book Festival

As part of the Dalkey Book Festival, on Saturday morning the Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro was interviewed by Fintan O’Toole, the focus of the conversation being America. Shapiro’s tremendous book Shakespeare in a Divided America was my Book of 2020, and he has just published The Playbook, a fascinating account of the 1930s Federal Theatre Project, which included the famous Orson Welles’s ‘Voodoo Macbeth’, and which I am part-way through right now. He said that the third volume of this loose trilogy, which he started after realising that the 2016 Trump election meant he had a responsibility to write about America, will be about Othello, to come out in 2027/28, a really exciting prospect (and he mentioned the 2025 Broadway production starring Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhall).

Shakespeare never stops being relevant and always opens up all societies, in his own words ‘holding a mirror up to nature’. This is the keynote of Shakespeare in a Divided America:

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.

Shapiro started with a story about a current attempt to put on a production of Coriolanus, being thwarted in a small American community as a supposedly ‘proto-fascist’ drama. Shapiro has been trying to put the case for the production. In a phrase which prompted a lot of nodding in the audience, he said ‘No battle is too small to fight’, and we should never stop challenging even apparently small bureaucratic decisions.

Among the stories he returned were about John Quincy Adams and ‘miscegenation’, the astonishing fact that Ulysses S. Grant, the future 18th President, played Desdemona, and the Astor Place riot in NYC in 1949. Most dramatic was his account of the 2017 Julius Caesar Public Theatre production in Central Park, in which Caesar dressed à la Trump, and director Oskar Eustis seeded extras around the audience, who were then rivalled by Make Rome Great Again activists. An account of this can be read in the Introduction to Shakespeare in a Divided America and its final chapter. For Shapiro, this was one of the most fraught theatrical events he has ever witnessed, and now he sees it as a kind of prefiguring of the January 6th assault on the Capitol.

Fintan O’Toole called Shapiro ‘a kind of archaeologist’ in the way he has unpicked the past to open up new ways of looking at the plays, as well as being a superb story-teller.

He answered some questions from the audience, including one about Elizabeth Winckler’s notorious Shakespeare Was A Woman and Other Heresies, about which he was utterly scathing, stating he never had any time for conspiracy theorists of any kind. At the end I was able to ask a question too, about the resonances King Lear might now have for him as an American in a fractured country facing an election with two old men on the ballot. He said that he found that difficult to answer without the context of a particular production - he has always been a man of the stage rather than the page, as seen in his long-standing position advising NY Public Theatre. They have been doing Much Ado About Nothing for many years, and indeed it is really time to stage Lear. That is a production I would definitely cross the Atlantic to see.

It was a superb hour of commentary about Shakespeare, America and the powers of the theatre.