America’s unlikely love affair with Shakespeare

Without England’s national poet, there would be no starlings in the United States. Tim Smith-Laing on a strange fervour

views at a dinner in 1833, she “swallowed half a pint of water, and nearly my tumbler too, and remained silent”. Shapiro is interested in the way Adams’s “tentative steps toward becoming a committed abolitionist seem to have required a counterweight” in his vitriol against miscegenation, and he suggests that “Shakespeare licensed Adams to say what he otherwise was too inhibited or careful to say.”

All told, Shakespeare in a Divided America finds Shapiro at his best: engaging, precise in detail, and always willing to look beneath the skin of the matter at hand. In the second chapter, manifest destiny and masculinity appear under the guise of a young soldier rehearsing as Desdemona in an 1846 army production of Othello. Nicknamed “Little Beauty” by officers, his real name was Ulysses S Grant, future general, president and spirit of American masculinity incarnate. Eventually replaced as Desdemona by a professional actress, Grant becomes the hook on which Shapiro hangs an engaging investigation of cross-dressing on the 19th-century stage. Grant’s fellow Shakespeare obsessives, Abraham Lincoln and his assassin, the Shakespearean actor John Wilkes Booth, provoke a dive into the role of Julius Caesar in defining America’s fear of tyranny – which, of course, persists, the right to bear arms being still regarded as a necessary bulwark against overweening government.

If the chapters examining sexual and marital mores through the lens of The Taming of the Shrew, Kiss Me Kate and Shakespeare in Love offer slightly less to chew on, Shapiro’s broader thesis, that Shakespeare is a useful barometer of America’s cultural weather, still convinces, and it allows him to plot a relatively hopeful graph for America’s future, despite the depressing recursiveness of its debates on race, gender, and sexuality.

Shapiro’s optimism retreats, however, in a conclusion examining outrage pile-ons in the age of Trump. Uncertain if Shakespeare’s ability to stoke debate can resist increasingly shrill authoritarian calls to stifle dissent, Shapiro remarks not just on “how easily democratic norms could crumble” but on how Shakespeare could disappear from the stage. As he reminds us, it has happened before: when the Puritans shut the London playhouses in 1642. It is a sobering thought. But Shakespeare’s work survived that; I suspect he will survive anything today’s puritans could throw at him, too.

Ulysses S Grant, nicknamed ‘Little Beauty’, once played Desdemona in drag