James Shapiro, _Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us about Our Pst and Future_

 CRIKEY, HAVE I really not posted on this blog since February? One of those semesters.

Shapiro’s book makes a good companion to Tyrant, Stephen Greenblatt’s short book on how Shakespeare had Trump’s number back four-hundred-and-something years ago.  Shakespeare in a Divided America does not duplicate Greenblatt’s effort, though. Like Greenblatt’s book, Shapiro’s book is compact (just over 200 pages), smart, and devoted to Shakespeare’s relevance to our national politics; unlike Greenblatt’s, it is about the past more than the present (although it does discuss the 2017 production of Julius Caesar in which Caesar bore a marked resemblance to the Orange One).

Shapiro devotes a chapter apiece to eight episodes of national contention that found expression in the Shakespearean productions of the time, starting before the Civil War (e.g., “1833: Miscegenation,” “1845: Manifest Destiny”) and ending up in the present (“1998: Adultery and Same-Sex Love,” “2017: Left/Right”). I knew, vaguely, that Shakespeare has been a staple of American theater for as long as there has been one, but I did not know that relying on his cultural clout to make statements about Issues of Moment goes all the way back as well. Performers and producers used Othello to make points about people of African descent, The Tempest to make points about immigration, Taming of the Shrew to make points about marriage—often extremely retrograde points, with talk about Shakespeare’s Understanding of Eternal Human Verities as smokesceen.

Great idea for a book, but what puts the project over the top is Shapiro’s none-better skills in working an archive (see his 1599). His chapter on the Booths, for instance, is by itself worth picking up the book for. (I did not know that John Wilkes Booth was much admired for his performance as Brutus.)

I very much appreciated that Shapiro, while skillfully describing how Shakespeare has been used as a front for culturally conservative campaigns, also shows how the plays present numerous opportunities for directors who want to take them a different way. Like Whitman (and Dylan), Shakespeare contains multitudes.