Shakespeare
in a Divided America:
What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future
By James Shapiro
Reviewed for Cholla Needles by Greg Gilbert
Shakespeare’s
plays and sonnets offer multifaceted lenses through which we may interpret the world, and “there’s the
rub.” In Shakespeare in a Divided America,
author and Professor James Shapiro, a member of the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences who has several award-winning books on Shakespeare to his credit,
turns that lens on interpretations of America. While the author’s credentials
suggest an informed and scholarly reading experience, which proved true, I was
delighted to find that his book is wickedly entertaining as well, even bawdy on
occasion, and politically astute.
Divided opens with John Quincy Adams’s
complaint about Othello, chiefly that
Desdemona marries a “blackamoor.” Quincy, a leading abolitionist who had
opposed slavery since 1783, viewed intermarriage as an “outrage upon the law of
nature.” Thus begins Shapiro’s chapter “1833: Miscegenation,” an approach that
sets the stage for a chronological examination of successive epochs, each a
consideration of how Shakespeare was used by competing interests. Successive
chapters (“1845: Manifest Destiny”; “1849: Class Warfare”; “1865:
Assassination”; “1916: Immigration”; “1948: Marriage”; “1998: Adultery and Same-Sex
Love”; and “2017: Left | Right”) offer scenes of rising action and conflict
that culminate in a “to be or not to be?” of America as an unresolved
question.
Shakespeare’s
dominant role in shaping America is itself a curiosity. Shapiro speculates that
an absence of rivals and a use of language that sounded like the King James
Bible may have contributed to “a Bible-obsessed nation” adopting the Bard. Alexis de Tocqueville observed that volumes of
Shakespeare were plentiful among “pioneer’s huts” during his 1831 tour of
America. Today, Shakespeare’s works are the most published, performed, and
discussed in America, indeed, the globe. Even so, how Shakespeare became so
influential in America remains, for Shapiro, an unresolved mystery. His introduction speculates that 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 recognize if not
acknowledge this.” Yet, as Shapiro saw, in November 2018 the parents of
students in North Carolina were upset to learn that the “satirical 1987
adaptation The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)
at the school included ‘suicide, alcohol consumption, and ‘bad language.’” As
responses to Shakespeare proliferate, so too do the readings and
interpretations.
Indeed,
in 1845 debates on America’s Doctrine of Manifest Destiny resonated with
soldiers in Corpus Christi, many of whom identified with Iago’s laments in Othello about how rank is conferred, in
their circumstance by seniority or by merit: “where each second / Stood heir to
the first.” The soldiers built a theatre and performed. Here is where Shapiro
is a bit wicked in highlighting one young soldier’s femininity as why he was
asked to play the part of Desdemona. The young man, clean shaven, five-seven,
and 135 pounds and with that “streak of the feminine in his personality” made
the youthful Ulysses S. Grant the perfect candidate. While he spurned that
role, he later played a lead, with whiskers, as head of the Union Army and as
President, his personal stage craft shaped during an era of American
exceptionalism.
Shakespeare
was invoked by both sides of those who would annex Texas and make manifest
“American dominion to the Pacific.” Manifest Destiny was the populist slogan of
the day. A futile counter-appeal by abolitionist Robert Charles Winthrop to
fellow congressmen in 1845, relied on Shakespeare’s King John:
——Here’s
a large mouth, indeed,
That
spits forth Death and mountains, rocks and seas
Talks
as familiarly of roaring lions
As
maids of thirteen do of puppy dogs.
What
cannoneer begot this lusty blood?
He
speaks plain cannon fire, and smoke and bounce. (2.1.458–63)
To which Winthrop adds his paraphrase:
“And against whom are all these gasconading bravadoes indulged? What nation has
been thus bethumpt and bastinadoed with brave words?” The answer, as we now know,
arrived in the form of our “sea to shining sea” telegraphs, waterways, rails,
and commerce. “Inherent in Manifest Destiny was a belief in manly superiority.
Like a headstrong wife, Mexico had to be taught a lesson, roughed up a bit.” And
in the forging of a continental dominion we find the sinew that connects young
Grant’s femininity to an American exceptionalism that transforms the very norms
of manhood, as evidenced by the evolving role of gender in Romeo and Juliet.
As
“norms of manhood began to change, mirroring the split between martial
manliness and effeminacy within Romeo himself, male actors found the role
increasingly unplayable.” Popular British actress Charlotte Cushman was as
masculine as young Grant was effeminate, a woman who could capture Romeo’s
inner turmoil. When performing as Romeo in Boston during the 1851-2 season, a
man heckled her manly characteristics. She stopped performing and threatened to
personally “put that person out,” thereby receiving what she described as the
greatest ovation of her illustrious career. Even so, the piling up of dead American
soldiers between 1848 and 1865, more than 800,000, spurred an interest in a
“less manly acting style—exemplified by the ‘poetic’ Hamlet of Edwin Booth” as
well as an end to female Romeos. As introspective and bombastic male personas
competed for approval, their performances were viewed also through lenses of class
warfare.
The
chapter on class warfare opens with the “massacre” outside the Astor Place
Opera House in New York in 1849 when “somewhere between 10,000 and 24,000”
protested a performance of Macbeth. “The
theater, not for the last time, found itself at the center of a riot, one
fueled by a heady mixture of racism, nationalism (spurred by anti-British
sentiment), hostility toward abolition, and economic anxiety.” Two actors presented
strikingly different interpretations, Forrest and Macready, in a city where
nearly “10,000 New Yorkers would see one of these three productions of Macbeth
that night.” To some, Macready’s “gentle manliness” was being eclipsed by the
coarser Manifest Destiny perspective put forth by Forrest’s interpretation. Was
a ruthless Macbeth killed by a gracious Duncan, or was Macbeth a symbol of
assassinated greatness? If any of this sounds familiar, it should.
In
the book’s final chapter, we read about how the “Right under Donald Trump—who
may be the first American president to express no interest in Shakespeare—now
found itself struggling to find anything in the teaching or performance of
Shakespeare’s plays that aligned with its political and social agenda.” At
stage center is Julius Caesar at New
York’s Central Park open-air theater, the Delacorte, in the summer of 2017. But
first, a little background is in order. An architect of Trump’s political
ascendancy, Steve Bannon, had in an earlier incarnation attempted an adaptation
Shakespeare to the screen. After the failure of his sci-fi interpretation of Titus Andronicus, he attempted a
screenplay adaption of Coriolanus
that relocated the setting at the Rodney King riots, complete with rival street
gangs. More about stoking fear and anger than ideas, his treatment failed, but
it did set the stage for future events.
Thus,
during the Trump presidency, when the Delacorte’s business suit clad Caesar was
felled, a video clip was acquired by Breitbart and the New York Times and featured on Fox
& Friends. The headline: “’NYC Play Appears to Depict Assassination of
Trump.’” Among the outraged were Mike Huckabee, Eric and Donald Jr., and a
chorus of those who wanted the blood of the performers. So many threatening
calls ensued that the theater had to send “people to voice mail.” Steve Bannon
declared, “’The establishment started it. . . . You all are
gonna finish it.’ . . . the action he
was encouraging, in Antony’s words, would ‘let slip the dogs of war,’ unleash
chaos that would overturn the established order.”
Within
the order of the book, American history comes full circle, as is fitting. Between
the first act and last there is much to recommend. Shapiro’s consideration of The Taming of the Shrew in Chapter 6
considers marriage in post-World War II America and discusses various
approaches to Katherine’s final speech calling for women to abase themselves. Shapiro
actually applies scholarship to tracing mid-century incidents of men spanking
women on stage, in films, and in comic books and magazines, with a visual link
in bibliographic essays at the book’s conclusion. Most amusing is his treatment
of Kiss Me, Kate, a musical based on The Taming of the Shrew, where Cole
Porter smokescreens the debasement scene with a bowery rendition of “Brush Up
Your Shakespeare.”
Cole Porter’s contribution was
to infuse . . . hints of transgressive
behavior. The provocative Kinsey Report—Sexual Behavior in the Human Male—had
just been published, offering a long-hidden view of American sexual practices.
It was so topical that Porter even name-drops “the Kinsey report” in his racy
song “Too Darn Hot,” then alludes to Kinsey’s revelations about what American
men were really up to: infidelity, masturbation (“pillow, you’ll be my baby
tonight”), and homosexual activity (“A marine / For his queen”).
It’s staggering what Porter got
away with in Kiss Me, Kate, especially in the repressive frontstage
world. So, for example, when Lois Lane’s Bianca sings about her desire to wed
(because she is so eager to have sex), her seemingly clueless language is
almost beyond the pale, as her willingness to marry any Tom, Dick, or Harry
turns into a desire for what sounds like any “hairy Dick”—and then to a longing
for what sounds identical to the words “a Dick, a Dick, a Dick, a Dick, a Dick,
a Dick, a Dick, a Dick, a Dick, a Dick, a Dick, a Dick.”
From
his examination of The Tempest where
Caliban becomes a lens into America’s treatment of Native-Americans and other
non-whites and through his insights into Harvey Weinstein’s campaign to win an
Oscar and avoid being killed by Brad Pitt, Shapiro entertains and informs. From
the absurd and offensive to the heart wrenching and comical, Shakespeare in a Divided Nation places
the lenses of history’s most influential writer over the Lincoln assassination,
over our racial, class, and gender divides, and concludes by placing that lens
over us, the readers. This is a book for thinkers as well as Shakespeare
scholars.
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