Shapiro surveys the battlefield by looking at what he calls “eight defining moments in American history” when disputes over Shakespeare revealed deep and abiding sociopolitical rifts. Other Shakespeareans have responded to our times by seeking lessons in the plays for how we might comprehend, cope with, and maybe climb our way out of the current political abyss. Stephen Greenblatt’s polemical Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics, for instance (expanded from an op-ed he published on the eve of the 2016 election), never names Donald Trump, but it evokes him on every page as Greenblatt shows how Shakespeare “grappled again and again with an unsettling question: how is it possible for a whole country to fall into the hands of a tyrant?” Jeffrey R. Wilson’s Shakespeare and Trump more bluntly examines the uses of the plays in a MAGA world, probing, for example, the Shakespeare-quoting political punditry of the 2016 election cycle.
Shapiro, in contrast, mostly looks back to Shakespearean disputes that predate our current crisis, not so much mining the plays for nuggets of contemporary insight as assessing them as cultural artifacts that have acquired layers of meaning by dint of their bipartisan utility over time. Most of all, he argues, they have been used as a means for Americans to engage race, class, gender, sexuality, and immigration, issues they otherwise don’t know how to talk to one another about.
For decades, Marxism, feminism, queer theory, and critical race theory have been opening up the voluminous field of Shakespeare studies to reveal how the plays and their performance traditions have grappled with these very matters. Shapiro is certainly informed by such work—the bibliography for each of his eight chapters mentions his indebtedness to some of the scholars focusing such lenses—but it is not where he turns to make his case. Rather, as in his previous books, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare:1599 and The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606, he entwines cultural analysis with character-driven narrative. In A Year in the Life he wrote, “It is no more possible to talk about Shakespeare’s plays independently of his age than it is to grasp what his society went through without the benefit of Shakespeare’s insights.” Apparently, the same is true of the United States in any age.