Shakespeare in a Divided America summary

In 1845, over half the US Army was camped around Corpus Christi along the shores of the Gulf of Mexico. No one was sure what was going to happen, but the show of force, the biggest since the War of 1812, was clearly meant to intimidate Mexico in the hope of westward expansion.

This effort didn’t appeal to everyone, especially the abolitionists, who saw the expansion as a way to create more slave-owning states. But for those willing to go to war, there was a new idea to grab onto – Manifest Destiny.

Shakespeare’s work leaves a lot open to interpretation. Consider the moment in Hamlet when the Danish Prince tells Horatio, “I must be idle.” What does he mean and how does one act idle?

Even Shakespearean scholars have been divided on this question. One conclusion is that Hamlet wants to appear passive and disinterested so as to avoid the attention of his uncle, the king. Others believed that since Hamlet wants people to think he’s mad, being idle must mean pacing around aimlessly.

Abraham Lincoln loved Shakespeare. He memorized soliloquies and frequently returned to works such as Macbeth to sort through his own personal tragedies and help process his difficult decisions. He loved to recite lines to others and ask for their thoughts on what Shakespeare was trying to convey. For Lincoln, Shakespeare was a tool for introspection. For John Wilkes Booth, the man who would take Lincoln’s life, Shakespeare’s work was a call to action.

The key message here is: John Wilkes Booth was likely inspired and emboldened by Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.

Is Shakespeare an American writer? Seeing as the man never set foot in America, the answer should simply be no, right? How about this one: Did Shakespeare ever write a play about America? Most scholars would again say no, since there’s no evidence that Shakespeare had any interest in the New World.

But in the early twentieth century, people began to find creative ways of making Shakespeare an American inheritance. And all of this was happening at the same time the country was seeing a rise in anti-immigrant policy.

At the end of World War II, America was a changed country. During the war, women had begun taking on jobs in unprecedented numbers. But when soldiers returned home, there were calls for those women to let the men have their jobs back. Editorials were written about the need to restore the pre-war marital dynamics for the good of the country. Instead, the divorce rate in the US skyrocketed, reaching an all-time high in 1945, with the New York Times projecting over half a million divorces in 1946.

Some of this can be chalked up to the many spontaneous marriages that took place as young soldiers were quickly sent abroad, but there was also a terrible rise in domestic violence as well. Whatever the reason, this was an interesting time for American theater to revisit one of Shakespeare’s more controversial comedies.

The track record for film adaptations of Shakespeare has been spotty at best. Romeo and Juliet tends to be the exception, with Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 film and Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 adaptation both doing well at the box office.

Knowing that modern movie audiences are probably most familiar with Romeo and Juliet was also key to the success of Shakespeare in Love, a film from 1998 that won seven Oscars, including Best Picture. But it was a long road to the red carpet, and its journey to the big screen reveals a lot about progressive American audiences at the time.

In 2012, a successful production of Julius Caesar toured the United States. It featured a tall, skinny Black man in the title role. It was an obvious nod to the country’s president, Barack Obama. No one was outraged at the idea of a stand-in for the president being assassinated onstage. But the same couldn’t be said five years later when New York City’s Delacorte Theater in Central Park put on a production of the same play with a Trumpian Julius Caesar.

The key message here is: Shakespeare’s work continues to be politicized, but it’s in danger of being abandoned by the Right.