MixedThe Times Literary SupplementThis is an undertaking that Shapiro, as the editor of the anthology Shakespeare in America for the Library of America, is eminently qualified to complete. He does so with his characteristic blend of acuity, assiduousness and unflaggingly narrative prose ... Shakespeare in a Divided America has many virtues ... And yet I’m not at all sure that it bears scrutiny. It is salutary to be reminded of the long and insidious history of American racism in connection with John Quincy Adams and Percy MacKaye, and easy to share Shapiro’s pleasure that \'colorblind\' casting has made the twenty-first-century Shakespearean stage more racially diverse. But the fact remains that Shapiro finds no space to discuss the ways in which the Americans ignored by MacKaye – that is, those whose ancestors arrived in chains before being all too readily assimilated into a nation that valued them only as slaves – engaged with Shakespeare’s writings. As Shapiro surely knows, such engagements have much to say about an American experience gratuitously cut off from liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Shapiro’s sheer readability masks his dependence on a form of political allegorizing that is too narrow in its vision, and too complacent in its assumptions ...
Jonathan Bate
PanThe Los Angeles Review of BooksThe real problem...is that careless writing is among the least of the flaws that make How the Classics Made Shakespeare so disappointing ... it is bewildering to find \'one of the world’s leading authorities on Shakespeare\' (to borrow a line of Bate’s own blurb) so persistently shutting his eyes to the nuances of writing in which difficulty, and with it ambiguity, are deliberate artistic strategies ... How the Classics Made Shakespeare does not put the case that Shakespeare offers us a transformative-transcendent vision of human sexuality of the kind sketched by D. H. Lawrence, Anaïs Nin, or even a Judith Krantz. We are instead asked to swallow sex as the lowest common denominator, joining together Roman antiquity, the Shakespearean imagination, present-day science, and everyday lived experience ... Shakespeare is never middlebrow, never safe, never conventional, never reassuring, never clear-cut ... for Shakespeare, the vicissitudes of neither sex nor romantic love are enough of a basis on which to fashion the kind of dramatic and poetic \'dreams\' in which he was interested, and whose limitations he understood only too well. Rather, he wrote to explore and ultimately to escape the vanilla of magical thinking — the self-same confection into which Bate would have us plunge him back.
Stephen Greenblatt
MixedThe Los Angele Review of Books\"Greenblatt’s latest book is Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics. Although it is not exactly a popular work, it shows him moving further than ever before toward the role of the self-consciously public intellectual — in this case occupying a space somewhere between James Comey and the Timothy Snyder of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017). Greenblatt adjusts his language accordingly ... Most of these claims are transparently over-determined, but in the course of making them Greenblatt offers up some deft and occasionally provocative readings of the text. Unfortunately, these readings too often work against his chosen line ... Although I expected to disagree with this and that in Tyrant, I also expected to admire it and to find myself in sympathy with its aims. I’ve spent a good deal of time trying to figure out why this has not, in fact, proved to be the case. One answer relates to the ill-defined and under-explored use of tyranny as an idea and a heuristic.\
