RaveThe NationUsing Shakespeare as an ideological cudgel is rooted in the country’s history of conflict, and Cotton’s screed confirms what literary scholar James Shapiro shows in his latest book, Shakespeare in a Divided America: For a couple of centuries—at least since Tocqueville noticed that in America \'there is hardly a pioneer’s hut that does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare\'—reactionaries and radicals alike have fired from the same canon ... Shapiro, in contrast, mostly looks back to Shakespearean disputes that predate our current crisis, not so much mining the plays for nuggets of contemporary insight as assessing them as cultural artifacts that have acquired layers of meaning by dint of their bipartisan utility over time. Most of all, he argues, they have been used as a means for Americans to engage race, class, gender, sexuality, and immigration, issues they otherwise don’t know how to talk to one another about.
