Speaking of Shakespeare

SoS #26 | James Shapiro: Shakespeare in a Divided America

December 28, 2021 Thomas Dabbs Season 2 Episode 7
Speaking of Shakespeare
SoS #26 | James Shapiro: Shakespeare in a Divided America
Show Notes Transcript

This is talk with James Shapiro of Columbia University on his recent book, ‘Shakespeare in a Divided America’. This conversation covers highlights of Shapiro’s book on the influence of Shakespeare in American thought and on the minds of such American leaders as John Quincy Adams, Ulysses S. Grant, Abraham Lincoln, and Henry Cabot Lodge. The book also examines how Shakespeare appears in American history and how Shakespearean material weighs in on such matters as race, immigration, and gender. From the Astor Place riots in the 19th century to the hullabaloo over the portrayal of a Trump look alike at the Delacorte theatre, this book also shows how Shakespearean performance exposes a range of divisive conflicts in the American consciousness. This talk also cover Shapiro’s prior work on Shakespeare’s life, antisemitism in Shakespeare, and the question of Shakespearean authorship.

00:00:00 - Intro
00:02:47 - Overview of ‘Shakespeare in a Divided America’
00:06:57 - John Quincy Adams, Ulysses S. Grant, and ‘Othello’
00:11:08 - Why Shakespeare in America?
00:13:56 - Astor Place Riots, Shakespeare competition, unruly behavior
00:21:30 - Shakespeare in prison
00:26:39 - Henry Cabot Lodge, ‘The Tempest’, and immigration
00:32:47 - Kiss Me Kate, post war American and marriage
00:34:59 - LGBTQ and ‘Shakespeare in Love’
00:38:39 - Joel Coen’s ‘Macbeth’, using film in pedagogy
00:40:23 - Trump as Caesar at the Delacorte
00:43:33 - James Shapiro’s history as a Shakespearean, theatre goer
00:46:22 - The transformation experience of theatre going
00:48:30 - The Shakespearean authorship question and the Supreme Court
00:54:58 - Following one’s own path in Shakespeare studies
00:56:58 - Future research, African-American Shylock, multicultural Shakespeare
01:01:25 - Theatre in Ireland
01:04:49 - Closing remarks

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Thomas Dabbs  0:05  
This is Speaking of Shakespeare conversations about things Shakespearean. I'm Thomas dabbs, broadcasting from Aoyama Gakuin University in central Tokyo. If you are joining us on YouTube and wish to listen to this program as a podcast, you may click the link below to your favorite podcast platform. This talk is with James Shapiro, Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Jim serves on the Board of Directors of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and in 2011, was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. We will begin our talk today with his recent book entitled "Shakespeare in a Divided America." This series is funded with institutional support from Aoyama Gakuin University, and also with a generous grant from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. Well, Jim, there you are and thank you so much for joining us. My colleagues in Japan here in Japan and internationally, and theater, literary critics, linguists, cultural studies, just people who are interested in Shakespeare and, and also things American in this case. They're all going to be super grateful. And we of course, are asking many non Americans to give us leeway to talk about things American. You and I are both Americans both from very different backgrounds, actually. but both sons of the Republic and the great American experiment. When I first saw the title "Shakespeare in a Divided America," I thought, oh no, James Shapiro has jumped into the whole Trump thing social media, cable news, hornet's nest with Shakespeare in hand. And I was really relieved to see the subtitle--concerning our past and our future. And there's a bit of that stuff at the end, and rightfully so. But I was pleased to find that it started with John Quincy Adams, one of the heroes of the Armistad. But then I was disheartened as it continued with the paradox present within his soul concerning Othello and race. So my relief was short lived. And then I was reminded via Shakespeare, that division has been with us as Americans since the beginning. And the very Shakespearean poetic element of paradox. Also, I kind of want to ask you about. You show how Shakespeare at once reflects conflicts in American consciousness, but has also driven the minds of American influencers, including presidents, and a notable assassin. May we ask you to give us an overview of your book?

James Shapiro  2:45  
Sure. I should say that those including yourself familiar with my work, know that I have focused at least for the previous quarter century, on two years in Shakespeare's life, and in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, and I thought the furthest afield I would ever get from Elizabeth in England, was Jacobean England, I go as far as 1606. But that's as far as I would really trespass.

Thomas Dabbs  3:19  
The year of Lear.

James Shapiro  3:23  
And those two books took me, the first one took 15 years to research and write. And the internet made it a little faster. So the "Year of Lear" just took me a decade to, to research and to write. So had you asked me back when I was researching and writing those books, would you write about Shakespeare in America? My answer would be in all honesty. I know precious little about America. And Shakespeareans tend not to write about America, they tend to write about the Anglo American context. If it's global, they would look to Japan before they'd write about America, my first publication for Shakespeare quarterly, and the only time I've published in that extraordinary journal was a short piece on Hamlet in Tokyo. So that's as far afield as I would get. But in 2016, when Hillary Clinton was defeated, and Donald Trump was elected president, I realized I didn't really understand what was going on in my own country. And then I had a much better sense of what was going on in 5099. Then in 2016, and a few years before this, I had put together an anthology for the Library of America on Shakespeare in America. And that gave me a stepping stone to start thinking about what was going on in America through the only focusing lens I know which is Shakespeare, and it may not be the best focusing lens, but it's the only one I know. And it meant touring a bit going to the south, which I've lectured in the south, but serious visits to Tennessee and Florida and Texas and a couple of other states just try to understand how Shakespeare was understood there was value there. And then I just do what I usually do, which is going to archives and thought hard about an arc that began, as you say, with the founding fathers, and took us up to the year of publication. And I didn't want to write a survey, a really wonderful survey of Shakespeare in America was published by Alden in Virginia Vaughn who are friends, and I admire that book enormously. I wanted to do what I ordinarily do in my work, which is choose a year or choose a series of years, and then drill down and see if I could really understand a specific historical moment, and how a particular Shakespeare production or adaptation or conflict might help explain something about America's past. So that I could see where we came from. And again, as you rightly noted, where we might be heading, because that is as crucial, although more difficult to speculate about, but I thought if I established a trajectory that took me from the 1830s to 2017, I might be able to say something about where we are heading.

Thomas Dabbs  6:56  
Yeah. Well, I was struck right off the bat with the idea of JQ Adams, being so ardently against interracial marriage. And, and taking it out on the play, which, of course, even in his time was kind of ancient play, but he, he took it as contemporary as personal. And then we're transported into Corpus Christi, Texas. Ulysses S. Grant and drag, playing Desdemona. And I didn't know this, I've read a little on the subject. But I didn't know these things, and were enlightening.

James Shapiro  7:36  
I certainly didn't know them. When I began, I revere John Quincy Adams as a fierce abolitionist, sixth President of the United States, a man who went back into the House of Representatives to find slavery after he left the presidency. So I have enormous respect for him and always have and still do. And yet, he exemplified something that I discovered again and again, in researching and writing Shakespeare, in a divided America, which is, there are things people will say, about Shakespeare, or through Shakespeare, that they won't say in any other way. So John Quincy Adams has left the record of 10s of 1000s of pages of diaries and other kinds of writings. And he nowhere in there mentions miscegenation. Or as he would have called it amalgamation, the only time he did so was on in two essays on Othello. And I realized that there's a kind of unwritten history of America that can be unpacked. If you look at what people say about Shakespeare, or live through Shakespeare. You gave the example of Ulysses S Grant, as a member of the 4000 strong US Army about to invade Mexico and extend the reach of slavery and, and there he is rehearsing the role of Desdemona. And if you ask me what my kind of takeaway on that is, I think it's extraordinary that a man who led the the Union forces not that long after in a civil war, who would become president himself, saw the world through the eyes of a woman. He's wearing a dress, and long street is following the Civil War said he looked really good in a dress. Grant saw the world through the eyes of a woman in love with a black man. And I think that is a great thing for a United States president to do--any United States President.

Thomas Dabbs  9:52  
Yeah, yeah. To transport himself into that world. But the interesting thing also that you remark upon is the choice of Othello in this basically expansionism that include that included slavery and expansion. And expansionism that was trying to expand slavery into what now is Texas proper, and that this would be the play of choice in some way, you know,

James Shapiro  10:21  
We, in the academic world right now, the preoccupations rightly so are about race. But when Grant and his fellow officers put on Othello, I'm sure they were thinking of this as a play about military culture and military life. And there are many, many, many Americans who serve in the military, who will understand the issues that Iago struggles with of promotion of being passed over. And I think race matters less to the soldiers, than an army play. And I fellow as an Army play, there's, there's no question about that.

Thomas Dabbs  11:03  
And the question comes up right off the bat among my peers, sometimes Oh, what is why Shakespeare in America? Now my answer has been well, you know, if you read any history of the 13 colonies, and as I have, I'm from South Carolina, I've read history, they're fascinating, all of them. And but you're disappointed at the beginning to find out you, you have to go through 100 to 150 pages worth of what happened before the, you know, 1776, and all of this stuff, and it has to do with indigenous peoples native tribes, the relationship between colonists who were subjects of the crown, and so it's, it's perfectly natural that they, they viewed himself as English and reading Shakespeare, as well as Milton, or the Bible or anything, would have been very strongly ingrained before even the revolution. So it doesn't seem to me that curious that Shakespeare just became part of the American experience.

James Shapiro  12:07  
I agree. And I think about the ways in which Shakespeare's poetry is written at the same time that the King James Bible that's so shaped the language and, and rhetoric and belief systems of so many Americans in the 17th and 18th centuries, early colonization. So it's no surprise until you get to post 1776, when it looks like America will want to find its own literary heroes rather than except those handed down from the nation they broken with. And that turns out not to be the case. To Melville's chagrin, probably too many others. Shakespeare remains, you know, I didn't know this when I began the book, but he's the only author in the common core that is specified as someone who, whose work should be taught to high school students in America today. And his works are taught to 90% of South American high school students. So reports of his death are greatly exaggerated.

Thomas Dabbs  13:25  
Well, it's also very good stuff, let's admit, but and I think in the state, so it is kind of slow to develop a literary tradition that was, was received well, in the States. In fact, if my memory serves some of the great writers, Longfellow and Whitman, first enjoyed receptions in France or in England, and then the Americans found that oh, we have our own people too. So but it was it was a slow incoming, what was not slow incoming was a sense of partisan nationalism, that in your book culminates, it probably was there before and have Well, I'm sure it was there before. But in the Astor Place riots, and I do remember an old book now, and I wish I could remember the author, but it was issued by the Folger library called Shakespeare in America, and I came across it years ago. And I read that about that incident for the first time. And I'm going I want to know so much more about this. And you told us so much more about it.

James Shapiro  14:29  
It was it was a fun story to tell. I. One of the challenges in writing this book was each episode that I wrote about especially Astor Place and Abraham Lincoln and assassin John Wilkes Booth. They want there to be books. And every day I go to the computer and fight and trim and cut because I needed to contain multitudes in this book and it couldn't swell out shaked, but the Astor Place riots in my native New York continue to haunt me. My students are really engaged by it, whether it's about income inequality, nationalism, class conflict, immigration, maybe even a bit of racism thrown into the mix. It's it's a hard story to untangle. And yet it's the first time blood is shed over Shakespeare in a serious way in the world. And 20 people were killed, a couple of 100 were injured over a production of Macbeth, if you can imagine that.

Thomas Dabbs  15:44  
Out of every nothing, I think in the print says And Romeo and Juliet, you know, here when it gets started, how quickly people can become unhinged in a mob situation. And of course, in a time in New York City when you didn't have I don't think you had a professional train Constabulary. I think they had to bring in the National Guard with their rifles to start shooting into the crowd.

James Shapiro  16:11  
 They did, they brought in the the state militia. And in fact, you're right, one of the results of the Astor Place riots was the establishment of the New York Police Force. The NYPD came out of that. And also the creation of Central Park because civic leaders understood there's too much pressure building up in this urban environment. We need to give people a release. And a night at the theater is insufficient in that regard.

Thomas Dabbs  16:41  
Yeah. Yeah. And I'm thinking it may be later when you have the scenes that we remember, it was Daniel Day Lewis from Gangs of New York. Yeah, the boys of the Bowery and those tough guys coming in from their meat butchering shops or whatnot from who also went to theater.

James Shapiro  17:00  
Yes they did. Not much that not much later than this, in fact, and that's part of the roiling gangs and divisions between communities in downtown Manhattan in the 19th century. Lots of rioting.

Thomas Dabbs  17:17  
Yeah. Well, I, I was very it really impressed. Well, let's, let's pause a little bit with Lincoln, because that connection with the booth family, and that how they were in themselves, even before the assassination, part of a large part of American theater history. And from what I know, the father was Edwin Booth, is that right?

James Shapiro  17:46  
One of them was Junius.

Thomas Dabbs  17:49  
Brutus Booth, what a name Junius Brutus, Edwin Booth was the brother. And this conflict had to do with bringing Mcready over famous British actor who wasn't you know, he wasn't a member of the House of Lords. He was a regular guy who had his own class struggles in England, I think, you know, like any actor at that time. But he was famous enough to go on the great American tour that I think that people don't know about that this may begin in New York, but it goes to DC it goes to Nashville and maybe St. Louis, there's a theater in Charleston, South Carolina, certainly New Orleans, but they would tour America and gain traction and fame. And he was competing against Forrest, who was the his American counterpart, who would have been like, I don't know if he was to talk about to alleviate or to, you know, and they, they took this competition, something like your British hooligans, in terms of you know which team you're on.

James Shapiro  18:53  
It's, you know, we forget a lot of our cultural history in America. The superstar performers in the 19th century, were Shakespeare actors, Charlotte Cushman and imported heroes, like McCready, Edwin forest is is the first great American male Shakespearean, and every small midsize and large town and city in America had theaters and they would go from theater to theater. And when McCready went to Cincinnati, somebody threw half of the sheep's carcass on stage to protest is performing performance they go.

Thomas Dabbs  19:34  
Forget these polite crowds you know who exactly this was raucous stuff, and there was theater with the in theater. You know, the observation you see it in Hamlet, but then later where who's there in society and this is, this is we're getting into Edith Wharton's New York. You know, there's high society there are people in the in the book of high society who are approved and they have their various places along the side and they're privileged seats. And then you have the pit down there with all these people and a lot of people observing how someone else reacts to a particular scene, that kind of stuff going on. It just must have been something.

James Shapiro  20:16  
 Itwas more like a price fight, then you know, we think of theater where people politely applaud at the end. If you applaud in the middle of it, people give you a dirty look. People are throwing pennies and oranges and rotten fruit, and there's prostitution going on in the upper left. I mean, it was a three ring circus. That's what theatre was in the 19th century.

Thomas Dabbs  20:40  
Yeah. Yeah. And I think also in Covent Garden in what now? Absolutely, yes, it was then. And that kind of stuff. And these actors, some of them, I'm trying to remember if it was, I don't know if it was keen, but there was one actor who famously would just play Lear drunk. And one of the things I read, and there are things you had to leave out, I imagined that you probably feel that you had to leave out 90%. There's a situation where a century shoots I follow because he gets so involved in the play, and I can't remember the source. But they're just story after story of things that just are amazing that happened during these performances.

James Shapiro  21:24  
One of the pleasures of my life is when I'm not teaching Shakespeare at Columbia, I'm working with the Public Theater, either in summer productions at the Delcourt in Central Park, but more often than that, taking professional actors on tour with 90 minute versions of the plays to prisons, and halfway houses around New York. And the first time I went to Rikers prison. They didn't know they were supposed to sit on their hands and clap politely. And we were doing much ado and hero faints and six guys jump up, she's done. She's down. And, and much else besides going to the woman's prison in Westchester, when Romeo doesn't avenge himself on table, he was getting some nasty stuff thrown his way, when he came back and killed Tibble it was to universal relief in this crowd. So I love I love prison Shakespeare because it's much closer to Elizabethton and 19th century experience than it is to our overly polite modern day theatre.

Thomas Dabbs  22:41  
Yeah, I when I was in graduate school, I had the experience of teaching in maximum security prison. And well, I didn't do it long because it was afterwards I would be drained and the sense of but because these were smart people. And they passed test to take a college level class, and I was a grad student, and I did the waste of resources of human resources that I felt, and also a strong that Well, I came away with two things that number one, there are people in prison who don't need to be there. And number two, there are some people who do you were happy that they are there. Prison was this. This was Kirkland Correctional Institute and Columbia, South Carolina. So we're in his heavy duty, heavy duty and primarily African American, you know, part of that history of well, let's, let's see if we can somehow detained African American men somehow. And yet, there were two young white guys in there about 19 years old. And both were in due to these idiotic legislative moves not just in South Carolina, but in other states, to supersede judges and their judgment. So it was a three strikes and you You're out. And I checked the records. I had someone who was a friend in the office and check the records, to bus for marijuana, and one bus for small amounts of cocaine but enough to get them 20 years locked down, no parole, and those two boys, those two boys were in there. And there was a gentleman in there who looked I swear just like Morgan Freeman and Shawshank. And if same kind of personality like you guys. I'm not sure what I would do if I got out now. But he was he killed it. He killed a man 25 years earlier, drunk maybe on drugs in a bar fight. And he said, you know if I'd lost he would be here and now I'd be in the ground. But I saw no reason to, you know, have him detained. He was a mild, peaceful soul, as were several other people there.

James Shapiro  24:47  
But when I think about prison inmates, Shakespeare's plays are filled with murder with violence with a lot of unspeakable things that you and I in our daily lives. eyes don't have much contact with. Yeah, broken families, the whole nature of so many of these plays, and one of the most rewarding things is bringing plays to audiences that know from experience what these plays are about.

Thomas Dabbs  25:17  
Yeah, yeah. And I think I was attracted to that. But from John Janae, was kind of famous for his prison performances. And early when I was, when I was in college, I studied, I did a foreign study at University of London, and just took in, you know, Country Boy, finally getting into the West End. And every, every day, you can do a matinee and an even an evening performance, you can get these cheap tickets, you know, and it's just this infectious thing, you know, you fall in love with it. So immediately, and one of the productions I saw was the San Quentin players, oh, great, directed by Beckett himself in a burned out kind of theater, Tottenham Court Road. And wow, I never will forget that production. I've never seen Beckett. I've seen the end game, maybe two times before that, and it was done in a jocular fashion, you can do it that way. But the pain that was transferred from those actors to the audience, there was it was so dark, but it was so good.

James Shapiro  26:19  
Well, you're very lucky to have seen that in the San Quentin, experiment in in Shakespeare and Beckett is unmatched. Really. It's extraordinary.

Thomas Dabbs  26:30  
Yeah, that he managed to do that. That's just amazing that that would happen. And but let's move on a little bit. I want to go up to Henry Cabot Lodge, he kind of interests me on the subject of paradox. Someone who at once was pro immigration then turned strongly against it had Shakespearean justifications, it seems from the tempest or whatnot, similar to John Quincy Adams, who had his reasons to support abolition, but then very privately, felt that white people and black people should not procreate, so that that paradox, which is in Shakespearean sonnets or whatever is playing with that notion with Henry Cabot Lodge, and a brilliant man, in his writing,

James Shapiro  27:18  
 These are extraordinary intellects. And one of the things that I didn't want to do was write a book in which all the heroes were northerners and all the villains from the south, a kind of Mason Dixon or East West divide, or even liberal and conservative because John Quincy Adams was I any body standards of the day and liberal end of the spectrum. So it's not as if I was going after any individual or group in this, what I was trying to say was that individuals gravitate to Shakespeare for different reasons. And Lodge, one of the towering intellects in the Senate at the turn of the century, decided to make immigration, his issue. And he used Shakespeare as a stick to beat immigration with. And he was relentless. And the result was the 1924 restrictions on immigration in this country, only only overturned in the 1960s. And right now we're in the midst of a crisis over immigration. So none of these issues go away. And Shakespeare again and again, is mobilized, sometimes weaponized by the left and the right, in dealing with the things that Americans are really not good at talking to each other about, and of working through communally and collectively,

Thomas Dabbs  28:44  
Yeah yeah, as I, you know, get older and look back over the Jim Crow South that I grew up in, it was still that way. But then schools were desegregated, and things. There wasn't the type of violence or fighting that you would imagine, because we were kids. You know, this was our time and that school, and we knew we had to mediate these conflicts. There were friendships that were limited because of the continuing inability for anyone to go to anybody else's home, and that kind of thing. But I've always thought, you know, if you if you pass, if you had a Geiger counter ratio, a racist Geiger counter and passed it over America, then it probably would be up to six, maybe even now, you know, in the south, it might be surprising, might be very high. It might not be that high at all. But anywhere you passed it over in recent history, you know, the problems with policemen that shooting, shooting kids or whatnot are arresting for No, no reason. These are happening all over the country.

James Shapiro  29:50  
And I live in New York City, one of the liberal bastions of this country, and our Department of Education is among the most segregated in the country. Hands down out. So these issues and again, the Shakespearean connections to these issues, run throughout the whole country. It's not one community or another. It's not high culture or low culture, in Shakespeare on film and Shakespeare in musicals. Everywhere we turn we watch as people try to confront and resolve differences, really through Shakespeare, which I find thrilling.

Thomas Dabbs  30:30  
Well, The Tempest, getting back to Henry Cabot Lodge, and that movement, the, the appropriate The Tempest, recently, I think is was in Arizona, the tempest or there was a move to ban it from education. Because some of our colleagues and postcolonial studies found that a play to use to enlightened people to the ideas of post colonial thinking and very progressive left thinking. And it was used for the opposite reason, during that time that the same play was used to, to do two different things quite different on the political spectrum.

James Shapiro  31:09  
That's what I love about Shakespeare that a play that's now taught as the anti colonial or exposing colonialism, Tempest was in 1916, in the midst of these battles over immigration, used to as a as a means of encouraging the education and assimilation of the immigrants who are streaming into America. So the history of productions is endlessly to me endlessly fascinating, and I'm still working on these issues, even having published that book.

Thomas Dabbs  31:51  
Yeah. And the introduction, not only of white superiority against slaves or freed slaves or blacks, then you had, there's a whole smorgasbord that would be Italian immigrants from Southern Italy, Italy, as you pointed out, and any other kinds of Eastern Europe,

James Shapiro  32:11  
 My unwashed ancestors from Eastern Europe, Jews,

Thomas Dabbs  32:14  
 Anti semitism, which is a strong theme and your writing and other books. You steer straight into that. And I remember years ago, reading your, we might get to this in a bit, but reading your case managers, yeah. And your apology at the very beginning, saying I just did not want to go into this. And it reminded me a little bit of a Hector and Troilus and Cressida, they're all of these reasons not to go into it. Okay, so here I go. And let's just do it. It needs to be done. And well, moving up to the shrew. And the shrew is very recently back, you know, very strong, people want to do it, because it's a great play, and it has some great things in it. But the way of, for, you know, Kate to manage the ending in the speech, and that sort of, and whether or not Kiss Me, Kate, whether there is a kiss or not a kiss, that sort of thing we should experience and production. There's a recent virtual reality version of it. I interviewed David McGinnis, and another guy named Steve WITTEK at Carnegie Mellon, they put together, Steve Whitaker had the technology to do a kind of 360 Virtual reality version, which is very interesting. But then handling what we hope is post sexist, it isn't, but you know, what we're hope we're aiming to. And then those issues were there. And in, you know, Post War America, that's when that's that's the rub, isn't it? Getting back and those women have been working in factories, they know they can work, they know they can bring home a paycheck, and to suddenly surrender all of that to these guys coming back from the war. That

James Shapiro  34:05  
one day you're told, be Rosie the Riveter and the next day, your toe, be a submissive wife, and quit your job. So a veteran coming on from the work and habit. And that was the great background to Kiss Me, Kate. And it was just fun delving into that moment of mid century history that, again, I knew precious little about, and looking at the ways in which Bella Spiewak, who wrote the book, for this extraordinary musical, was herself struggling with these issues in her personal life. So I don't think I've ever had as much fun researching a book because there was so much I did not know and throwing myself into these stories was was great fun, like rolling around in the snow like a kid.

Thomas Dabbs  34:57  
Well, I'm going to move a little bit more quickly and get up to To the LGBT cue bit and how you integrated that with the, the vexing issue of how to change the ending of Shakespeare in Love. And I got a little bit you say tongue tied a little brain tied on that. I mean, that was a and Harvey Weinstein, there he is, you know, and

James Shapiro  35:26  
you just can't make it up. Yeah,

Thomas Dabbs  35:28  
from behind the curtain is always a Harvey Weinstein somewhere back there, and the Tom Stoppard trying to work with this script that had been written years before, and it was not historically accurate, but that had these elements of homoeroticism, right, and I remember when I saw it the first time just thinking this is just delightful is very Shakespearean and it's wonderfully adapted,

James Shapiro  35:54  
but they had to tweak it to become the mega hit that it became. And Shakespeare is not easy to tweak because he had a wife and two, two surviving kids in Stratford. So how you throw him into a love story that ends without the stain of adultery was a nightmare for Tom Stoppard, and he gets throw onto that cross dressing and same sex desire and it takes a Tom Stoppard to cut that Gordian knot. Oppose Harvey Weinstein's interventions for the most part, and give us that delightful movie. But underneath the veneer of that film, is as I tried to describe, a lot of conflict, a lot of division, a lot of anger.

Thomas Dabbs  36:49  
Wow, there's, there's also your you're throwing that out to a large, fairly large community of Shakespearean purist, who are going to be from the very opening credits, they're going to look for stuff. And guess who is yes, who, there's one thing that bothers me about the movie and the only thing and I learn everything else. The joke and it's a fabulous joke about I think it's Romeo and Juliet, the pirates daughter is that is working with a title like that. And now I know from my studies that Arthur Brooks brought out Romeo and Juliet, Juliet, and that that story appeared in when William painters palace of pleasure, with multiple editions afterwards, 30 years before Shakespeare was there, it could not have been anything but Juliet from a fine Italian family sells a pirate story. So that was an idea Ethel virus daughter, which is so funny, but it just couldn't have been that and it sort of promoted the myth of Shakespeare's creative consciousness and originality, which I pushed back against whenever I do whatever little article I do, because I find the creative energy in Shakespeare in the adaptation into brilliant adaptation, and the writing of speeches using that fodder that just like we would say, with Coppola and the Godfather, you know, taking that source material and making it do something in another medium. That I'm thrilled about that probably more than somebody just dreaming up. Things and Shakespeare did dream up things but but very, very faithful to certain sources that he knew would have popular appeal in that time. And it's just a small thing.

James Shapiro  38:40  
But one of the pleasures you have a head for this holiday season is Joel Cohen of the Coen Brothers has filmed Macbeth and black and white and I've had a chance to see it at the New York Film Fest. Oh, no,

Thomas Dabbs  38:54  
you have.

James Shapiro  38:56  
I have and I have a piece out this week in The New York Review of Books on on it and it's very brilliant. It's extraordinarily brilliant. And Shakespearean you're gonna love this film. They'll probably have one or two questions about it, as we always do, but Denzel Denzel, Washington is Macbeth Francis McDormand is ready to make powerhouse performances from from top to bottom. And I think we'll be showing this to our students for or our successors for decades to come.

Thomas Dabbs  39:35  
Don't I'm so happy when that happens. Because that does give you such in teaching, and particularly I'm in my students are very good in English. But there's still a second language and it's a second culture and it's a second culture to native speakers, and to be able to help us film to show how directors and in this case one of the finest film directors, you know, Ever, and his brother also and writers, too, to be able to use that to bridge those gaps. It's just makes everything click.

James Shapiro  40:11  
Well, you're gonna you're gonna love it. And a lot of it is steeped in curse. I was thrown of blood so you can show the two films together. That'll be exciting.

Thomas Dabbs  40:20  
Yeah, yeah, that's it. Well, I just wanted to comment a bit on the on the Trump part. And this, this proclivity at the Bellecourt. And I think there was, I think it was also at the Bellecourt where Obama was Julius Caesar, earlier, and it was at the same theater, or it might have been

James Shapiro  40:39  
a different theater, the there was no production of Julius Caesar, in which an Obama lookalike was, was assassinated in New York City, about six months before. The production that I advised in which a Trump look alike, was assassinated in Central Park, to the chagrin and growing anger of those on the cultural right. Who attacked the stage

Thomas Dabbs  41:12  
vigorous performances. Yeah, in a scary way. And I'll let our viewers read about that in your book. But it's a scary, scary stuff. But you made the point in the book that, you know, they're not taking the whole picture of Julius Caesar, you know, Judas now, you know, and I don't think either Obama or Trump exactly crossed the Rubicon. And did you know if we're going to be historically Or who is it Plutarch or Norse version of Plutarch? But still, all right, we're adapting it for a modern audience. We do have two iconic figures who are iconic in ways that George Bush and Bill Clinton even are not, would not work. Obama come angry.

James Shapiro  42:00  
I agree. That's a very good point.

Thomas Dabbs  42:03  
And so there would be immediate jealousy. But what they missed is, of course, the fact of how swiftly Brutus and his gang were punished for what they did. Yeah, it was. Yeah, it didn't.

James Shapiro  42:20  
But when I saw the events of last January, on the attack in the Capitol, I really felt that what I had witnessed at the delicate theatre and a production of Julius Caesar was a dress rehearsal.

Thomas Dabbs  42:35  
Yeah, yeah, surely was. But you did connect that with Astor Place and with how quickly people can get stirred up for for whatever reasons, and how quickly theater still does that? It Guys, it's true. And the brand I guess, the brand name, Shakespeare, that can still get that blood flowing, the blood flowing and the right wing media, you know, going in now, of course, Shakespeare, now I think might be because of the years of being taught in school associated with nerds eggheads intellectuals, Left Coast right, you know, blue states, coastal blue states, elites, that sort of thing. And that's, that's very strong. In right now, and I think that it may have been very strong in the mid 19th century, that kind of thinking and I don't know where it comes from. I really don't know are i Yeah, you turn to this American theme that your your book which is an anthology is a series of cutouts from various influential people talking about Shakespeare in America. And and that was interesting in itself and wonderful reading for people who are historians or Shakespeare is also you've been on this American thing for a bit here and what was it always there that you turn to it is

James Shapiro  44:02  
now I mean, I'm, I was probably sitting in the row behind you in London, from matinee and evening performances. You know, my, my, my connection with Shakespeare has always been with British Theatre, London Theatre, Royal Shakespeare Company Theatre in Stratford upon Avon. And it's truly only been in the last half dozen years that I've turned to an American focus. I love Britain, I love theater in Britain. And that, when I was I never studied Shakespeare at university, I had had a terrible experience with Shakespeare in high school and swore no one would have ever forced me to study Shakespeare again. And that's a not uncommon experience, but it's helped me reach readers who I know hated Shakespeare. Even if they won't admit it, and when I was in my late teens, I traveled to Europe quite a bit first with my big brother then alone. And we ended up in London. And for as you remember, for, you know, just $1 or two, you can get a student ticket to see a play and a matinee. And all of a sudden, you are seeing six or seven Shakespeare productions in a week. And I came back every year, through my late teens and early 20s. And by then I'd seen, I don't know, couple of 100, maybe 250 Productions, only Shakespeare, people would offer me tickets to Nicholas Nickleby, which would be a huge hit, I'd say, No, I'm gonna see my fourth comedy of era, you know, Comedy of Errors, instead, and, but those, that's a very formative time in one's life, as you know, as well. And those productions are tattooed in my head. And that was my Shakespeare education. And I must have spent a lot of time napping during American history in high school because I don't remember a damn thing. So I've had to re educate myself as as an American citizen. And my next book is also going to be on on an American subject with some Shakespeare in there as well.

Thomas Dabbs  46:21  
Yeah. Oh, there's so many. There's so many stories we could tell we don't have time. One prominent one is the Old Vic when I was there, the Old Vic was about to go under. And it's on the wrong side of the river. Now it's kind of the right side of the river because that's rejuvenated. And for two pounds, I had front roads seats to a production of checkouts Yvonne off, and I do go off Shakespeare, particularly if it's Checkol for somebody like Beckett, or, you know, these great playwrights and Yvonne off is not a mainstream play. It's not, you know, the cherry orchard. But I thought, you know, my, my professor said, this is a, this is a portrayal of what was called in manic depressive miss, which we've called now bipolar. And I got there in a Washington, the lead actor in that play just killed it. It was the best thing I think I've ever seen. You know, it's just one of those things that you go God, and I'm front row, and his name was Derek Jakobi. Wow. And this was before. Yeah, this was before I Claudius or any of the recognition, he was in this off, off play. And I went to the pub after that was with my friend. And he walked in. And you know, of course, I walked up and I said, Mr. Jacob, hey, I really enjoyed your performance. And he said, someone who was in the audience.

James Shapiro  47:44  
But you're very lucky. But we you know, we are of an age. But it was an age where you could see before the age of Netflix, where stars couldn't afford to do theater work, their agents wouldn't let them we had a chance to see extraordinary the best actors in the world, performing these plays, and for you, and for me, obviously, for both of us. It was a transformative experience.

Thomas Dabbs  48:15  
Yeah, it was it did everything. It was almost a tragic transformation for me, but I managed to struggle through and get into profession and a good job, a lot of people have trouble in the profession. But because of that, then this is the next topic that I find that my younger colleagues in the profession are very cautious now about what they say and do and papers. And they have to be necessarily they have to be they have to fit into journals, they have to get their promotions, they're lucky to be where they are. And they anything could could destroy them, you know, a colleague who doesn't like him kind of black balls them in a tenure decision or a promotion decision and that kind of thing. We won't go into that. But it can be very, very ugly in Maine. Not so much here in Japan. But the I would say in Japan, you would see something like that coming a long way off. Whereas in the States, you might not even know somebody Yeah, there might be an Iago right there who's smiling in your face. And you know, so people are very cautious, and you are not cautious. There's never seen a bit of caution. Now you started out with Johnson and rival playwrights. So you're always talking about conflict there. But getting into anti semitism. And two in two books, because there's the German town who I won't dare try to program or GAO. Yes, that history there. And then the contested well the Irish authorship question, my goodness, you know, she said, just stand on stage metal with a big Bullseye and say Here I am, because they're all those guys, those people out there, and they're absolutely relentless. You know that is nothing trolls are nothing new to us. There's nothing new to you.

James Shapiro  50:05  
They've been there on their worst nightmare.

Thomas Dabbs  50:08  
You. Good?

James Shapiro  50:11  
Good. After I published contested well, they on the authorship question, I got a letter on Supreme Court stationery addressed to me at Columbia. And I thought I didn't know they had jury duty for the Supreme Court. I can't I can't do that. And I totally envelope open and it was from a Supreme Court justice recently retired Justice Stevens who I admire this side idolatry. And he noted that Shakespeare signatures the six signatures are all wobbly, suggesting to him that Shakespeare was illiterate and didn't write the plays. And being combative Brooklyn guide that you obviously recognize in my work. I wrote back saying, Dear Justice Stevens, I admire your extraordinary time. On the Supreme Court, I noticed that your secretary type this letter and also signed it for you extraordinary that you've gotten this far as an illiterate. And yeah, it was kind of brazen to do that. Just like I'm sure he loved that he

Thomas Dabbs  51:25  
must have loved that. That's even

James Shapiro  51:27  
back the next day. And we corresponded for six months until I ghosted him, because the position he was advocating was an Oxfordian position, that the Earl of Oxford, who was fiercely in the minds of his supporters, anti democratic, was the true author of Shakespeare's plays. And I said to Justice Stevens, where I wrote to him, and my correspondence with him is now at the Folger library, I've donated it so others can mine this, but I just said, Look, you you can't celebrate American democracy and advocate a Shakespeare written by deeply anti democratic individual doesn't work, you can do both. And he said, Yes, I can. And he said, then this conversations over

Thomas Dabbs  52:16  
closed, how about that that's how it ended, kind of in a

James Shapiro  52:21  
lovely man. But, you know, for me being tendered means an obligation to Nobody in his right mind or her right mind, would spend five years researching as uninteresting a question as who wrote Shakespeare, we know, wrote Shakespeare, we've seen the archival evidence, I've held it in my hands. But for me, that book was also about the rise of conspiracy thinking in America. And anybody who reads a newspaper or goes online knows just how viral that has become. In the decades since I wrote that book.

Thomas Dabbs  53:02  
Yeah, yeah. And irritates me. I think, you know, okay, let's say I'm gonna be anti Hemingway. I'm just gonna say Hemingway did not write anything. Hemingway wrote this. Yes, he did. I mean, yeah, we knew he was, did you see him? Right? Did you actually see him? Right? And did you stand there in the room, when he finished A Farewell to Arms and watch him take it to the publisher and then print it? You know, it's that ridiculous that you? And, and yet they are out there. And I don't know what drives it. Except that brings a lot of attention to the people who take a stance like that. And also, there is a strong feeling that you had to go to Oxford or Cambridge to write poetry like that. And we to countless examples of people who don't have education, you know, and as you were saying, I wasn't the best student in high school. And I've managed at some point to get through and get into pretty, you know, good programs or whatever. But they all of us have our histories of having to, I mean, you could say, Listen, there's no way that James Shapiro wrote these books. He was born in Brooklyn to this, you know, in this background, and there's no way that this a boy from the country, a country crossroads, could ever, you know, have anything worthwhile to say about shakes. You know, that's a class thing. But you don't go to those schools. They don't sit you down and say, here's how to write a sonnet. That's the last thing they do.

James Shapiro  54:38  
In fact, I'm not James Shapiro. I'll fess up right now. Jamesville is a reclusive scholar. And he hires me to do these. I've read his books. And he's hired me to do these interviews so that he can focus on his scholarship, but I'm happy to continue to answer your questions.

Thomas Dabbs  54:57  
Yeah. Well, you said in one of your I saw on YouTube that you didn't take Shakespeare in graduate school. That was true in comparative literature program. And I found that amazing.

James Shapiro  55:08  
I was definitely not going to study Shakespeare formally. And and in fact, it allowed me to follow my own path. I also understood that if you hook yourself to a star professor, you end up in a lot of ways, like a small tree overshadowed by a larger one that blocks out the light. And I couldn't risk that I understood myself well enough to know that it would take a long time to shed that influence for for better and for worse.

Thomas Dabbs  55:47  
Yeah, that's so interesting that Yeah, and you took it up after, after graduate school to go into this. And that's, that explains what I find to be some of the uniqueness in your research methods. Because when you do get into even your other the two books Europe layer, and the 5099, I can't imagine in the training I had, it would not have been easy to pass through the gauntlet, of getting a dissertation approved, doing that type of thing. They would want me to do something, I don't want to, you know, something else, but something that basically modeled the professors I studied under, and, and also very careful, very careful, meticulous, maybe textual bibliographical scholarship, maybe adopting some approved critics, whether silicone or Foucault, or something of that nature. And, and I saw that refreshing thing that you said, let's just go look at the year and the records are there for all of us. And we are, after all trained in historical research. So let's just put it together and see what happens. We've been talking about the past the whole time, and you have the future and your subtitles. So let's talk about the future. What's the future for Shakespeare in America for for us?

James Shapiro  57:07  
Well, one of the things that I do is work with a lot of really first rate theatre companies. It's a blessing. And it keeps me open to where things are going. And one of the productions that I'm talking with right now is a production of The Merchant of Venice, with an African American Shylock John Douglas Thompson, one of the top Shakespeare actors in America. And it goes back to Ira Aldridge who was a great Othello, we all know that, but he was also a spectacular Shaila. So here we have two centuries later, an African American who in the New York theater is going to be playing Shaila, how that's going to land with Jewish groups and Black groups. I have no idea but you know that I love conflict. And that's what this is about. I'm working with a Native American playwright who will be doing a Shakespeare production. In the years to come. I'm working with Latina X directors, I'm working right now on a production of The Comedy of Errors that's going into prison, that is going to have some Spanish in it as well. So what I'm describing is a way in which a multicultural or pluralistic Shakespeare, or Shakespeare that is not simply white and Anglo Saxon is now penetrating into the theatre culture, and not simply in terms of scholarship on race, although Jana Thompson and others are leading that, but that is one of the futures for Shakespeare in America. That is to say, what does it mean to have Denzel Washington, one of our great great great actors playing Macbeth, when Orson Welles and others have made films of Macbeth that didn't have a single black actor, and Joel Cohen has has several in among the leads, and also among the lesser roles, so it's a changing world we're living in. And Shakespeare is both reflecting those changes, and helping to make them happen. If not, for Joe Papp at the Public Theater in the 1950s and 60s, giving a chance to every leading Latina X and black actor of the day, we wouldn't have the Denzel Washington's in the movie theaters today. So I think that's one of the things that's happening. The other thing that I'm turning to is the Federal Theater Project of the late 1930s, about which I knew very little, in which for a remarkable four years, there were hundreds even 1000s of productions around the United States, paid for by the federal government. under FDR in the New Deal, and until Philistines in Congress shut off the funding for this, we were on the verge of a national theater that would have made theater part of daily life in small communities in large. You can pay a nickel and see a play much as we saw plays, as students in in London. And I guess, having seen this plant take root in 1936. And then being uprooted in 1939 is for me one of the saddest chapters in my nation's history. And I'm spending the next few years delving into that. And what happened then?

Thomas Dabbs  1:00:49  
Yeah, yeah, funding the Philistines. It just doesn't seem to be any way to cross that bridge and get them to understand that you get a lot of bang for your buck. It doesn't cost that much. And when it's successful, it brings it makes people money if that's what you're worried about money. It brings in Yeah.

James Shapiro  1:01:10  
To educated a populace in mind that a populace that's that was what threatened the Philistines

Thomas Dabbs  1:01:18  
really to educate the populace like this on the horizon. But well, I want to you're going to Ireland, your your Is that okay to talk about your onshore and you're going to Ireland and I'm very interested why Ireland, I think I have some idea maybe but what a fabulous thing you have right in your near future right after Christmas, right? Yeah.

James Shapiro  1:01:43  
Well, I've had to postpone it by a month because COVID and restrictions in Ireland, but I've just rebooked successfully. And I'm married to an extraordinary writer who has Irish grandparents, or four, and one of her grandparents. Her grandfather on her father's side, fought in the Irish revolution. And she has accompanied me on many research trips, and now I'm accompanying her on her research trip. A really good research assistant and driver. And I've many Irish friends contravene is my colleague at Columbia, Paul Muldoon, Fintan O'Toole, and I feel a real affinity as a Brooklyn Jew with the Irish for some weird reason. I think they're confrontational as well, after all the years battling the English. And I know I never would have written about Ireland in in 1599 without having a strong interest in Irish culture and literature and music as well. So I'm on sabbatical this spring and happy to get out of plague ridden New York.

Thomas Dabbs  1:03:15  
Yeah, Doris is here and they're objects of genocidal rampages. I think there'd be some, yeah, cross identity there. But in terms of drama and theater,

James Shapiro  1:03:28  
they matched unmatched, and

Thomas Dabbs  1:03:31  
just Abbey Theatre just to take a look in, you know, into Yeates and that whole period. And I just sat on a dissertation as a second reader or whatnot. And a student was working on the arts and crafts movements in the 19th century in Ireland. And it's just fascinating stuff and how I connected with Yeats and with drama, there's a connection there. And of course, Beckett and then OKC.

James Shapiro  1:03:59  
King, I mean, they're just extraordinary, many contemporary Irish playwrights as well. So no, I spend every every night that I can in the theater in Ireland. And the last time I was over there, I saw production of Midsummer Night's Dream that had the same cast as the production of Midsummer Night's Dream in 1977. And now they were all in their 70s and 80s. And it was brilliant resituated in an old age home, and it was quite brilliant. And you know, all those Randy. Slightly Alzheimer patients. It was brilliant and it shows you these plays just keep on giving. They keep on showing new sides. They really

Thomas Dabbs  1:04:46  
do. This is endless. Well, yeah, I have kept you through supper time.

James Shapiro  1:04:54  
And I've kept you through breakfast. So we're equal. Yeah,

Thomas Dabbs  1:04:57  
yeah, I might. Yeah, I might have it I think I'll have another cup of coffee after we face because I do have a class today and I'll be doing that pretty soon. I, I again want to express our deepest appreciation. And our apologies. I don't know why we'd have to apologize. It's not our fault. But our apologies for not being able to, to bring you over. And, but at least we can do this, this. This was

James Shapiro  1:05:26  
a thrill and I know our paths are gonna cross in person once the world is back on its feet.

Thomas Dabbs  1:05:32  
I'm certain we'll just have to make it happen. And thank you so much, Jim. Again.

James Shapiro  1:05:38  
It's been a pleasure talking and I'm sure we were in the theater at the same time and same place some years back

Transcribed by https://otter.ai