... terrific ... If Jill Lepore and the late Tony Judt had collaborated, this taut, swift and insightful tract might have been the offspring. Yet Shapiro’s subtitle is misleading: His subject is us, the U.S., not Shakespeare plays. If you’re worried about the current state of the Republic, this is a book that will stoke your fears — while educating you on why you might justifiably be having them ... The 1998 chapter is worth the price of the book alone ... Shapiro’s book is history, but not past history. It’s ongoing and all too painfully still-relevant history. As he bounces back and forth between 1833 or 1916 and today, the similarities between Then and Now overwhelm the differences and Shapiro’s title resonates anew, reminding us how divided we’ve been since our very beginnings, with historical-tragical constantly muscling out pastoral-comical ... Among all the fine words currently being spilled examining the American mess, James Shapiro has outshone many of our best political pundits with this superb contribution to the discourse. He upped the wattage simply by bouncing his spotlight off a playwright 400 years dead who yet again turns out to be, somehow, us.
... wonderfully vivid ... a formidable challenge but [Shapiro] meets it with tremendous narrative skill and analytic power. That he does so in 300 entirely accessible and compulsively readable pages is little short of miraculous ... The book works so well because Shapiro does not attempt a continuous history. He applies the method of his previous books, which is to focus on single moments and pursue their meanings with forensic archival rigour and brilliant critical close reading. But here there is an added layer of contemporary urgency: Shapiro does not hide his distress at the current plight of American politics and culture ... a colourful and dynamic kaleidoscope of American divisions. This is superb theatre history but it is also an outstanding work of history, full stop. Shapiro shows us that Shakespeare is a cracked mirror in which the US continually glimpses its divided selves. It is hard to imagine anyone better able to discern what it reflects.
James Shapiro makes the case that arguments about the Bard’s plays have long reflected our conflicted beliefs as a nation about hot-button issues like immigration, adultery, homosexuality and interracial love ... Shapiro, who serves as a consultant for the Public Theater, which stages the free Shakespeare in the Park festival every summer, is uniquely qualified to give readers a behind-the-scenes look at what happened [when Trump supporters disrupted the 2017 production of Julius Caesar in New York City's Central Park]. It’s a fascinating story—one of many in this entertaining and accessible book—that underscores Shapiro’s key point: Shakespeare never goes out of style.
Using 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.
... timely and resonant ... Shapiro’s message, which reverberates through some sparkling chapters on class, immigration and manifest destiny, is that...Shakespeare lines offered a collective catharsis ... Shapiro’s chapter on same-sex marriage is cleverly framed around a fascinating description of the making of Shakespeare in Love ... The professor’s final words on the contemporary American disruption offers some bleak cultural pessimism.
The most popular honorary American of all time is unquestionably Jesus of Nazareth. But Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro’s latest book makes a lively case for Will as the man from Galilee’s perennial runner-up among unwitting citizens of the USA. Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future blends Shapiro’s usual zest for unpacking time-capsule moments (e.g., The Year of Lear) with a newfound relish for Trump-era topicality. True, you may be tempted to groan at his fatuous subtitle—our future, really? Say it ain’t so, Weird Sisters. But he’s contrived an ingeniously structured game of historical hopscotch whose nimbleness keeps a reader turning pages without fretting overmuch about his shakier connective leaps, of which there are a few ... Shakespeare in a Divided America isolates eight revealing episodes when America’s Bardolatry has ended up refracting our national tussles with race, class, and sex, along with the ongoing turmoil of new ingredients in ye old melting pot. And let’s not forget violence ... Shapiro’s occasional missteps and overreaching don’t mar the originality of his best aperçus, arresting juxtapositions, and vivid thumbnail characterizations of yesteryear’s political and theatrical figures.
I assume Mr. Shapiro describes these two positions as 'extremes' in order to place himself in the reasonable center, but in fact he, too, has recruited Shakespeare for his own purposes in the culture wars. I don’t fault him for it. Many writers—I think of Coleridge and Orwell, but there are hundreds of others—have drawn profitably on Shakespeare’s plays, especially the histories and tragedies, to elucidate contemporary political questions. The trouble with Mr. Shapiro’s book is that, although he gestures continually at political questions, he offers little that can be called an argument ... Much of the book, particularly its first half, is not forensic but historical, and Mr. Shapiro writes well as a historian ... Alas, when Mr. Shapiro relates his often excellent historical analysis to post-2016 American politics, his writing becomes flaccid and vague ... Why, I’ve asked more than once in these pages, do gifted scholars feel they must turn otherwise readable and significant books into ham-fisted commentaries on the 45th president? O, reason not the need!
The narrative flows like a novel with many plot lines, and you don’t need to be a Shakespeare scholar or a historian to enjoy this well-researched book ... [Shapiro] succeeds in presenting an even-handed account of Shakespeare and American politics, though his observations, comments, and conclusions convey an unmistakably liberal viewpoint.
This 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 ...
It is a riveting story, nimbly told ... Shapiro spotlights several...moments, drawing out scrupulously researched detail from each ... The only question that Shapiro’s book doesn’t satisfyingly address is whether Shakespeare is still a mirror through which most Americans see themselves. Well-known though the plays remain in the US, they are no longer on the lips of politicians and ordinary citizens.
[Shapiro] is fascinating on textual revisions and adaptations of popular plays ... Extensive bibliographic essays round out the collection ... Chock-full of approachable and engaging critical analyses, this work will pique the curiosity of both Shakespeareans and anyone interested in American culture.
... richly detailed ... Shapiro’s wit and well-sourced anecdotes enliven his incisive analysis of more than a century’s worth of American history. Written with broad appeal and expert insight, this sparkling account deserves to be widely read.
