Shakespeare in a Divided America Reviewed at NYT

"If Jill Lepore and the late Tony Judt had collaborated, this taut, swift and insightful tract might have been the offspring," writes David Ives in his New York Times review. More: 

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. 

Shapiro is already a master of creating Shakespeare treats for the literate common reader. His “1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare” and “Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?” are as entertaining as any nonfiction of recent years. Now he’s outdone himself — no surprise, given his qualifications for this new volume. He not only teaches English and comparative literature at Columbia, he serves on the board of directors of the Royal Shakespeare Company and is the Shakespeare scholar in residence at the Public Theater in New York. He also edited the comprehensive “Shakespeare in America” anthology. Here, his combined scholarship and theatrical experience help him examine — brilliantly — the notorious 2017 “Julius Caesar” in Central Park, in which a Donald Trump look-alike as Caesar was assassinated nightly to fierce outrage from the political right.

Did you know there was an epidemic of men spanking women in movies in the decade after 1938? That young, pre-bearded Ulysses S. Grant was cast as Desdemona in an Army production of “Othello” and rehearsed but never went on because of what amounted to homosexual panic among the producing officers in a national manliness crisis? Did you know that Steve Bannon wrote a screenplay for a sci-fi “Titus Andronicus” as well as an alt-right “Coriolanus”? (Neither was produced.) That Abraham Lincoln’s favorite play was “Macbeth,” one that helped secure the reputation of John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln’s own Macbeth-to-be? It’s all here and much more.

Continue reading at NYT.