# Shakespeare in a Divided America by James Shapiro - Blinkist

What’s in it for me? Discover how Shakespeare’s work reflects age-old divides in American politics and culture.

Even if you haven’t read his plays, you’ve likely seen William Shakespeare’s influence in movies, books, and advertisements.

Part of Shakespeare’s appeal is that his work has remained relevant.

Immigration, political tyranny, racial inequality, gender and marriage norms – these themes span across Shakespeare’s work, and artists and politicians of all stripes have used them to address America’s shifting values, for better or worse.

In these blinks, you’ll learn  why John Quincy Adams was disgusted by Othello; how different acting styles led to a riot in New York City; and why some have claimed The Tempest is an American play.

Shakespeare’s Othello revealed the progressive limitations of even America’s foremost abolitionists.

In 1829, a 19-year-old British woman named Fanny Kemble joined the family business and became an actor.

She was an overnight success in her first role, playing the female lead in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

Kemble proved to be such a sensation that her American debut became eagerly anticipated.

Upon arriving in the US in 1833, she received a dinner invitation from the wealthy Boston physician, George Parkman, who also invited the former president John Quincy Adams.

Kemble and Adams were seated next to each other at the dinner table, and their conversation turned out to be a minor sensation of its own.

The key message here is: Shakespeare’s Othello revealed the progressive limitations of even America’s foremost abolitionists.

Like many well-read Americans at the time, John Quincy Adams admired Shakespeare.

But he’d always had issues with the play Othello.

In particular, he took issue with the character Desdemona, and her intimate relationship with Othello, who’s described as a dark-skinned Moor.

Although it was unpublished at the time of his encounter with Kemble, Adams had written an essay in which he claimed that “the great moral lesson of the tragedy of Othello is, that black and white blood cannot be intermingled in marriage without a gross outrage upon the law of Nature .

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.

” Two years after Parkman’s dinner party, Kemble published the journals she’d written during her American tour.

In them, she described an awkward conversation with an unnamed man who told her that, despite being a “worshipper of Shakespeare,” he found Othello to be disgusting (and Romeo and Juliet to be childish nonsense).

It didn’t take readers long to figure out who Kemble was writing about, and reporters were soon pressuring Adams to elaborate on his remarks.

This is what led to his earlier essay finally being published – making his distaste for the relationship between Othello and Desdemona publicly known.

At the time, there was a growing abolitionist movement, despite the efforts of pro-slavery politicians like James Henry Hammond, of South Carolina.

Hammond also invoked Othello when he spoke to Congress and described a dreadful future in which someone like Othello would be considered a fellow congressman.

In his final years, Adams made the abolition of slavery his central cause.

But this mental divide, of wanting to end slavery yet still being unsettled by the love between people of different skin colors, speaks to just how far America had to go if it were ever to reach its ideals of equality.

Shakespeare’s plays question the limits of masculinity and militarism.

In 1845, over half the US Army was camped around Corpus Christi along the shores of the Gulf of Mexico.

No one was sure what was going to happen, but the show of force, the biggest since the War of 1812, was clearly meant to intimidate Mexico in the hope of westward expansion.

This effort didn’t appeal to everyone, especially the abolitionists, who saw the expansion as a way to create more slave-owning states.

But for those willing to go to war, there was a new idea to grab onto – Manifest Destiny.

The key message here is: Shakespeare’s plays question the limits of masculinity and militarism.

Manifest Destiny suggests that the westward expansion of America was a god-given right.

And this idea was rooted in masculinity.

Take the words of President James K.

Polk, who wrote that “we shall never be able to treat with her .

.

.

until she has been taught to respect us.

” Yes, that’s Mexico Polk was referring to.

Yet ideas about masculinity were divided at the time.

On the one hand, there was the frontier ideal, which embraced alcohol, physicality, and supremacy.

On the other, there was the belief that one could be masculine while still being reserved, sober, moderate, and morally upright.

You can see which type of masculinity was in favor by looking at popular actors of the day.

Around 1845, one such actor was Edwin Forrest, a barrel-chested, square-jawed epitome of hypermasculinity.

So it’s really not surprising that during his time, Romeo and Juliet had fallen out of fashion.

Romeo, despite his skill at swordplay, just isn’t macho.

Rather, he’s acutely in touch with his feminine side, with lines like, “O sweet Juliet, thy beauty hath made me effeminate.

” Actors like Forrest just couldn’t play the part.

So it fell to a woman to do right by Romeo.

Premiering at Boston’s Haymarket Theater in December of 1845, Charlotte Cushman’s Romeo was an instant success, eliciting standing ovations and glowing reviews in the press.

But not everyone was on board.

Forrest belittled Cushman in the press, and a few critics just couldn’t cope with a woman as the lead.

A “disgustingly monstrous .

.

.

perversion” was how the British writer George Fletcher put it.

Nevertheless, Cushman was a superstar in her day.

Ultimately, it was the horrors of the Civil War that truly exposed the dark side of domineering manliness.

Afterward, the public once again turned to a more mild-mannered version of masculinity, and Romeo was once again played successfully by men.

Shakespeare’s work leaves a lot open to interpretation.

Shakespeare, and the role of public theater, lay at the heart of the Astor Place Riot.

Consider the moment in Hamlet when the Danish Prince tells Horatio, “I must be idle.

” What does he mean and how does one act idle?

Even Shakespearean scholars have been divided on this question.

One conclusion is that Hamlet wants to appear passive and disinterested so as to avoid the attention of his uncle, the king.

Others believed that since Hamlet wants people to think he’s mad, being idle must mean pacing around aimlessly.

The top British actor of the day, William Macready, chose the second approach when he performed Hamlet in Edinburgh, in 1846.

Little did he know, this performance would set off a chain reaction leading to a deadly riot in New York City.

The key message here is: Shakespeare, and the role of public theater, lay at the heart of the Astor Place Riot.

To be clear, Macready didn’t just wander around aimlessly.

He also tossed his head back, skipped, and swung a handkerchief from shoulder to shoulder.

The audience hissed in disapproval.

And, as it happened, another actor was in the crowd: none other than American macho man Edwin Forrest, who shouted, “Throw him out,” before exiting the theater.

A rivalry began between the sensitive Macready and the brash Forrest.

When Macready toured America a couple of years later, Forrest staged competing performances on the same night, often of the same play.

But then things took a violent turn.

At the time, theaters were still considered a sacred place, where people from all walks of life could mix.

New York’s Astor Opera House broke with that tradition.

It was a new theater, bankrolled by wealthy patrons, with a strict set of policies, including a fancy dress code.

This essentially prohibited the working class from attending.

And since he was being put at odds with the all-American Edwin Forrest, Macready’s performance at the Astor Opera House was now at odds with anti-aristocratic, anti-British Americans.

It all got out of hand on May 10, 1849, when rabble-rousing activists organized a protest of Macready’s performance of Macbeth.

Things quickly turned into a full-blown, cobblestone-throwing riot, and a militia had to be used to protect the theater and those inside.

In the ensuing confrontation, over 20 people died in what became known as the Astor Place Riot.

Four years later, the theater was dismantled.

It couldn’t escape its bloody past as the site of a horrible class conflict.

John Wilkes Booth was likely inspired and emboldened by Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.

Abraham Lincoln loved Shakespeare.

He memorized soliloquies and frequently returned to works such as Macbeth to sort through his own personal tragedies and help process his difficult decisions.

He loved to recite lines to others and ask for their thoughts on what Shakespeare was trying to convey.

For Lincoln, Shakespeare was a tool for introspection.

For John Wilkes Booth, the man who would take Lincoln’s life, Shakespeare’s work was a call to action.

The key message here is: John Wilkes Booth was likely inspired and emboldened by Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.

John Wilkes Booth memorized Shakespeare’s plays from an early age.

His father, Junius Brutus Booth, was a British actor and the plays of Shakespeare were among the household books.

And though Booth senior didn’t press his children to follow in his footsteps, John Wilkes and his two brothers became actors.

John Wilkes also became politicized at a young age.

He got involved with the anti-immigrant Know Nothing Party by the age of 16 and was soon indoctrinated with ideas of white supremacy.

Unlike his brothers, John Wilkes wanted to be known as a Southern actor, and so he established a name for himself in cities like Richmond, Virginia and New Orleans.

He gravitated toward the brash, bold, and dark Shakespearean roles, like Richard III and Macbeth.

And he was also known to be something of a method actor before that term even existed.

He once told a friend that he’d forget himself completely while portraying a character.

According to another friend, Booth had said that “Of all Shakespeare’s characters I like Brutus the best, excepting only Lear.

” Following the end of the Civil War, Booth became radicalized.

In 1864, his anger was likely stirred as he toured a South now occupied by Union soldiers.

And when he visited Montreal in October of that year, he met with Confederate officials who gave him funding for a plot to kidnap Lincoln.

That plan eventually fell apart and turned into an assassination plot.

In November of 1864, he played Antony, alongside his two brothers, in a New York City production of Julius Caesar.

It was reported that during the production, John Wilkes interjected the words “sic semper tyrannis,” meaning, “thus always with tyrants,” following Caesar’s assassination.

He reportedly shouted these same words after killing President Lincoln the following April.

In the early twentieth century, anti-immigrant sentiment ran high, and found a home with The Tempest.

Is Shakespeare an American writer?

Seeing as the man never set foot in America, the answer should simply be no, right?

How about this one: Did Shakespeare ever write a play about America?

Most scholars would again say no, since there’s no evidence that Shakespeare had any interest in the New World.

But in the early twentieth century, people began to find creative ways of making Shakespeare an American inheritance.

And all of this was happening at the same time the country was seeing a rise in anti-immigrant policy.

The key message here is: In the early twentieth century, anti-immigrant sentiment ran high, and found a home with The Tempest.

Shakespeare’s The Tempest begins with a shipwreck off the shore of a magical island.

Turn-of-the-century scholars and writers began to propagate the idea that Shakespeare intended this magical island to represent the New World.

But more troubling was how the character of Caliban was being interpreted.

Caliban is a sort of half-man, half-monster; he lives on the island, and is there when the other characters arrive.

He’s taken in by the wizard Prospero, who tries to make him his servant.

To a growing number of Americans, it was apparent that Caliban was the native “savage” that lived in America before the enlightened travelers arrived.

Things got a little more complicated when playwright Percy MacKaye wrote an adaptation called Caliban by the Yellow Sands, intended to be the centerpiece of a multi-city production, staged in 1916, celebrating the 200th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death.

This play emphasized Prospero’s desire to educate Caliban, a sort of subhuman in need of enlightenment.

According to MacKaye, Caliban was intended to represent all of us, and Prospero was a stand-in for Shakespeare himself, with the central theme being how we can all be enlightened by the Bard.

But MacKaye’s version of Caliban undoubtedly mirrored white American sentiment not only toward indigenous people but also toward immigrants.

The nineteenth century saw a steady rise in nativist attitudes and anti-immigrant politics, much of it racially based.

White immigrants from Northern Europe were preferred, while others were seen as polluting America’s heritage.

At the end of the play, MacKaye’s Caliban fails to achieve enlightenment – he can’t rise above his savage nature.

This also reflected dialog at the time, which suggested that people from different cultures would never learn to be true Americans.

It’s hardly surprising that the country would soon enact its strictest immigration laws ever.

New interpretations of The Taming of the Shrew reveal a changed America.

At the end of World War II, America was a changed country.

During the war, women had begun taking on jobs in unprecedented numbers.

But when soldiers returned home, there were calls for those women to let the men have their jobs back.

Editorials were written about the need to restore the pre-war marital dynamics for the good of the country.

Instead, the divorce rate in the US skyrocketed, reaching an all-time high in 1945, with the New York Times projecting over half a million divorces in 1946.

Some of this can be chalked up to the many spontaneous marriages that took place as young soldiers were quickly sent abroad, but there was also a terrible rise in domestic violence as well.

Whatever the reason, this was an interesting time for American theater to revisit one of Shakespeare’s more controversial comedies.

The key message here is: New interpretations of The Taming of the Shrew reveal a changed America.

Bella Spewack was one of the few female playwrights in 1947 – and she was not a fan of The Taming of the Shrew.

As she put it, it was one “of the worst Shakespeare wrote.

” So, when the producer Arnold Saint Subber had the clever idea of turning the play into a Broadway musical, she didn’t exactly jump at the opportunity.

Spewack’s reaction is understandable.

The Taming of the Shrew is about a strong-willed woman, Katherina, who is eventually made into an obedient bride by her suitor, Petruchio.

So, Spewack had to think it over before agreeing to take on the job and adapt the play for post-war audiences.

In the end, however, Spewack agreed to adapt the play for a post-war audience, and it went on to become one of the most successful Broadway productions of all time: Kiss Me, Kate.

She’s co-credited with her husband, Samuel Spewack, but there’s evidence to suggest that his name was added primarily to please the producers.

Like the original play, the musical includes a play within a play – but this time there are two parallel stories: one involving actors performing Shakespeare’s play onstage, and the other involving the actors’ backstage, modern-day concerns.

Spewack cleverly made this into two competing visions of marriage: the old-fashioned idea of women’s obedience to men is reflected in the Shakespearean scenes, while the new idea of liberation and independence is reflected in the backstage scenes.

Shakespeare in Love changed significantly to accommodate American sensibilities.

The track record for film adaptations of Shakespeare has been spotty at best.

Romeo and Juliet tends to be the exception, with Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 film and Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 adaptation both doing well at the box office.

Knowing that modern movie audiences are probably most familiar with Romeo and Juliet was also key to the success of Shakespeare in Love, a film from 1998 that won seven Oscars, including Best Picture.

But it was a long road to the red carpet, and its journey to the big screen reveals a lot about progressive American audiences at the time.

The key message here is: Shakespeare in Love changed significantly to accommodate American sensibilities.

It was 1988 when the original screenwriter, Marc Norman, began work on a fictional story about William Shakespeare as a young, struggling playwright.

Originally, the story was about Shakespeare finding his muse, who’s a sexually adventurous and independent woman named Belinda.

She helps Shakespeare tap into his feminine side, which gives him the ability to transform from a second-rate writer into the man who’d create his first masterpiece, Romeo and Juliet.

Complicating matters is that when Will, as he’s called in the movie, first falls in love with Belinda, she’s disguised as a young man.

But after some confusion and soul-searching, Will works up the nerve to profess his love to the young man and kiss him.

Only afterward does he find out that it’s actually Belinda.

The two then go on a journey, involving a fair amount of unconventional sex, in an effort to find “the very soul of love.

” Around 1991, producers brought the British playwright Tom Stoppard onboard to do some rewrites.

The scene of Will thinking he was kissing a man was quickly revised.

Now his muse, who was renamed Viola, would have to reveal her true identity before any romance occurred.

And much of the heroine’s original boldness and independence was removed.

Will’s marriage also needed to be addressed in a way that wouldn’t offend American sensibilities around adultery.

So scenes were added that allowed Will to explain that his marriage was essentially loveless prior to meeting Viola.

Would the film have been as successful if the script had retained its more daring themes?

Would audiences in the ’90s have embraced a movie about the fluidity of sexuality and a man finding power from embracing his feminine side?

Maybe not, but one could argue that the more interesting movie might be one that doesn’t keep audiences shielded from the realities of modern America.

In 2012, a successful production of Julius Caesar toured the United States.

Shakespeare’s work continues to be politicized, but it’s in danger of being abandoned by the Right.

It featured a tall, skinny Black man in the title role.

It was an obvious nod to the country’s president, Barack Obama.

No one was outraged at the idea of a stand-in for the president being assassinated onstage.

But the same couldn’t be said five years later when New York City’s Delacorte Theater in Central Park put on a production of the same play with a Trumpian Julius Caesar.

The key message here is: Shakespeare’s work continues to be politicized, but it’s in danger of being abandoned by the Right.

Like many of Shakespeare’s plays, different people take away different ideas from his work.

Certain productions emphasize one thing or another, and people with specific agendas make interpretations to serve their purpose.

As we’ve seen in the previous blinks, it’s been this way for a long time.

But only recently has one side of the American political theater chosen to abandon Shakespeare rather than use the work to their own ends.

When the 2017 production of Julius Caesar was staged, it wasn’t a call to take down the president.

In fact, this production emphasized the uncertainty and regret of the murderous characters following the assassination.

The point was made that assassinating a leader, even if he’s a tyrant, will never lead to peace and democracy.

But this didn’t matter to Trump supporters once they heard about the production.

And media outlets like Breitbart and Fox News barely, if at all, mentioned that the production was Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.

The main story was that a guy who looked like Trump was being stabbed on stage in Central Park.

That one of the actors was a Black man only seemed to stoke the outrage further.

Quickly, a social media onslaught took place, with countless death threats being delivered to anyone associated with the production.

There was no discussion about the meaning of the play, only that it should stop, immediately – or else.

With the help of security and a police presence, the few remaining performances were held and the production ended as scheduled.

But it wasn’t the production anyone expected.

It was intended to spark debate, but instead revealed how little it takes before democratic and societal hallmarks like public theater can be threatened.

Final summary

The key message in these blinks: The work of William Shakespeare has long been embraced by both sides of the political spectrum, and the issues with his plays have often revealed the divides that have been within America since the beginning.

Whether it’s interracial marriage, masculinity, tyranny, or gender and sexual politics, Shakespeare has long been used and interpreted to reflect on these issues.

Shakespeare has offered solace and inspiration to those willing to reflect deeply on his work, and on themselves, though his plays have also been used to inspire hateful misdeeds.

Only recently has the right-wing branch of American politics abandoned its claims to Shakespeare, but we can hope that his work will continue to inspire thoughtful debate.

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What to read next: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, by James Shapiro Shakespeare only lived to be 52 years old, but his supply of work seems endless.

In particular, the year of 1599 was incredibly prolific, both in terms of quality and quantity.

In that year alone he wrote Julius Caesar, As You Like It, Henry V and, just to top things off, Hamlet.

Obviously, this is a year to be remembered in the life of Shakespeare.

Want to learn more about it?

Then check out the blinks to A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599.