"Shakespeare in a Divided America"

James Shapiro's well organized book is surprisingly instructive on current events, and it would have been even more so if I were more familiar with "The Tempest" for the chapter on immigration.

• It helped that in a Bible-obsessed nation, Shakespeare’s language sounded so similar to that of the King James Version (1611), contributing to the sense that his plays were a kind of secular scripture.
• Thirty years later Eustis had come to a different understanding: “It’s not that I think Brutus is right. It’s not that I think Julius Caesar is right. What I’m watching is a group of people struggling with how” to “take political power,” and how, then, “does that political power reflect their values?” For Eustis, Antony is “somebody who can take power, but has no idea how to make that reflect” his values. With “Brutus and Cassius, you have the case of people who don’t know how to take power.” And with Caesar and Octavius, “you have people who are able to take power and who are able to use that to reflect their values, which is to have power. Power becomes an end in itself.
• Reviewers at the time struggled, without much success, to reconcile the production’s warnings about the dangers of fascism with its equal insistence on the limits and cluelessness of liberalism. Welles, who saw both sides, was drawn to the play precisely “because Shakespeare has feelings for and against everyone in it.”
• Oskar Eustis took to the stage before the performance began, and had this to say about how both theater and democracy depend upon competing points of view... Nobody owns the truth. We all own the culture.
• In it, (John Quincy) Adams vilifies Desdemona for desiring and then marrying a black man: ... She breaks a father’s heart, and covers his noble house with shame, to gratify—what? Pure love, like that of Juliet or Miranda? No! Unnatural passion; it cannot be named with delicacy.
• In 1820 John Quincy Adams reconstructed in his journal a cordial conversation he had had with John C. Calhoun, secretary of war and a staunch defender of slavery, over what emancipation would mean for America. The two played out the moves. Abolish slavery, Calhoun said, and the South would immediately break with the North and ally itself with Great Britain. When Adams pointed out that this meant “returning to the colonial state,” to his surprise Calhoun agreed, saying that this departure would have been forced on the South. A naval blockade of the North would follow, then undoubtedly an invasion of the South and a bloody civil war. Neither man could see further than that—though both recognized that the abolition of slavery would mean the end of the compromise that had resulted in the United States of America.
• Like Adams, Hammond found it easier to speak of Shakespeare’s fictional character than to name an actual, threatening African American person:
• The 1830s proved a difficult time for those, like Adams, trying to stake out an increasingly untenable position of favoring abolition while opposing amalgamation. The incoherence of this position was mirrored in legislative battles:
• What he told her, and then so uncharacteristically elaborated on in print, seems to have allowed Adams to cling to a position short of genuine freedom and equality for former slaves. His tentative steps toward becoming a committed abolitionist seem to have required a counterweight, and he found it in this repudiation of amalgamation.
• It is not a great leap to consider his essay on “The Character of Desdemona” as a rebuke of Fanny Kemble, who had publicly embarrassed him. While her name was excised before Adams’s response was published, she haunts it. As with race, so with gender: Shakespeare licensed Adams to say what he otherwise was too inhibited or careful to say—or say so honestly.
• The company then settled on a West Point classmate and friend of both Porter’s and Longstreet’s who was five feet, seven inches tall and a slight 135 pounds. His name was Ulysses S. Grant... Grant was chosen to play Desdemona because of his looks and perhaps his voice too
• The confluence of technological and demographic changes that marked this effort to make America great in the 1840s now seems painfully familiar. The rise of the telegraph, coupled with the widespread introduction of steam engines on waterways and rails, accelerating the movement of goods and people, revolutionized traditional notions of time and space. Old and familiar ways were further upended by a changing labor landscape, marked by increasing industrialization, the loss of jobs to women (who could be paid less), and a rise in immigrant labor
• Cushman gravitated to so-called breeches parts, including Rosalind in As You Like It and Viola in Twelfth Night, comedies in which the heroines disguise themselves in men’s attire, and was soon recognized as “undoubtedly the best breeches figure in America.”
• Forrest had publicly caned a man who criticized him in the newspapers, paid a ridiculous amount for a statue of himself as Coriolanus, and was both a friend and a supporter of President Andrew Jackson, who embodied his sort of masculinity in the political sphere. Forrest’s career was carried along by the swift currents of “Jacksonian democracy”—that catchphrase (and oxymoron) for the political realignments in the 1830s and 1840s that came to be identified with the nation’s seventh president: anti-elitist, racist, manly, expansionist, nationalist, in favor of limited regulation and a more powerful presidency, and mostly good for white men.
• Shakespeare was as much a part of his life as fisticuffs. As a young dockhand, Rynders had purchased a copy of the plays and he trained himself to “recite entire scenes from memory.” Shakespeare also came in handy when stirring up a crowd; a “singular feature” of Rynders’s “campaign addresses when he entered the political fray” was “a mixture of terrible profanity with liberal quotations from the Scriptures and Shakespeare.”  {"Deadwood" inspiration?}
• The Whig newspaper the Courier and Enquirer. The willingness of the troops to fire on the protesters, the newspaper argued, was “an excellent advertisement to the capitalists of the old world, that they might send their property to New York and rely upon the certainty that it would be safe from the clutches of red republicanism, or chartists, or communionists of any description.” The message to the wealthy in Paris, Vienna, Venice, Berlin, Milan, and other European cities that had recently seen revolutionary violence was: bank here, where we shoot protesters.
• Others saw only social corrosion, not benefits.
  There was certainly a greater recognition of the need for shared public space: two years after the riots, in early May 1851, Woodhull’s successor as mayor, Ambrose Kingsland, proposed building a large park suited for “the wants of our citizens.” Though still conceived from the top down, Central Park would be carved out by the end of that decade. The bloody events of May 1849 had a sobering effect: there would not be another major outbreak of violence in the streets of New York City until the draft riots of 1863.
• It is not the substance, but the manner in which kindness is extended, that makes one happy in the acceptance thereof. The sauce in meat is ceremony; meeting were bare without it. Be kind enough to accept the enclosed two dollars and a half (though hard to spare) for what we have received.
  ... It’s one of the more impenetrable speeches in Shakespeare, so dense that Booth has to supply his own paraphrase in the preceding sentence.
• After abducting Lincoln, Booth’s acting career in the North would be over, so while in Canada, he arranged for his wardrobe and scripts to be put aboard a ship that would attempt to run the Union blockade. It never made it.
• William R. Taylor’s groundbreaking study, Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (1961), includes a chapter, “From Hotspur to Hamlet,” that explores how the ideal of the white gentleman in the antebellum South gravitated to these polar Shakespearean models. The Southern Hotspurs came “to symbolize honorable failure and the lost cause,” while the Southern Hamlets lacked the “vitality and masculinity” needed to act: they are “the consciousness and the conscience of the South” who “are paralyzed by their knowledge.” John Wilkes Booth shared the racial and social values of the Confederacy. In turning Hamlet into Hotspur—a mad, masculine, fiery rebel—he managed to combine these two popular types,
• The final pages of Pollard’s book neatly encapsulate his message: “The war did not decide negro equality; it did not decide negro suffrage . . . it did not decide the right of a people to show dignity in misfortune, and to maintain self-respect in the face of adversity. And these things which the war did not decide, the Southern people will still cling to, still claim, and still assert in them their rights and views.”
• it was Macbeth to which those mourning Lincoln found themselves turning time and again, especially those likening him to the slain Duncan, who
  Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been
  So clear in his great office, that his virtues
  Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against
  The deep damnation of his taking-off. (1.7.17–20)
• It wasn’t until after World War II, then, that American productions began engaging the darker side of authority and global power that British ones had been wrestling with since Victorian days, and not until the 1970s that The Tempest joined the mini-canon of Shakespeare’s plays frequently taught and staged in America.
• In retrospect, it is unsurprising that a Shakespearean comedy would be appropriated in this way, since his comedies almost always end with the creation of a new social order defined by who is included and who is kept out. The wrong skin color, religion, or sexual orientation, or simply the unwillingness to act and sound like everyone else is enough to warrant exclusion.
• Saint Subber, Spewack, and Porter were outsiders who were keenly aware of cultural norms in 1940s America, the terrain on which the war between men and women in their musical was waged. Like many in the American theater of his day, Saint Subber was gay at a time when those who weren’t heterosexual had to mask their sexual orientation if they had any hope of thriving professionally. Saint Subber also likely knew that neither Lunt nor Fontanne was exclusively heterosexual; they even shared the friendship of the young and gay star Montgomery Clift,
• letting him know how greatly (Spewack) resented his claim that “I will never apply my full creative powers to the further improvement of Kiss Me, Kate, and that I have been confused, evasive, and mentally distraught and will continue to be so.” The irony that they were reproducing the very double standard against which Lilli rebels in the musical (while employing Petruchio’s trick of asserting that Katherine is confused and distraught) seems utterly lost on the men behind the show.
• It’s staggering what Porter got away with in Kiss Me, Kate, especially in the repressive frontstage world. So, for example, when Lois Lane’s Bianca sings about her desire to wed (because she is so eager to have sex), her seemingly clueless language is almost beyond the pale, as her willingness to marry any Tom, Dick, or Harry turns into a desire for what sounds like any “hairy Dick”—and then to a longing for what sounds identical to the words “a Dick, a Dick, a Dick, a Dick, a Dick, a Dick, a Dick, a Dick, a Dick, a Dick, a Dick, a Dick.”
• Successive stanzas make it increasingly clear that women have no say: “If she says she won’t buy it or like it / Make her tike it, what’s more As You Like It.” The wit and pleasure of the clever punch lines, the humor of these lowbrow figures promoting Shakespeare, the tug of the old Bowery tune, all work to distract us from what is actually being said.
• In its closing stanzas, as the violence and threats escalate, the gunmen make clear that it helps to quote from those of Shakespeare’s plays that are themselves suffused with the threat of violence: “Better mention ‘The Merchant of Venice’ / When her sweet pound o’ flesh you would menace.” And, in the end, if a woman resists an aroused man, a beating may be necessary: “If because of your heat she gets huffy / Simply play on and ‘Lay on, Macduffy!’”—here recalling the bloody strokes at the end of Macbeth. The cheery song normalizes domestic violence, and Shakespeare is there to legitimate if not facilitate this. And those of us enjoying the musical are complicit in this. It’s a perfect prologue to Katherine’s long speech.
• As far as loose morals and women’s independence went, the backstage world was now more or less indistinguishable from the frontstage one, leading one reviewer to complain that “the cast seems to have no grasp of the temperamental, backstage comedy” of the Broadway hit. Frontstage conventionality—embodied in Shakespeare’s taming plot—had won out over what an anxious Willard Waller had in 1945 called “a time of experimentation and new family customs.” Playact submission long enough and it is easy to forget that it is just a performance. A door that had briefly opened was firmly shut and mostly stayed that way until the 1960s ushered in civil rights, second-generation feminism, Stonewall, and with those social movements freshly transgressive ways of staging and interpreting Shakespeare.
• Those who have seen the 1998 film will likely be surprised by how much more progressive Norman’s 1991 version of the love story had been. The heroine, originally named Belinda, is adventurous, sexually liberated, and fiercely independent. She is discovered by Will Shakespeare while acting for a boys’ theater company, passing herself off as a young man named Thomas.
• one of the more uncomfortable issues for Americans at the end of the twentieth century: adultery. The United States remained steadfastly puritanical on the issue, at least in theory: in 2001, only 7 percent of Americans polled by Gallup thought that having an extramarital affair was morally acceptable, a percentage that hardly budged—to 8 percent—when the same question was again asked in 2015. To give some sense of Americans’ disapproval of infidelity, no other behavior that was polled was considered less morally acceptable—not even human cloning, suicide, or abortion.
• On the previous Valentine’s Day, an ad had run in the Washington Post, addressed to “Handsome” and signed “M”:
  HANDSOME
  With love’s light wings did
  I o’er perch these walls
  For stony limits cannot hold love out,
  And what love can do that dares love attempt.
  —Romeo and Juliet 2:2
• Early on in the film, Will, in a therapy session with Dr. Moth, complains about his creative impotence in Freudian terms: “the proud tower of my genius has collapsed.” The line, which might have gotten laughs in 1999, would no longer do so two years later, when it would be hard not to cringe when hearing of collapsing towers.