Shakespeare in a Divided America

James Shapiro, drawing on a career spent researching Shakespeare and advising productions at the Public Theater in New York, argues that Shakespeare's plays have served for over two centuries as one of the few shared cultural spaces where Americans across the political spectrum can engage with the nation's most divisive issues. Through eight historical episodes spanning from the 1830s to 2017, each centered on one or two plays, Shapiro traces how Americans have turned to Shakespeare to voice what could not otherwise be said about race, class, gender, expansion, immigration, and political violence.

Shapiro opens by establishing that Shakespeare took root in America despite early anti-theatrical sentiment. Touring British actors, schoolbooks, and cheap editions spread his works, and his language, echoing the King James Version, resonated in a Bible-obsessed nation. Yet as divisions deepened, Shakespeare became a site of cultural conflict as much as common ground. Shapiro notes that who is permitted to perform Shakespeare has long served as an index of who is considered fully American, citing the African American actor Ira Aldridge, who had to leave New York for London in the 1820s to play leading roles denied to him at home.

The first chapter examines John Quincy Adams, a former president and leading abolitionist, who in 1835 published two essays condemning Desdemona for marrying a Black man in Othello, calling her passion "unnatural" and declaring her murder deserved. Shapiro traces this paradox to a disastrous 1833 dinner with the British actress Fanny Kemble, during which Adams called Othello "disgusting." When Kemble published a veiled account of the exchange, Adams responded with his essays. Shapiro argues that Shakespeare licensed Adams to voice views about race and disobedient women that he was otherwise too inhibited to express. Kemble, who married the American slaveholder Pierce Butler and witnessed plantation life firsthand, later recorded that Adams had used the word "nigger" to describe Othello at the dinner.

In 1845, Shapiro turns to two stories connected by Manifest Destiny, the belief in America's God-given right to continental expansion. At a military encampment near the Mexican border in Corpus Christi, Texas, officers staged plays to curb dissipation. Ulysses S. Grant was chosen to play Desdemona in Othello, but the actor cast as Othello objected, and a professional actress replaced him. Simultaneously, Charlotte Cushman, the greatest American actress of the nineteenth century, debuted as Romeo in London. Romeo had briefly become a woman's part, as male actors found the role unplayable amid shifting norms of manhood. Cushman, a woman who loved other women, performed the role with extraordinary conviction. After the Mexican-American War ended in 1848, men reclaimed the role, and Cushman faded from cultural memory.

The 1849 chapter recounts the Astor Place riots, in which more than 20 people died when the New York State militia fired on a crowd protesting a performance of Macbeth by the British actor William Macready. The violence originated in a feud between Macready and the American star Edwin Forrest: Forrest was brash and hypermasculine, beloved by working-class audiences; Macready was restrained and cerebral, favored by elites. The newly built Astor Place Opera House had broken with democratic theatrical traditions by imposing dress codes and segregating working-class patrons. Shapiro argues that the riots exposed deepening class divisions in a rapidly growing New York where income inequality had sharpened.

The chapter on 1865 explores the competing Shakespeare obsessions of Abraham Lincoln and his assassin, John Wilkes Booth. Lincoln, largely self-taught, knew the plays well enough to recite them nearly by heart; his favorite was Macbeth, which he turned to throughout the war. Booth grew up immersed in Shakespeare; his father, Junius Brutus Booth, was a leading Shakespeare actor, and the younger Booth specialized in dark, combative roles. By 1864, he had been recruited by Confederate agents and was plotting against Lincoln. After the assassination, he invoked Julius Caesar in his diary to justify his actions. Shapiro traces how the nation settled on Macbeth to mourn Lincoln, likening the slain president to the innocent Duncan, a framing that allowed a blood-soaked nation to defer confronting the racial hatred Booth declared had motivated his act.

The 1916 chapter examines how The Tempest and its character Caliban, the island inhabitant enslaved by the sorcerer Prospero, were conscripted into the debate over immigration. Between 1880 and 1920, nearly 24 million immigrants arrived in America, and those from southern and eastern Europe were increasingly characterized as racially inferior. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge led the congressional campaign for restriction, constructing a racial narrative in which Shakespeare's era represented the apex of Anglo-Saxon "race making." The playwright Percy MacKaye wrote Caliban by the Yellow Sands for the Shakespeare tercentenary, a massive community drama whose depiction of Caliban as a bestial creature reinforced anti-immigrant assumptions. Congress passed a literacy test for immigrants in 1917, and racially driven quotas followed in 1921 and 1924, remaining law until 1965.

The 1948 chapter traces the making of Kiss Me, Kate, the musical adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew, against the backdrop of postwar battles over women's independence. As women were pressured to surrender wartime jobs to returning veterans and divorce rates soared, the creative team structured the show around contrasting worlds: a conservative Shakespearean frontstage where wives submit, and a transgressive backstage where women make choices about careers and relationships. The team were all outsiders, including the gay producer Arnold Saint Subber, the immigrant playwright Bella Spewack, and the closeted lyricist Cole Porter. The ending left ambiguous whether the heroine genuinely submits or merely acts the part. The 1953 film scrubbed this ambiguity, making patriarchal resolution unambiguous.

The chapter on 1998 follows the making of Shakespeare in Love, which underwent radical revisions as filmmakers discovered what American audiences could and could not accept. The original screenplay by Marc Norman explored same-sex desire, depicting Shakespeare falling in love with a cross-dressed woman he believes is a young man. British playwright Tom Stoppard replaced this with a conventional heterosexual romance. The film's ending was reworked repeatedly, as Miramax executive Harvey Weinstein pushed for a happier resolution. An unused sequence showing the heroine encountering a Native American and a dark-skinned man on the American shore was cut because, as director John Madden acknowledged, "it seemed to take us somewhere we didn't want to go," introducing associations of genocide and slavery. The film won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

Shapiro concludes with the 2017 controversy over the Delacorte Theater production of Julius Caesar, directed by the Public Theater's artistic director, Oskar Eustis, in which a Trump-like Caesar was assassinated onstage. Right-wing media amplified an illegally filmed clip of the assassination, stripped of context; corporate sponsors withdrew, and protesters disrupted performances. Eustis received threats, including a handwritten letter sent to his home. Shapiro argues that the episode revealed how democratic norms can crumble when one side opts for silencing rather than dialogue. He observes that Shakespeare's future in America appears both secure and precarious: 91 percent of high schools teach the plays, yet deepening divisions threaten the shared cultural space they have long provided, much as divisions in early seventeenth-century England led to civil war, regicide, and Parliament's 1642 order closing the theaters.