Shakespeare In America
Edited and Introduction by James Shapiro
Foreward by Bill Clinton
Jim Shapiro is one of the Shakespeare world’s most intelligent, accessible, trusted and therefore, important authors. He is the author of “1599: One Year in the Life of Shakespeare” and “Contested Will” a superb dissection of the ‘authorship’ question. He now has edited a group of stories, poems and other writings by American writers over the centuries -each with a connection to Shakespeare. From Amazon.com “The history of Shakespeare in America,” writes James Shapiro in his introduction to this groundbreaking anthology, “is also the history of America itself.” Shakespeare was a central, inescapable part of America’s literary inheritance, and a prism through which crucial American issues—revolution, slavery, war, social justice—were refracted and understood. In tracing the many surprising forms this influence took, Shapiro draws on many genres—poetry, fiction, essays, plays, memoirs, songs, speeches, letters, movie reviews, comedy routines—and on a remarkable range of American writers from Emerson, Melville, Lincoln, and Mark Twain to James Agee, John Berryman, Pauline Kael, Woody Allen, and Cynthia Ozick. Americans of the revolutionary era ponder the question “to sign or not to sign;” Othello becomes the focal point of debates on race; the Astor Place riots, set off by a production of Macbeth, attest to the violent energies aroused by theatrical controversies; Jane Addams finds in King Lear a metaphor for American struggles between capital and labor. Orson Welles revolutionizes approaches to Shakespeare with his legendary productions of Macbeth and Julius Caesar; American actors from Charlotte Cushman and Ira Aldridge to John Barrymore, Paul Robeson, and Marlon Brando reimagine Shakespeare for each new era. The rich and tangled story of how Americans made Shakespeare their own is a literary and historical revelation. As a special feature, the book includes a foreword by Bill Clinton, among the latest in a long line of American presidents, including John Adams, John Quincy Adams, and Abraham Lincoln, who, as the collection demonstrates, have turned to Shakespeare’s plays for inspiration.
“AuthorLink” Review/Post by Cindy Matthews
| What could be more American than a play by William Shakespeare? In Shakespeare in America, editor James Shapiro has collected a wide range of poems, essays, short stories, parodies and theatrical critiques from our country’s beginning to the present day from an even wider range of personalities—Washington Irving, Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, James Thurber, Isaac Asimov and Pauline Kael to name a few. To understand how a 16th century English playwright’s work could become so loved, studied and produced in America we need only look at our past.Our country’s history of race relations are reflected in Othello, which president John Quincy Adams, an abolitionist, critiqued as evidence of the horrors of interracial marriage. However, actor Paul Robeson’s great portrayal of Othello in 1943 and the “Voodoo Macbeth” staged in 1936 in Harlem demonstrate how civil rights also found a strong voice in Shakespearean drama. With multitudes of “Shakespeare Societies”, rural and urban Americans from all backgrounds enjoyed his plays throughout the 19th century, leading to popular 20th century musicals like Kiss Me Kate and West Side Story, along with Orson Welles’s powerful Julius Caesar set in the fascist Italy of 1937.As Henry Cabot Lodge claimed “Americanisms” aren’t a debasement of the language as the British decry, but evidence of how close to Shakespeare’s tongue the original English colonists spoke. The immortal bard, who made just two brief mentions of the New World in his works, is really one of us. We can never have enough of him. Reviewer: Cindy A. Matthews |
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