Back Shakespeare in America: An Anthology from the Revolution to Now

Shakespeare in America: An Anthology from the Revolution to Now

Foreword by President Bill Clinton More

Edited by James Shapiro

“I think Americans will be fascinated to learn of our deep and early connection to the Bard, how he inspired presidents and incited mobs, and how vivid the legacy of one Englishman’s imagination still sits within the consciousness of our country. Like Shakespeare’s own plays, this anthology is full of enthralling stories and weird coincidences, and it’s a treasure.”—Meryl Streep

Overview
News & Views
Table of Contents
Contributors

Overview

Story of the Week Washington Irving, “Stratford-on-Avon”
April 13, 2023

Story of the Week Lorenz Hart and Morrie Ryskind, “Shakespeares of 1922”
May 2, 2022

Story of the Week Mark Twain, “The Killing of Julius Caesar, Localized”
April 23, 2021

“The history of Shakespeare in America,” writes James Shapiro in his introduction to this groundbreaking anthology, “is also the history of America itself.” From our beginnings as a nation, Shakespeare has been a central, inescapable part of our literary heritage, a figure so widely revered that, as Tocqueville noted in the 1830s, there was “hardly a pioneer’s hut” without a volume or two. Shakespeare in America reveals how, for over two centuries, the plays have been a prism through which crucial American issues—revolution, slavery, war, social justice—were refracted, debated, and understood.

Shapiro traces the rich and surprising story of how Americans made Shakespeare their own through a wide range of genres—poetry, fiction, essays, plays, memoirs, songs, speeches, letters, movie reviews, and comedy routines—and a remarkable roster of American writers: from Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Mark Twain, and Henry James to James Agee, Langston Hughes, Pauline Kael, Isaac Asimov, Adrienne Rich, and Jane Smiley. American statesmen and presidents from John Adams to Bill Clinton (in a foreword written for this volume) offer their own testimonies to Shakespeare’s profound and enduring influence.

The anthology also tracks the multitude of ways in which American theater and film have been indelibly marked by Shakespeare: actors from Charlotte Cushman and Edwin Booth to John Barrymore, Paul Robeson, and Marlon Brando reinterpret Shakespeare for each new era; the legendary productions of New York’s Yiddish theater are evoked in Cynthia Ozick’s story “Actors”; in the Depression years, Orson Welles revolutionizes Shakespearean performance with his landmark productions of Macbeth and Julius Caesar; the creators of Kiss Me, Kate and West Side Story write Shakespeare into the history of the classic American musical theater; and Joseph Papp, renewing a once-flourishing popular taste for the plays, establishes a New York tradition with Shakespeare in the Park.

Internationally acclaimed Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro introduces each piece with a lively and informative headnote to guide the reader through the fascinating record of our 250-year-long engagement with Shakespeare and his works—from the perennial interest in the birthplace at Stratford-upon-Avon to the uniquely American obsession with the question of who really wrote the plays—and supplements the texts with a sixteen-page illustration insert.

James Shapiro, editor, is Larry Miller Professor of English at Columbia University. His books include Rival Playwrights, Shakespeare and the Jews, Oberammergau, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, and Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? Most recently, he was co-author and presenter of the three-part BBC series Shakespeare: The King’s Man.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Also available in a paperback edition.

Project support for this volume was provided by Larry Miller and David Parsons,

Shakespeare in America: An Anthology from the Revolution to Now is kept in print by a gift from J. Lawrence Hughes to the Guardians of American Letters Fund, made in memory of Freeman “Doc” Lewis and Herbert M. Alexander.
News & Views

Story of the Week Washington Irving, “Stratford-on-Avon”
April 13, 2023

Story of the Week Lorenz Hart and Morrie Ryskind, “Shakespeares of 1922”
May 2, 2022

Story of the Week Mark Twain, “The Killing of Julius Caesar, Localized”
April 23, 2021

Interviews James Shapiro on how American attitudes toward Shakespeare keep changing
August 15, 2016
Table of Contents

Foreword by President Bill Clinton
Introduction by James Shapiro

Anonymous: The Pausing American Loyalist (1776)
Jonathan M. Sewall: Epilogue to Coriolanus (1778)
Peter Markoe: The Tragic Genius of Shakspeare; An Ode (1787)
John Adams: Letter to John Quincy Adams (1805)
Washington Irving: Stratford-on-Avon (1820)
Charles Sprague: Prize Ode (1824)
John Quincy Adams: The Character of Desdemona (1836)
Edgar Allan Poe: Hazlitt’s Characters of Shakspeare (1845)
J.M.W.: First Impressions of Miss Cushman’s “Romeo” (1846)
Maungwudaus: “Indians of North America” (1848)
Anonymous: Account of the Terrific and Fatal Riot at the New-York Astor Place Opera House (1849)
Ralph Waldo Emerson: Shakspeare; or, the Poet (1850)
Herman Melville: Hawthorne and His Mosses (1850)
William Wells Brown: Ira Aldridge (1862)
Nathaniel Hawthorne: Recollections of a Gifted Woman (1863)
Emily Dickinson: Drama’s Vitallest Expression is the Common Day (1863)
Henry Timrod: Address Delivered at the Opening of the New Theatre at Richmond (1863)
Abraham Lincoln: Letter to James H. Hackett (1863)
Mark Twain: The Killing of Julius Cæsar “Localized” (1864)
Oliver Wendell Holmes: Shakespeare. Tercentennial Celebration. April 23, 1864
John Wilkes Booth: Letter to the National Intelligencer (1865)
Herman Melville: “The Coming Storm” (1866)
G.W.H. Griffin: “Shylock,” A Burlesque (c. 1867)
Mary Preston: Othello (1869)
Frederick Wadsworth Loring: In the Old Churchyard at Fredericksburg (1870)
Walt Whitman: What Lurks behind Shakspere’s Historical Plays? (1884)
William Winter: The Art of Edwin Booth: Hamlet (1893)
William Dean Howells: Shakespeare (1895)
Willa Cather: from Between the Acts (1894); Antony and Cleopatra (1895)
Henry Cabot Lodge: Shakespeare’s Americanisms (1895)
Jane Addams: A Modern Lear (1895)
Belle Marshall Locke: The Hiartville Shakespeare Club (1896)
Henry James: The Birthplace (1903)
Mark Twain: Autobiographical Dictation (1909)
George Santayana: Shakespeare: Made in America (1915)
Robert Frost: ‘Out, Out—’ (1916)
Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Shakespeare’s Heroines as Human Beings (1916)
Charles Mills Gayley: Heart of the Race (1916)
T. S. Eliot: Hamlet and His Problems (1919)
William Carlos Williams: To Mark Anthony in Heaven (1920)
Lorenz Hart and Morrie Ryskind: Shakespeares of 1922
Stark Young: John Barrymore’s Hamlet (1922)
George F. Whicher: Shakespeare for America (1931)
Joseph Quincy Adams: Shakespeare and American Culture (1932)
James Thurber: The Macbeth Murder Mystery (1937)
Sidney B. Whipple: Orson Welles’s Julius Caesar (1937)
Toshio Mori: Japanese Hamlet (1939)
Langston Hughes: Shakespeare in Harlem (1942)
Samuel Sillen: Paul Robeson’s Othello (1943)
James Agee: Laurence Olivier’s Henry V (1946)
Maurice Evans: Preface to G. I. Hamlet (1947)
Cole Porter: Brush Up Your Shakespeare (1948)
Hollis Alpert: The Abuse of Greatness (1953)
Isaac Asimov: The Immortal Bard (1954)
John Berryman: Shakespeare’s Last Word: Justice and Redemption (1955)
Lord Buckley: Hipsters, Flipsters, and Finger-Poppin’ Daddies (1955)
Hyam Plutzik: Carlus (1960)
Mary McCarthy: General Macbeth (1962)
Adrienne Rich: After Dark (1966)
Pauline Kael: Orson Welles: There Ain’t No Way (1967)
John Houseman: from Run-Through (1972)
Woody Allen: But Soft . . . Real Soft (1975)
Walter McDonald: Caliban in Blue (1976)
Gloria Naylor: Cora Lee (1982)
Dramatists Guild Landmark Symposium: West Side Story (1985)
Frank Rich and Joseph Papp: The Shakespeare Marathon (1989)
Sam Wanamaker: Address to the Royal Society of Arts (1989)
Jane Smiley: Shakespeare in Iceland (1996)
Cynthia Ozick: Actors (1998)
BJ Ward: Daily Grind (2002)
Jen Bervin: from NETS (2004)
Contributors

John Adams
John Quincy Adams
Joseph Quincy Adams
Jane Addams
James Agee
Woody Allen
Hollis Alpert
Isaac Asimov
Leonard Bernstein
John Berryman
Jen Bervin
John Wilkes Booth
William Wells Brown
Lord Buckley
Willa Cather
Emily Dickinson
T. S. Eliot
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Maurice Evans
Robert Frost
Charles Mills Gayley
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
G. W. H. Griffin
Lorenz Hart
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Oliver Wendell Holmes
John Houseman
William Dean Howells
Langston Hughes
Washington Irving
J. M. W.
Henry James
Pauline Kael
Abraham Lincoln
Belle Marshall Locke
Henry Cabot Lodge
Frederick Wadsworth Loring
Peter Markoe
Maungwudaus
Mary McCarthy
Walter McDonald
Herman Melville
Toshio Mori
Gloria Naylor
Cynthia Ozick
Joseph Papp
Hyam Plutzik
Edgar Allan Poe
Cole Porter
Mary Preston
Adrienne Rich
Frank Rich
Morrie Ryskin
George Santayana
Jonathan M. Sewall
Samuel Sillen
Jane Smiley
Charles Sprague
James Thurber
Henry Timrod
Mark Twain
Sam Wanamaker
BJ Ward
George F. Whicher
Sidney B. Whipple
Walt Whitman
William Carlos Williams
William Winter
Stark Young

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