Shakespeare in a Divided America

Shakespeare in a Divided America Plot Summary

Introduction

In 1864, as the Civil War raged across America, three brothers gathered on a New York stage to perform Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. The eldest played Brutus, the middle brother played Cassius, and the youngest, John Wilkes Booth, played Mark Antony. Less than six months later, Booth would assassinate President Abraham Lincoln, crying out the Latin phrase "Sic semper tyrannis" – thus always to tyrants – the same sentiment that drove Shakespeare's Brutus to murder Caesar. This dramatic connection between Shakespeare and American history is no coincidence but rather emblematic of how deeply the Bard's works have been woven into the fabric of American identity and conflicts. Throughout four centuries of American history, Shakespeare has served as both mirror and battleground for the nation's evolving cultural values. From the Revolutionary era when the founding fathers quoted him in their personal correspondence, to the Civil Rights movement when his plays became vehicles for racial integration on stage, Shakespeare's works have been continuously reinterpreted to reflect America's changing self-image. His plays have been performed in frontier camps, used to justify both sides of the Civil War, adapted to address immigration debates, and reimagined to explore gender roles and sexual identity. By examining these cultural flashpoints through the lens of Shakespeare, we gain unique insight into how Americans have grappled with their most profound societal divisions and aspirations.

Chapter 1: Racial Boundaries and Othello's Forbidden Love (1833)

In 1833, former President John Quincy Adams published a controversial essay titled "The Character of Desdemona," in which he harshly criticized Shakespeare's heroine for her "unnatural" marriage to Othello. Adams, known for his eloquence and intellectual prowess, shocked many by describing Desdemona's love for the Moor as a "moral flaw" that justified her tragic fate. This reaction came during a period when America was deeply divided over racial issues, with abolitionists gaining momentum in the North while the South was entrenching its defense of slavery. Adams's interpretation reflected the anxieties of white Americans about racial mixing, or what was then called "amalgamation." Though Adams himself opposed slavery, his discomfort with interracial marriage revealed the complex racial attitudes even among progressive thinkers of the time. His reading of Othello became particularly significant when contrasted with his dinner encounter with the famous British actress Fanny Kemble, who challenged his interpretation. Kemble, who would later marry a Southern plantation owner and publish a scathing account of slavery, represented a more progressive view of the play's racial dynamics. The debate over Othello in this period mirrored larger cultural battles about America's racial identity. Southern writers explicitly used the play to argue against abolition, claiming that Othello's jealousy and violence proved the dangers of elevating Black men to positions of power or allowing interracial relationships. Meanwhile, some Northern abolitionists began using the play to humanize Black Americans and challenge racial prejudice. The character of Othello became a cultural battleground where Americans fought over fundamental questions about race, citizenship, and human equality. This period established a pattern that would repeat throughout American history: Shakespeare's works being appropriated and reinterpreted to advance competing visions of American identity. The language of Shakespeare provided a shared cultural vocabulary through which Americans could debate their most divisive issues. As the young nation struggled to define itself in the aftermath of independence, Shakespeare's plays offered both a connection to European heritage and a malleable text that could be shaped to address uniquely American concerns about race, democracy, and national character.

Chapter 2: Manifest Destiny and Theatrical Gender Performance (1845)

In 1845, as America pursued its "Manifest Destiny" to expand westward, a young lieutenant named Ulysses S. Grant was stationed with the Army of Observation at Corpus Christi, Texas. While preparing for what would become the Mexican-American War, Grant and his fellow officers organized theatrical performances to relieve boredom. Remarkably, Grant himself performed the female role of Desdemona in Shakespeare's Othello, donning a dress and wig for the entertainment of his comrades. This seemingly trivial episode reveals much about the complex gender dynamics of mid-19th century America during its aggressive territorial expansion. The concept of Manifest Destiny, coined by journalist John O'Sullivan in 1845, framed American expansion as divinely ordained and linked to Anglo-Saxon racial superiority. This ideology was deeply gendered, casting American men as virile conquerors and protectors of feminine virtue. Yet the military culture that embodied this aggressive nationalism also permitted surprising gender fluidity in its recreational activities. Male soldiers regularly performed female roles in camp theatricals, temporarily crossing gender boundaries in ways that would have been scandalous in civilian society. This period also saw the rise of Charlotte Cushman, America's first international theatrical star, who became famous for her performances of male Shakespearean roles, particularly Romeo. Cushman's cross-dressed performances were celebrated rather than condemned, as critics praised her ability to embody masculine virtues while maintaining her feminine identity. Her success revealed the period's complex attitudes toward gender: while Victorian society rigidly defined appropriate male and female behavior, theatrical performance created a space where gender boundaries could be temporarily transgressed. The Mexican-American War that followed Grant's theatrical experiences was explicitly framed in gendered terms, with American politicians describing Mexico as a feminine land awaiting masculine American conquest. Shakespeare's plays, with their complex treatment of gender roles and identity, provided Americans with a cultural framework for exploring these tensions. The popularity of cross-dressed Shakespearean performance during this period of aggressive national expansion suggests that Americans were working through anxieties about gender even as they promoted a hypermasculine vision of national destiny. The legacy of this period would echo through subsequent American history, as Shakespeare continued to serve as a vehicle for exploring gender identity and performance. From the all-male Shakespeare companies of the frontier to the gender-bending productions of the modern era, Americans have repeatedly turned to Shakespeare to negotiate changing conceptions of masculinity and femininity. The paradoxical combination of rigid gender norms and theatrical gender fluidity that characterized the Manifest Destiny era established patterns that would persist in American culture for generations.

Chapter 3: Civil War, Lincoln, and Julius Caesar's Shadow (1865)

On April 14, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln attended a performance of "Our American Cousin" at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. During the play, actor John Wilkes Booth, a passionate Confederate sympathizer and accomplished Shakespearean performer, entered the presidential box and shot Lincoln in the head. As he leapt to the stage, Booth shouted "Sic semper tyrannis" – the same sentiment that motivated Shakespeare's Brutus to assassinate Caesar. This tragic event represented the culmination of how deeply Shakespeare had become intertwined with America's bloodiest conflict. Throughout the Civil War, both North and South had claimed Shakespeare as their cultural champion. Lincoln himself was a devoted Shakespeare enthusiast who regularly memorized and recited passages from the plays, finding particular solace in Macbeth during the darkest days of the war. He often invited actors to the White House to perform Shakespeare and discussed the plays with his secretaries during quiet evenings. For Lincoln, Shakespeare provided both personal comfort and political wisdom, helping him navigate the moral complexities of preserving the Union while ending slavery. Meanwhile, the Booth family represented America's Shakespearean royalty. John Wilkes Booth's father, Junius Brutus Booth, had been one of America's greatest Shakespearean actors, and his brother Edwin was considered the finest American actor of his generation. In November 1864, just months before the assassination, John Wilkes had joined his brothers in a charity performance of Julius Caesar to raise funds for a Shakespeare statue in Central Park. Edwin played Brutus, while John Wilkes played Mark Antony – ironically, the character who mourns Caesar's death and vows revenge against the assassins. Booth's assassination of Lincoln revealed how Shakespeare's plays about tyranny and political violence had become powerful frameworks for Americans to interpret their own political conflicts. Booth explicitly cast himself as Brutus, a noble Roman defending liberty against a tyrant, while many Northerners saw him as Iago – a villainous destroyer of greatness. The assassination transformed Lincoln into a Shakespearean tragic hero in the American imagination, with numerous funeral orations drawing parallels between Lincoln and characters like Hamlet, Lear, and Caesar. The Civil War era cemented Shakespeare's status as America's adopted national poet, claimed by citizens across regional and political divides. Even as Americans fought over the meaning of their nation, they shared Shakespeare as a common cultural touchstone. This paradoxical quality – Shakespeare as both unifier and battleground – would continue to characterize his place in American culture through subsequent generations, as the nation grappled with the war's legacy of racial division and reconciliation.

Chapter 4: Immigration Fears and The Tempest's 'Other' (1916)

In 1916, as America debated restricting immigration and World War I raged in Europe, New York City hosted an elaborate Shakespeare Tercentenary celebration marking 300 years since the playwright's death. The centerpiece was Percy MacKaye's massive community pageant "Caliban by the Yellow Sands," which featured over 1,500 performers, including many immigrants. The production reimagined Shakespeare's character Caliban from The Tempest as a primitive being gradually civilized through exposure to Shakespeare's works – a thinly veiled metaphor for how America's cultural elites viewed the assimilation of immigrants. This period saw intense battles over America's cultural identity, with Anglo-Saxon Protestant elites feeling threatened by the massive influx of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. Leading politicians like Senator Henry Cabot Lodge championed legislation requiring literacy tests for immigrants, arguing that newcomers from Italy, Poland, Russia, and Greece threatened America's Anglo-Saxon heritage. Shakespeare was explicitly enlisted in this nativist cause, with Lodge and others claiming him as the embodiment of Anglo-Saxon genius and using his works to define who could be considered truly American. The Immigration Restriction League, founded by Harvard graduates in 1894, explicitly linked Shakespeare to their cause, arguing that America's cultural greatness stemmed from its Anglo-Saxon roots and that unrestricted immigration threatened this heritage. Scholars like Charles Mills Gayley published works like "Shakespeare and the Founders of Liberty in America," claiming that Shakespeare had directly influenced America's founding principles and that preserving his cultural legacy required limiting immigration. These arguments helped build support for the literacy test requirement that Congress finally passed in 1917, over President Wilson's veto. MacKaye's "Caliban" pageant, though ostensibly celebrating inclusivity by involving immigrant performers, actually reinforced hierarchical views of culture. The production portrayed Caliban – explicitly associated with immigrants in contemporary discourse – as a bestial figure who could only be partially civilized through exposure to Shakespeare's genius. While immigrants participated in the performance, they were largely relegated to minor roles, with Anglo-American professionals taking the lead parts. The production's message was clear: immigrants could join American society only by submitting to Anglo-Saxon cultural authority. The Shakespeare Tercentenary celebrations culminated in the opening of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, in 1932. At the dedication ceremony, the library's first director, Joseph Quincy Adams, explicitly linked Shakespeare to America's immigration debates, praising the playwright for helping to create "a homogenous nation" despite the "babel of tongues and cultures" brought by immigration. By this time, the restrictive immigration quotas of 1921 and 1924 had dramatically reduced the flow of newcomers, especially those from non-Western European countries. Shakespeare had been successfully enlisted as a cultural gatekeeper, defining who could be considered authentically American.

Chapter 5: Post-War Marriage and Taming the Shrew (1948)

In December 1948, the musical "Kiss Me, Kate" opened on Broadway, becoming an instant hit that would run for over 1,000 performances and win the first-ever Tony Award for Best Musical. Based on Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, the show featured a play-within-a-play structure that juxtaposed Shakespeare's tale of Katherine's "taming" with the backstage story of divorced Broadway stars navigating their own battle of the sexes. The musical emerged at a pivotal moment when American society was renegotiating gender roles in the aftermath of World War II. During the war, millions of American women had entered the workforce to replace men serving overseas, gaining unprecedented economic independence and challenging traditional gender boundaries. When the war ended, there was enormous social pressure for women to return to domestic roles and surrender their jobs to returning veterans. This transition created significant tensions, reflected in soaring divorce rates and anxious cultural commentary about the "crisis" in American marriages. Books like Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia Farnham's bestselling "Modern Woman: The Lost Sex" argued that women's unhappiness stemmed from their resistance to natural gender roles. "Kiss Me, Kate" navigated these tensions by simultaneously presenting Shakespeare's patriarchal vision of marriage and a more modern relationship where a divorced couple negotiates a potential reconciliation. The musical's most famous scene – where the male lead puts his ex-wife over his knee and spanks her – reflected a disturbing trend in post-war American culture, where domestic discipline was normalized in films, advertisements, and popular media. Yet the musical also gave its female characters agency and ambition, with the backstage plot showing women making choices about their careers and relationships. The creative team behind "Kiss Me, Kate" included several outsiders to mainstream American culture who brought their own perspectives to the material. Bella Spewack, who wrote the book, was a Jewish immigrant who had escaped poverty on the Lower East Side to become a successful playwright. Cole Porter, who wrote the music and lyrics, was a closeted gay man who had to carefully navigate homophobic social norms. Their collaboration produced a work that both reflected and subtly questioned the gender politics of post-war America. The success of "Kiss Me, Kate" demonstrated how Shakespeare could be adapted to address contemporary American concerns while maintaining his cultural authority. By framing modern gender conflicts within Shakespeare's familiar story, the musical allowed audiences to explore changing social norms within a safe cultural context. The show's enduring popularity – it was made into a successful film in 1953 and has been regularly revived – reflects its effectiveness in using Shakespeare to negotiate American anxieties about gender, marriage, and social change in the post-war era and beyond.

Chapter 6: Clinton Era Adultery and Shakespeare in Love (1998)

In December 1998, as President Bill Clinton faced impeachment proceedings stemming from a sexual scandal, the film "Shakespeare in Love" opened in American theaters. This romantic comedy, which imagined a love affair between Shakespeare and a noblewoman that inspired "Romeo and Juliet," would go on to win seven Academy Awards including Best Picture. The film's treatment of adultery, gender identity, and artistic inspiration reflected the cultural battles raging in late 1990s America, as the nation became increasingly divided between progressive and traditional values. The making of "Shakespeare in Love" revealed these tensions. The original screenplay by Marc Norman included a subplot where Shakespeare believes he has fallen in love with a young man (actually a disguised woman), forcing him to question his sexual identity. When Tom Stoppard revised the script, this element was largely removed, reflecting Hollywood's reluctance to present a potentially bisexual Shakespeare to mainstream American audiences. Similarly, the film's treatment of adultery – Shakespeare and his lover are both in relationships with others – had to be carefully framed to avoid alienating viewers in a nation where polling showed overwhelming disapproval of extramarital affairs. The film's ending also became a battleground between artistic vision and commercial concerns. Test audiences wanted a conventional happy ending where the lovers stay together, but the filmmakers insisted on a bittersweet conclusion where Shakespeare's lover sails to America, carrying his influence to the New World. This compromise ending symbolically linked Shakespeare to America's founding, reinforcing the idea that his works had shaped American culture from its beginnings – a narrative that had been promoted since the nineteenth century. By the early 21st century, Shakespeare had become increasingly entangled in America's intensifying political polarization. This culminated in 2017 when the Public Theater's production of "Julius Caesar" in New York's Central Park sparked national controversy by portraying Caesar with clear references to President Donald Trump. When Caesar was assassinated in the production, right-wing media outlets accused the theater of promoting political violence, leading corporate sponsors to withdraw support and protesters to disrupt performances. The "Julius Caesar" controversy revealed how Shakespeare had become a flashpoint in America's culture wars. While Shakespeare had always been used to debate American values, the intensity of the reaction – including death threats against the director and actors – reflected the breakdown of shared cultural understanding in an era of partisan media and social network bubbles. The right-wing outrage ignored both the play's actual message (which shows assassination leading to disaster) and the theatrical tradition of portraying Caesar as contemporary political figures, including a 2012 production that depicted Caesar as Barack Obama without controversy. As America entered the third decade of the 21st century, Shakespeare remained both a unifying cultural touchstone and a battleground for competing visions of national identity. From high school classrooms to Broadway stages to political debates, his works continued to provide Americans with a framework for exploring their deepest conflicts about race, gender, power, and national purpose – a role he had played since the nation's founding and would likely continue to play in its uncertain future.

Summary

Throughout four centuries of American history, Shakespeare has functioned as a cultural battlefield where Americans have fought over their national identity and values. From John Quincy Adams's racially charged reading of Othello to the Trump-as-Caesar controversy of 2017, Shakespeare's works have been continuously reinterpreted to reflect America's evolving self-understanding and deepest conflicts. This pattern reveals a paradoxical truth: while Americans across political, regional, and demographic divides have claimed Shakespeare as their cultural inheritance, they have simultaneously used his works to advance competing visions of what America should be. The consistent thread running through these cultural battles is the tension between Shakespeare as a symbol of traditional Western civilization and Shakespeare as a vehicle for progressive social change. The story of Shakespeare in America offers valuable insights for our polarized present. First, it reminds us that cultural divisions are not new to American life but have been present since the nation's founding. Second, it demonstrates how shared cultural touchstones can provide a common language for debating divisive issues, potentially bridging social divides rather than simply reflecting them. Finally, it suggests that America's greatest strength may lie not in cultural uniformity but in the creative tension between tradition and innovation, continuity and change. By understanding how previous generations used Shakespeare to navigate their own cultural conflicts, we might find ways to engage more productively with our contemporary divisions, recognizing that the ongoing reinterpretation of cultural inheritance is not a threat to national identity but a vital expression of democratic culture.

About Author

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James Shapiro

A specialist in Shakespeare and the Early Modern period, James S. Shapiro is Larry Miller Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he has taught since 1985. He has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Public Library Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and the American Academy in Berlin. In 2011, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He currently serves as a Shakespeare Scholar in Residence at the Public Theater in New York City.

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