Abstract
James Shapiro’s new book is a compulsively readable mixture of scholarly research, highbrow magazine journalism, and the Hollywood gossip column. After an introduction, it unfolds as eight case studies of moments in American history, from 1833 to 2017, when specific productions or adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays could be said to clarify a fault line in American life or a conflict about the nation’s values and identity. The topics of these case studies include: miscegenation in the antebellum period; the doctrine of Manifest Destiny during the Mexican American war; class warfare in 19th-century Manhattan, culminating in the Astor Place Riots of 1849; Lincoln’s assassination by John Wilkes Booth; fears of unchecked immigration at the outbreak of World War I; the perception of marriage and the rights of women after World War II; attitudes towards adultery and same-sex love in the late 20th century; and the contemporary divide between left and right in politics and society more generally. Along the way, Shapiro charts the rise and fall of American interest in specific plays: Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, The Tempest, The Taming of the Shrew, among others. The book concludes with ‘Bibliographic Essays’ that take the place of lists of books and articles and are informative in their own right.
Shapiro loosely connects the case studies together with an argument he broaches in the Introduction: ‘[Shakespeare’s] writing continues to function as a canary in a coal mine, alerting us to…the toxic prejudices poisoning our cultural climate. At some deep level Americans intuit that our collective nightmares are connected to the sins of our national past, papered over or repressed in the making of America and its greatness; on occasion, Shakespeare’s plays allow us to recognise if not acknowledge this’ (xii). He repeats this argument in every chapter, with only minor modifications (pp. 20, 31, 50, 113, 123, 153, 176, and 203). In chapters 4 and 7, Shapiro introduces the idea that Shakespeare also allows Americans to avoid confronting the truth about themselves (pp. 118, 193).
Throughout the book, the assertion that Shakespeare’s works are touchstones for experience is usually broad and not especially original. Few readers of Shapiro’s book are likely to disagree with him that Shakespeare sits brooding on the vast abysses of America’s social strife and makes them pregnant. More likely, at least a few readers will disagree with Shapiro’s judgements about ‘the toxic prejudices poisoning our cultural climate’. As Shapiro moves from the 19th century to the present, coming closer to his topic and eventually inserting himself into the story he tells about Oskar Eustis’s controversial production of Julius Caesar in 2017 (pp. 202–21), his own left-leaning politics become explicit and pugnacious. The objectivity of perspective that is an achievement in earlier chapters in the book occasionally falters. For example, when Shapiro brusquely describes Steve Bannon’s adaptation of Coriolanus as ‘an incoherent mess’ that ‘only a racist white guy could invent’, one might wonder whether this even-keeled history of America’s relationship with Shakespeare has changed into a personal polemic that exhibits the divisions that it aspires to analyse (p. 208). Shapiro goes on to condemn Bannon as a bad reader of Shakespeare, as well as a bad person, because he never permits the African American protagonist of his adaptation ‘to become a national hero or aspire to a leadership role politically – both of which are defining features of Coriolanus’s role in Shakespeare’s play’ (p. 209). Yet as any careful reader of the play knows, Coriolanus himself has no desire to be a Roman consul and stands for election only because his mother insists: ‘Know, good mother, / I had rather be their servant in my way, / Than sway with them in theirs’ (2.1.196–8). This is a minor mistake but perhaps it is a revealing one in a book that dwells on the idea that the Shakespeare Americans tend to love best is a Shakespeare they invent in the image of their own biases and passions. Happily, there is not too much of this kind of writing in the book, and it is confined to the chapters focused on 1998 and 2017. In every other chapter, Shapiro’s argument that Shakespeare is ‘common cultural property in America’ (p. 78) goes hand in hand with a clear-sighted, non-judgmental acknowledgement that the owners of this common property develop it differently.
One reason why Shapiro’s storytelling is so lively is that he frames the fault line in each chapter as a conflict between two or more prominent people who have left their traces in the historical record. When this approach works, the results are captivating. In chapter 3, Shapiro shows that the rivalry between British actor, William Macready, and Edwin Forrest, his American arch-nemesis, paved the way for the Astor Place riots, in which the institution of the theatre functions as ‘a complex means of channelling long-simmering anger over a host of divisive social issues’ (p. 50). In the next chapter, he sends Lincoln and Booth hurtling towards their fatal rendezvous at Ford’s Theatre by describing the strong and differential influence that reading Shakespeare appears to have exerted on the development of their characters. In an extraordinary exchange with his sister, the assassin and white supremacist Booth acknowledges that ‘[m]uch of the evil of us boys and girls…must have been engendered by power of those furious plays our father enacts’, whereas Lincoln, who tells a portrait painter that he admires Claudius’s guilty soliloquy in Hamlet as ‘one of the finest touches of nature in the world’, comes to feel ‘the deep connection between the nation’s own primal sin, slavery, and the terrible cost, both collective and personal, exacted by it’ (pp. 93, 113). These are my favourite parts of the book, along with chapter 6, in which a plucky trio of creative people (Bella Spewack, Cole Porter, and Arnold Saint Subber), ‘who all stood outside the ideal of an American family in the 1940s’, overcome their own differences and the resistance of popular psychology and public opinion to ‘create one of America’s most enduring musicals’, Kiss Me, Kate, which ‘allowed a fleeting glimpse of the struggle in postwar America for greater sexual freedom, racial integration, and women’s choice’ (pp. 162, 172).
However, there are drawbacks to focusing almost exclusively on famous people engaging in what appear to be epoch-making struggles. For one thing, the book loses sight of everyone else. Shapiro reveals a different kind of history from the kinds that we find in Andrew Murphy’s Shakespeare for the People: Working Class Readers, 1800-1900 (2008) and Jonathan Rose’s The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001). As much as I enjoyed the stories that Shapiro tells, and the surprising facts that they impart, it was never clear enough to me that the prominent politicians, intellectuals, and artists who go to war with each other in Shapiro’s pages are actually representative of America’s experience with Shakespeare. To whom do ‘us’ and ‘our’ in the subtitle of the book actually refer? Shapiro has virtually nothing to say about education or literacy as contexts for thinking about divergent American values and aspirations. Presumably, one would need to know more about the ways that Americans learned to read Shakespeare, which editions they read, and what assumptions they and their teachers had about the purposes of reading and interpretation, if one is to decide whether conflicts about the interpretation of Shakespeare’s works among social elites show the very age and body of the time his form and pressure, or, to the contrary, have the character of bombast and lining to the time.
Although he is an English professor and the title of the book suggests that Shakespeare is its main topic, Shapiro offers little in the way of literary criticism or close reading of Shakespeare’s works. (Clear, incisive discussions of Shakespeare’s approach to comedy on pp. 124, 178, and 194 reveal what Shapiro can do in this regard, and what we are missing.) This absence matters for at least two reasons. First, without building close reading into the book, readers are not in a position to assess Shapiro’s judgements about the pertinence of Shakespeare’s writing to the historical events he analyses, or to evaluate what earlier Americans did with the plays, or to form judgements of their own. Second, the absence of close reading raises, for me, a question about how much Shakespeare there actually is in Shakespeare in a Divided America. For Shapiro, Shakespeare is ‘common ground’ and ‘common property’: an object, not a subject, of attention. As I finished reading the book, I found myself wondering what it would have meant for Shapiro to enfranchise Shakespeare’s plays and treat them as interlocutors in a conversation, rather than as territory to be occupied or things to be used. Close, analytical engagements with Shakespeare’s writing would have given Shakespeare the voice that, paradoxically, he often lacks in this marvellous book, which aims to prove that ‘Shakespeare took root in the United States because he spoke to what Americans cared about’ (p. xi).