Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future

The years 1865 and 2017 are two of the eight years Shapiro isolates out to structure his book in a variation on the calendrical approach he applied in A Year in the Life of Shakespeare: 1599 and The Year of Lear: 1606. Why, even more, in a book that starts out treating matters of such serious and en...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Shakespeare Studies 2021-01, Vol.49, p.332-9
Main Author: Cartelli, Thomas
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Actors
Adams, John Quincy (American president)
Adultery
American history
Assassination
Baraka, Amiri (1934-2014)
Book publishing
Drama
Essays
Immigration
Jewish Americans
LGBTQ people
Lincoln, Abraham
Lincoln, Abraham (1809-1865)
Migrants
Riots
Shakespeare, William (1564-1616)
Social history
Theater
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Summary:The years 1865 and 2017 are two of the eight years Shapiro isolates out to structure his book in a variation on the calendrical approach he applied in A Year in the Life of Shakespeare: 1599 and The Year of Lear: 1606. Why, even more, in a book that starts out treating matters of such serious and enduring concern as race, class warfare, and immigration, expend time and space on a chapter titled "1998: (Consider only how conflicts about race and power between older and newer migrants to New York play out and play into the 1957 production of West Side Story, a thoroughly "classed" and "ethnicized" adaptation of Romeo & Juliet, brilliantly scripted, scored, lyricized, choreographed, and directed by four gay Jewish American men.) One of these resurfacing problems, immigration, Shapiro oddly chooses to treat by recycling facts, insights, and observations Coppélia Kahn and I presented over twenty years ago in what he refers to (on p. 251 of a back-of-the-book bibliographical essay) as our "trailblazing" published work on Percy MacKaye's Caliban by the Yellow Sands (251) instead of using his proven research skills to find and develop fresh material of his own. Understandably fastening on Edwin Forrest's unforgivable association with nativist rabblerousers, the chapter fails to give an adequate accounting of the egalitarian principles that motivated many participants in the attack on the Astor Place Opera House-as prominent a symbol of inequality then as the Hudson Yards development is now-and which led to the killing of 30 and wounding of hundreds of mainly workingclass New Yorkers by their own National Guard.
ISSN:0582-9399