James Shapiro. (2020). Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future. Penguin Publishing Group.

James Shapiro. 2020. Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future. Penguin Publishing Group.

James Shapiro, Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future. Penguin Publishing Group, 2020.

James Shapiro. Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future. Penguin Publishing Group, 2020.

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Shakespeare in a Divided America

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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.

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     January 1, 2020
     How the Bard has played in America over the centuries. Shakespearean scholar Shapiro (English and Comparative Literature/Columbia Univ.; The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606, 2015, etc.) admits that "it was the election of Donald Trump in 2016 that convinced me to write about Shakespeare in a divided America." Impeccably researched, the book focuses on how key figures in American history have experienced Shakespeare. Each chapter revolves around a play or two and what was happening socially and politically. Shapiro sets the stage with a discussion of the controversial Central Park production of Julius Caesar a month after the election. The assassination of Caesar by Brutus was seen by some as an attack on the president. The play, writes the author, "spoke directly to the political vertigo many Americans were experiencing." Shapiro begins exploring that vertigo in 1833, focusing on slavery, miscegenation, Othello, the celebrated English actress Fanny Kemble, and former president John Quincy Adams' disdain for a play about a black man and a white woman. After discussions of "Manifest Destiny" (Romeo and Juliet) and "Class Warfare" (Macbeth), one of Shapiro's best chapters explores the juxtaposition between Abraham Lincoln, who loved Shakespeare and could quote from the works at length, and actor John Wilkes Booth. Shapiro wonders if Booth's first-ever performance in Julius Caesar just months before Lincoln's reelection "fueled [his] violent intentions." Congressman Henry Cabot Lodge's 1916 description of The Tempest's Caliban as the "missing link" shows how Shakespeare would be "implicated in the story of American immigration." Front and center in "Marriage: 1948" is the story of The Taming of the Shrew and how it became Kiss Me, Kate, one of the "most enduring and successful American musicals." It was "staggering," Shapiro writes, "what [Cole] Porter got away with." Lastly, "Adultery and Same-Sex Love" weaves together Twelfth Night, playwright Tom Stoppard, and producer Harvey Weinstein's demand that Shakespeare in Love have a "happy ending." A thought-provoking, captivating lesson in how literature and history intermingle.

     COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

2. • premium: True
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     Starred review from January 13, 2020
     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.

3. • premium: True
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   • content:

     February 1, 2020
     Inspired, perhaps, by Andrew Dickson's Worlds Elsewhere (2016), which recorded how nations other than England have assimilated Shakespeare, Shapiro (The Year of Lear, 2015) presents eight cases of Shakespeare's impact in a perpetually culture-clashing U.S. The first was relatively quiet; in 1833, touring star Fanny Kemble conversed with the foremost antislavery congressman, ex-president John Quincy Adams, who held the marriage of Othello and Desdemona to be unnatural and later wrote the 1836 essay, The Character of Desdemona, compromising his reputation then and since. In 1849 and not quietly, renowned actors' competing characterizations of Macbeth sparked lethal, class-based rioting in New York. In 1865, an actor obsessed with Julius Caesar interpreted the play to justify assassinating President Lincoln. A 1916 adaptation of The Tempest intended to foster common citizenship was instead used to support anti-immigration. As recently as 2017, a Central Park production of Julius Caesar that by costume, mostly, portrayed its setting as Donald Trump's Washington, whipped up an online firestorm and crisis-style police protection. Filling out each chapter with vivid context, Shapiro could hardly be more engaging.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

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     December 1, 2019
     

     Shakespeare scholar Shapiro (literature, Columbia Univ.; Shakespeare and the Jews, 1599-1606) explores responses to the Bard's works in American society from the 19th century to the present. He is fascinating on textual revisions and adaptations of popular plays, as with the 1948 stage version of Kiss Me, Kate, based on The Taming of the Shrew, which challenged traditional gender roles and featured a multiracial cast. When the film adaptation was released in 1953, America had taken a rightward turn, as evidenced by the production's all-white cast and emphasis on the "re-domestication" of women. Script changes to the 1998 movie Shakespeare in Love also toned down the playwright's gay attraction for the merchant's daughter Viola (disguised as a boy) and his extramarital affair with her. Shapiro also discusses the Astor Place Opera House Riot (1849), Shakespeare lover Lincoln's assassination by Shakespeare actor John Wilkes Booth, Percy MacKaye's Caliban by the Yellow Sands (1916), and the 2017 Central Park production of Julius Caesar starring a Donald Trump look-alike. Extensive bibliographic essays round out the collection. VERDICT Chock-full of approachable and engaging critical analyses, this work will pique the curiosity of both Shakespeareans and anyone interested in American culture. [See Prepub Alert, 9/16/19.]--Joseph Rosenblum, Univ. of North Carolina, Greensboro

     Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

5. • premium: True
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   • content:

     October 1, 2019
     

     One of our top Shakespeare scholars--he's Shakespeare Scholar in Residence at New York City's Public Theater and sits on the board of directors of the Royal Shakespeare Company--Shapiro reveals how Shakespeare's works shaped this nation. He starts in the pre-Revolutionary era, when both loyalists and Patriots claimed Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy as their own, then shows how they can be used to calm our troubled waters today.

     Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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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...

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