A few years ago, I read author James Shapiro’s Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? Shapiro believed Shakespeare wrote the plays that had his name on them, but took the book as a means of examining the many people over the past two centuries or so who, for a wide variety of reasons, believe someone other than William Shakespeare wrote those plays. As someone who, quite frankly, agrees with Shapiro on the subject of the authorship question, I found it a good read, telling me where these ideas appear to have come from.
Now Shapiro has a new book out, Shakespeare in a Divided America: What his Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future. It’s a book looking at a very different aspect of the effect Shakespeare’s works have had on the modern world. And since I enjoyed one of Shapiro’s other works, why not look into another one?
Shapiro’s work here is looking into the how Shakespeare’s works have not so much influenced American social and political movements how his works have been seen by the people who led such movements. Each chapter covers a different time period, a different issue or event, and a different way one or two of Shakespeare’s plays were used by the movers and shakers of that time. That means looking at how same-sex marriage and adultery were seen during the making of Shakespeare in Love or which character John Quincy Adams despised in Othello due to his ideas on interracial relationships.
For the most part, the book covers people who loved Shakespeare and used the Bard’s work to justify their positions. They read what they wanted from the works, even if said ideas were either not present or totally alien to Shakespeare due to the times he lived in. What was something like same sex marriage to William Shakespeare? True, he often used gender-bending humor in his comedies as his all-male casts depicted stories where young maidens disguised themselves as young men to somehow woo their men of choice, but that didn’t mean Shakespeare even imagined a scenario where two men would even think of getting married.
Furthermore, Shapiro outlines how Shakespeare, like many educated Englishmen of his time, liked to present both sides to various controversial issues. That comes to play when Shapiro writes a chapter of two men who both loved Shakespeare for very different reasons. That would be Abraham Lincoln (who loved the tragedies like Macbeth) and John Wilkes Booth (who identified with characters from Julius Caesar). That comes into play again in the bookending chapters discussing the controversy of a 2017 Shakespeare in the Park production of Julius Caesar in New York City, where a Trump lookalike was used to stand in for Caesar.
Is there a real, unifying theme to Shapiro’s work here? Arguably, no. Times change, and how people view the issues of the day and Shakespeare’s works change with them. Plays that are popular today (like The Tempest) were not part of the popular repertoire for the better part of the 19th century. Who readers and viewers see as the real villains can change. And even people who live in the same time period don’t always agree on what the verses mean. It’s an interesting survey of times and issues, but it likewise doesn’t really hang together as a single narrative. Granted, that probably wasn’t Shapiro’s intent, but it does mean the epilogue has what feels like a somewhat abrupt ending.
Grade: B+
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