Shakespeare in a Divided America
What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future
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4.6 • 26 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
One of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year • A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist • A New York Times Notable Book
A timely exploration of what Shakespeare’s plays reveal about our divided land.
“In this sprightly and enthralling book . . . Shapiro amply demonstrates [that] for Americans the politics of Shakespeare are not confined to the public realm, but have enormous relevance in the sphere of private life.” —The Guardian (London)
The plays of William Shakespeare are rare common ground in the United States. For well over two centuries, Americans of all stripes—presidents and activists, soldiers and writers, conservatives and liberals alike—have turned to Shakespeare’s works to explore the nation’s fault lines. In a narrative arching from Revolutionary times to the present day, leading scholar James Shapiro traces the unparalleled role of Shakespeare’s four-hundred-year-old tragedies and comedies in illuminating the many concerns on which American identity has turned.
From Abraham Lincoln’s and his assassin, John Wilkes Booth’s, competing Shakespeare obsessions to the 2017 controversy over the staging of Julius Caesar in Central Park, in which a Trump-like leader is assassinated, Shakespeare in a Divided America reveals how no writer has been more embraced, more weaponized, or has shed more light on the hot-button issues in our history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Columbia University English professor Shapiro (The Year of Lear) explores how Shakespeare's plays have provided a framework for confronting America's "social and political collisions" in this richly detailed episodic history. Starting in the 19th century, Shapiro contends, Shakespeare's oeuvre helped to shape popular opinion through turbulent periods of growth, war, and political partisanship. He examines John Quincy Adams's 1836 essay vilifying Othello heroine Desdemona for marrying a black man in light of the former president's evolving abolitionism, contrasts Abraham Lincoln and John Wilkes Booth's interpretations of Macbeth, details how early-20th-century anti-immigration activists retrofitted The Tempest to their purposes, and places 1998 Academy Award winner Shakespeare in Love against the backdrop of the Monica Lewinsky affair and contemporaneous attitudes toward same-sex love. Most strikingly, Shapiro relates how a 2017 Shakespeare in the Park staging of Julius Caesar in which the title character resembled Donald Trump fanned right-wing outrage and inadvertently revealed "how easily democratic norms could crumble." Shapiro's wit (Lewinsky and Bill Clinton are referred to as "Starr-crossed lovers") and well-sourced anecdotes enliven his incisive analysis of more than a century's worth of American history. Written with broad appeal and expert insight, this sparkling account deserves to be widely read.
