Shakespeare & America

James Shapiro On Shakespeare & America | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra

"‘I have great confidence that Shakespeare's work spoke to Elizabethan preoccupations. But in many ways, he speaks more clearly and directly to American preoccupations, than he does to English ones. And I'm not exactly sure why, that's one of the mysteries that I wrestled with in investigating this. But America embraced Shakespeare as its national poet even after breaking with England in 1776. And he's never really had a rival here as the one writer everyone in America reads, we don't read him the same way but we all read him.

And one of the things that I learned while writing this book is, America Shakespeare is not England or Britain Shakespeare. Certain plays, Othello in particular, take a distinctive political and social meaning here that they don't in in England and the opposite can be said to be the case for works like Twelfth Night, which matter in terms of class in the UK in a way that they don't in America…

The link between Shakespeare and America goes back to pre revolutionary times when Hamlet's famous lines to be or not to be were appropriated by both those who wanted to get rid of the British and defenders of the British in America. And by the time the second President of the United States, John Quincy Adams was installed, we have presidents grappling with Shakespeare. Adams rewrote his speech from Henry the Fifth to show how a foreign power might use its influence and to put a sympathetic president in the White House…

Shakespeare becomes a way for Americans to grapple with social and political issues that are not easily spoken about or confronted. Americans are really bad at speaking about the things that divide us. Race, immigration, politics, the cultural gulf that is enormous right now. And Shakespeare time and again, in American history has been a way of speaking to those concerns...

In antebellum America, in the south, slaveholding south where people name their slaves Othello, it was one of the most popular plays in theaters... John Quincy Adams, who was one of the great abolitionists of his day, fiercely opposing slavery, to the point that he received death threats for that. And he opposed the expansion of slave states, fought to defend slaves in the Supreme Court. He was really a hero of that movement. Nonetheless, he couldn't wrap his head around the idea of a black man touching or sleeping with a white woman. Now, he kept the most extensive diaries, perhaps in American history and wrote widely on a range of subjects, but he never ever discussed miscegenation, or as it was called at the time amalgamation.

Except for when he turned his attention to Othello. And that occurred after what may be the worst dinner party in recorded history. He was seated next to Fanny Campbell, the superstar English actress who was touring America at the time. And Adams spent the evening mansplaining Shakespeare to her, including an account of Othello, which he called disgusting, and he didn't realize it, but she would publish a book about her American travels, that included this conversation somewhat guardedly. And he retaliated by writing a pair of essays, in which she said that Desdemona, for falling in love and marrying a black man who smothers her to death, got what she deserved. And later in another account of this conversation, Fanny Campbell writes that in describing this Adams actually used the N word instead of Negro to describe Othello. And it's extraordinary because he's one of the liberal heroes. Yet even he is using the N word and repulsed by miscegenation. So we have not come as far as we might imagine, in this country, on the left or on the right when it comes to race relations...

In the mid 19th century, at a time of Manifest Destiny, when a notion of aggressive manliness -  think of Donald Trump, a swagger, a desire to take over whatever you can grab - supplanted an older model of manliness associated with the Founding Fathers. And if you will, with a kind of subdued, quiet, earnest, hard working sober English manliness. And that had implications for how you did Shakespeare.

So at this time, no man could really play Romeo very effectively because he had to be in the words of the play effeminine at some moments, and then a great sword fighter killing Tibault and others And as it turned out, the only people who can really play him well were women. So the mid 19th century in America and to some extent in England as well was the great age of female Romeo's like Charlotte Cushman slipping around and look at men trying to play various roles."


Time to cancel John Adams as a bigot. I find it funny that miscegenation being seen as wrong back then somehow shows that the US hasn't come far