Shakespeare in a Divided America

James Shapiro’s books A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 and The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 are essential reading for anyone interested in the playwright and the cultural and historical resonances of his plays.

His latest book, Shakespeare in a Divided America, is brilliant reading. Shapiro skilfully shows how Shakespeare has been ‘present’ in so many of the most important moments in American life. As he states:

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.

‘Toxic prejudices’ are to the fore right now, and the book is bookended by the 2017 Oskar Eustis controversial production of Julius Caesar for Public Theater in Central Park in which the protagonist is explicitly portrayed as Donald Trump (assassinated, of course). Shapiro’s central thesis is that

Shakespeare helps clarify what was happening at this moment in America, for the performance of his plays forced to the surface the cultural tensions and shifts that otherwise prove so difficult to identify and might otherwise have remained submerged.

Those cultural tensions and shifts are seen in a series of historical moments, as Shapiro unpicks their implications for race, gender and class. Some of the stories he tells are astonishing, such as the Astor Place riot of 1849, prompted by two feuding actors and a production of Macbeth. About 30 people died, and well over 100 were injured.

Most famously, Shakespeare erupted into American life again in the assassination of the Shakespeare-reciting President Lincoln by the actor John Wilkes Booth, with race again at the core of the story (Booth’s father was a famous Shakespearean actor - his middle name was Brutus):

Shapiro writes this about the assassinated President

If any American reader of Shakespeare has truly felt—through meditating on the tormented words of guilt-ridden characters like Macbeth and Claudius—the deep connection between the nation’s own primal sin, slavery, and the terrible cost, both collective and personal, exacted by it, it was Lincoln.

There is so much other wonderful material in this book, including Chapter 5 on The Tempest. At the end of that play ‘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.

Another sparkling chapter looks at The Taming of the Shrew, famously transformed into the musical Kiss Me , Kate! and the gender and sexual complications that are exposed in that story follow through to the chapter of the very successful film Shakespeare in Love. And yes, now here comes the ghastly figure of Harvey Weinstein, putting pressure on the filmmakers and writers (including Tom Stoppard) to create a happy ending.

In retrospect, it’s hard not to conclude that Weinstein’s solution to the problem of Will and Viola’s relationship was to propose something not unlike what he seems to have imagined for himself and Gwyneth Paltrow and other young women like her: keeping her around as a mistress or plaything who might serve the sexual needs of a married man, in exchange for promoting her career.

There is so much more to enjoy in this book. One of Shapiro’s strengths as a writer is that he doesn’t overegg the pudding: he knows when to tell a story and to leave it there, not hammering home a message. It’s only surprising that no-one previously thought to examine in such depth the relationship between the world’s most powerful country, and the world’s greatest playwright. On the other hand, no-one could have done it so well as James Shapiro.