James Shapiro (1955–)

James Shapiro is one of the leading Shakespearean academics, and has a wonderful knack of presenting detailed studies of the plays and poems with great clarity and accessibility. In his previous books, 1599: A year in the life of Shakespeare and 1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear, he excelled at portraying the historical and political context against which the plays were written.

His latest book has moved into a slightly different field, recounting history of public engagement show more with Shakespeare in America. I had not previously appreciated the extent of American support for Shakespeare. If I had stopped to think of the issue at all, I suppose I might have expected a certain prejudice against such an icon of Britishness (or at least Englishness), as a manifestation of the ferocious pride in American independence from a former colonial power. It is clear from Shapiro’s book, however, that there is, and always has been, an abiding passion for the works of The Bard, that seems far stronger than any corresponding emotion among the public at large on this side of the Atlantic.

Of course, Shakespeare was writing at a time when European, and especially British, exploration of North America was becoming established as a norm. Indeed, some of Shakespeare’s weaker puns over seem to work if delivered in a transatlantic accent – early English-speaking residents of America would have been contemporaries of Shakespeare, and might have shared his own range of vowels (although that does, of course , beg the question of whether or not Shakespeare spoke in what we might now think of as a ‘Brummie’ accent.

I was fortunate enough to be immersed in Shakespeare’s works from a very young age, but know that for many of my contemporaries, a liking for his work is often despite, rather than as a consequence, of studying his plays at school. From a relatively early age, my mother made me learn a different sonnet or soliloquy each week, and if I could recite it faultlessly on Sunday morning, I was given a pound – back in the mid-1970s, when I was about twelve or thirteen, the spending power of that reward was considerable, so I turned to the task with great eagerness. As a consequence, I can still reel off considerable screeds of Shakespeare at the drop of a hat.

Such familiarity with his work seems to have been the norm with many American Presidents (although quite clearly not with the current incumbent), and Abraham Lincoln in particular. President John Quincy Adams also drew deeply upon his knowledge of Shakespeare’s plays, less felicitously than Lincoln would later do, not least in his vilification of Desdemona. Even just a month ago, I would probably have commented about how unbelievable President Adams’s dismissal of Desdemona for consorting with Othello seems today. Unfortunately, recent events have shown that institutional racism are very far from consigned to a dead past, and remain as insidious and divisive as ever. Shapiro analyses President Adams’s comments, and how they further inflamed a raging dispute across academia and beyond. Of course, this was against a context of a nation already divided over attitudes to slavery, that would lead to Civil War.

Shakespeare continued to have an unforeseen, and nowadays almost unimaginable, impact upon American history. In the third chapter of the book, Shapiro recounts how a violent riot erupted in New York in 1849, leaving more than twenty people dead. This arose from a feud between two Shakespearean actors: Briton William Macready and American counterpart Edwin Forrest. The rivalry between them had been seething for several years before boiling over with such serious sectarian consequences.

President Lincoln had a profound love of Shakespeare, whose works he could (and all too frequently did) recite at inordinate length. Acontemporary with an equal immersion in Shakespeare was his assassin, the actor John Wilkes Booth, who came from an acting family.

More recently, Shakespeare productions across America have provoked discussion of same sex relationships, adultery and what it is to belong. Shakespeare remains immensely popular in America, with as many as 250 or even 300 Shakespeare festivals held each year across the USA; more than the rest of the world put together.

This is that rare delight: a book as informative as it is entertaining, and a welcome addition to the canon of Shakespearean study. show less

Shakespeare and the Jews is not (nor is meant to be) an extensive analysis of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. In fact, commentary on the play features relatively infrequently in Shapiro's examination of 16th and 17th century England. Rather than focusing solely on the play or on the playwright, as one might anticipate from the title, the author strives to inform us of English attitudes and beliefs toward Jews so that we ourselves can surmise the impact that they presumably exerted on show more Shakespeare as he composed his famous dramas. I'd opine that Shapiro accomplished this goal rather well, too, although one may quibble over the accuracy of the title inasmuch as English society as a whole, not Shakespeare in particular, lies under Shapiro's magnifying glass.

Why should a reader in the USA have any interest in English attitudes toward Jews in the 15- and 16-hundreds? Need one remind others that the USA did not exist until the 18th century and that, before then, English history is also the history of most of us who call ourselves “Americans” today? Remember that the colonists who traveled to the New World in the 17th century (the single 16th century colony having vanished without a trace) were English. Their beliefs, attitudes and prejudices informed subsequent generations all the way into the United States of the 21st century. The history of which Shapiro writes is that of both modern-day England and the U.S. It is very much germane to English descendants on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

What impressed me the most about Shapiro's history? In 1849, French writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr wrote, “Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose,” i.e., the more things change, the more they remain the same. The radical prevaricators of the 21st century QAnon group are far from the first to concoct conspiracy theories. The great “Replacement Theory” is hardly the first to imagine the existence of a plot to replace a country's “native sons” with the progeny of immigrants. Xenophobia and other popular fears with the very same fallacious reasoning (if one can use such a word where reason does not appear to exist) abounded in Shakespearean England. Among the most astounding seems to have been a belief that Jews abducted, circumcised, and then crucified male Christian children, They were also “known” to capture adult males and forcibly circumcise them as well. Christian blood was collected and kept on hand to replace that which male Jews lost through menstruation. (Yes, you read that correctly.)

Even on a somewhat more rational level, divines and statesmen (there being little distinction between church and state) grappled with how to define Jewishness. Did the Jews constitute a nation even though there was no physical land area to give that nation a location? Were the Jews a separate and distinct race? Were they merely followers of a separate and distinct religion? Could a Jew truly and permanently convert to Christianity? How should the progeny of a Jew and a Gentile couple be defined?

There is yet more history to be learned from Shapiro's book. No other history book I've yet read informed me that all Jews were officially expelled from England in 1290, nor that they were readmitted by Cromwell's government in 1656. In reality, of course, borders were porous, and England was probably never totally deprived of its Jewish population.

For the historical revelations I found in it, I feel that Shakespeare and the Jews is quite worthy of a five-star rating. However, I must confess that I found Shapiro's recounting of this history to become tedious at times, requiring concentrated effort to absorb the factual content. Considering only the level of interest generated by what I considered to be rather dry narrative, assigning three stars would be my limit. Still, the book is quite informative in addressing a topic that I've not seen explicated elsewhere, and I would not hesitate to recommend it to readers interested in this period of English history. show less

Of course the answer to the subtitle's question is that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. But this excellent work gives detailed reasons why that is so, plus reasons why the other proposed authors did not, giving one ammunition for literary conspiracy theorists.

But the real power and interest of the work is James Shapiro's tracing of why the notion that Shakespeare was not the author of his works arose, and why the advocates of other candidates -- and besides the well-known two or three, there show more are scores of others who've been proposed -- had vested interests, or at least thought they did, in denying Shakespeare. Mark Twain and Sigmund Freud most notably felt the bases of their own work was threatened by Shakespeare's authorship.

And in the course of the narrative, which is always entertaining and felicitous, James Shapiro delineates a shift in literary criticism that bears much thinking about: the change from the early modern view of writers as creatively imaginative to creatively self-expressive, and the concomitant rise of autobiography as a genre.

It's nicely illustrated, too. A lot of fun to read, and a lot of think about therein. show less

A rewarding book, putting King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra into the context of James I's agenda for the Union of his kingdoms (not to be realized until Queen Anne's day, and in a completely different context) and the Gunpowder Plot of 1605.

It has been a commonplace for years that Macbeth is an extended act of attention towards James, both in his interest in the supernatural and as a Aeneid-style reference to an imperial future for Banquo's heirs (implying James == Augustus, which show more is pretty much how James liked to see himself, following in the footsteps of Elizabeth I as Astraea). Shapiro delves into this in detail, and into the ways in which the change in court environment (and patronage for Shakespeare's company) following James' accession on the death of Elizabeth shaped the plays Shakespeare was composing.

The discussion of Lear is enlightening, especially with regard to how the changes following the exposure of the Gunpowder Plot affected the two texts we have of Lear (Quarto and Folio), and the placing of Antony and Cleopatra into the context of how the monarchs' reflections in the plays affected what was acceptable (Elizabeth - Cleopatra and James - Octavius) at various times.

Like his earlier book on 1599, this is "old" historicism at its best -- allowing the environment of the time to cast light on the works produced. It effects no revolution in our understanding of Shakespeare, but deepens our understanding of critical details in the works. show less