Shakespeare. Bring up that name in conversation, and the reactions of your audience are likely to be mixed. To some of your listeners, that most famous name in all of English literature will likely arouse unpleasant memories of a dreary week or two in a high school class lost in a jumble of lords, ladies, jesters, and attendants, all seeming to speak a language only vaguely related to English.
Others will react with enthusiasm, remembering with fondness the production of “As You Like It” at a playhouse or the teacher who brought Macbeth and Lady Macbeth to life in an otherwise unremarkable college classroom.
Whether or not we’ve watched or read “Hamlet,” nearly all of us are familiar with “To be or not to be.” And popular expressions like “break the ice,” “not slept a wink,” “neither here nor there,” and “too much of a good thing” are all hand-me-downs from the Bard of Avon.
An Adopted Father of Our Country
In “Shakespeare in America: An Anthology From the Revolution to Now,” editor James Shapiro has brought together more than 70 pieces of literature, poems, reviews, essays, letters, humorous pieces, and a bit of fiction and drama, all of them written by Americans about an Englishman who died long before their time.
Here, John Quincy Adams analyzes the character of Desdemona, critical of her marriage to Othello. In a review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Mosses From an Old Manse,” Herman Melville imports Shakespeare into his critique, even writing “Believe me, my friends, that Shakespeares are this day being born on the banks of the Ohio.” No admirer of Shakespeare, Mark Twain parodies the playwright in an early piece of journalism, “The Killing of Julius Caesar ‘Localized.’” More modern takes on Shakespeare are delivered by the likes of humorist James Thurber, actor John Houseman, and writer Cynthia Ozick.
Those especially interested in American theater will undoubtedly find much of value in Shapiro’s collection. There are not only varied reflections on the plays but also pieces on acting and stagecraft, such as James Agee’s “Laurence Olivier’s ‘Henry V,’” which Agee calls “one of the great experiences in the history of motion pictures.” At the end of his review, Agee writes of Shakespeare that “one Englishman used language better than anyone has before or since, or ever shall; and that nearly the best that our time can say for itself is that some of us are still capable of paying homage to the fact.”
Presidential Devotees
The works of Shakespeare have also heavily influenced some of America’s greatest political figures. Shapiro includes in his study writings by such luminaries as John Adams, his son John Quincy, Abraham Lincoln, and American statesman Henry Cabot Lodge. In his remarks about Lincoln, for example, Shapiro reports that the president “carried a copy of Shakespeare’s works around the White House (even as he had carried it earlier in his career on the judicial circuit).” Lincoln’s secretary, John Hay, “reported how Lincoln would read aloud from the plays late at night.”W. Shakespeare, Ad Man Extraordinaire
If we need more evidence of Shakespearean influence on Americans, we need look only to the world of advertising.
‘Dis Reading Vill Not Stop’
Ordinary Americans have also long regarded as their inheritance the words of Shakespeare. Like Lincoln, for example, many people in the 19th century took their learning from the Bible and from Shakespeare.
We find a classic example of this conjunction in Betty Smith’s novel “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.” Here, an 18-year-old married and pregnant Katie Nolan learns from her illiterate immigrant mother that the secret for her children’s success lies “in the reading and the writing.” She tells Francie that she must read to her children from the Bible and from Shakespeare. “And every day you must read a page of each to your child—even though you yourself do not understand what is written down and cannot sound the words properly. You must do this so the child will grow up knowing what is great—knowing that these tenements of Williamsburg are not the whole world.”
A Tie That Binds
And the reading and performances of Shakespeare have not stopped.Moreover, Shakespeare is still widely taught in our schools. Despite the recommendations by some that we remove Shakespeare in favor of more diverse and relevant literature, that push to eliminate his works from the curriculum has so far largely failed. The reasons for our continuing fascination with Shakespeare may have something to do with tradition but even more to do with his relevance. To declare Shakespeare and his work irrelevant, as some would do, essentially means that human beings—with all their complexities, their tragedies and comedies, their foibles and virtues—are irrelevant as well.
At this point in America’s story, our culture needs greater unification, not more cuts from a dividing blade. Given their ongoing popularity, William Shakespeare’s poetry and plays can continue to serve as one of the threads joining us one to the other.