“Read by almost everyone at school, staged in theaters across the land, and long valued by conservatives as highly as liberals, Shakespeare’s plays remain common ground, one of the few places where Americans can meet and air their disparate views.”
This book begins with a discussion of a Shakespeare in the Park production of Julius Caesar not long after the 2016 election. That play, like most of Shakespeare’s plays, is decidedly ambiguous in engaging in moral questions, raising them, and often providing more than one answer to them. I tend to think about Shakespeare more of a student of consequences than morality, understanding how things happen and why they happen, more than suggesting what should or shouldn’t happen. He was a businessman in an age censorship and state terror against speech, and well, he was a survivor. Anyway, that production seemed to take that ambiguity to heart and even though the Caesar character was clearly modeled after Trump, the production didn’t offer obvious or easy answers to the question of how to deal with it. After all, what happens when the conspirators effect their goals? They all die, and their cause is lost to history and public opinion.
From here James Shapiro dives into the history of Shakespeare in America, focusing on episodic moments when the plays clash in some way with history. He begins with John Quincy Adams reckoning with the race-mixing at the heart of Othello in a production in the 1820s, and dives into what seems to be both his internal racism and misogyny, as evinced in his writing. This episode gets back to an idea that I’ve thought about a lot, how little American presidents tend to publish. We have one real book by Thomas Jefferson (and it’s a real mixed bag), several by Teddy Roosevelt, a book by Kennedy he probably didn’t write, self-aggrandizing memoirs by most of the presidents since WWII, Obama’s rare memoir before becoming president, a slew of terrible policy position books, a Civil war novel by Jimmy Carter, and Clinton’s embarrassing pairing with James Patterson. Compare that to the output of say two British prime ministers: Winston Churchill and Benjamin Disraeli, and American presidents have basically collectively written nothing.
Anyway, Shapiro then moves forward to the Booth family’s connection to Shakespeare and JW Booth’s obsession with Brutus, and the claim that he is an “American Brutus” has borne out, but he didn’t seem to realize how that cuts both ways. We get a look into the first productions of the Tempest to cast Black actors in the role of Caliban, attempts to claim the Americanism of Shakespeare, and post WWII production that bring the Cold War and culture wars to bear.
The book is interesting in terms of sharing the history of the US and this very particular question. I am not sure “what his plays tells us about our past and future”, because like the plays, we tend to read things the ways we want to.
