Michael: Most people think of Shakespeare as required reading from high school. You know, a bit stuffy, maybe a little boring. But what if his plays were at the center of one of New York's deadliest riots, and were even used to justify the assassination of a U.S. President? Kevin: Whoa, hold on. Shakespeare? The guy with the ruffles and the "wherefores"? I thought his biggest contribution to violence was high school students wanting to throw their textbooks out the window. Riots and assassinations? Come on. Michael: It sounds unbelievable, but that's the explosive core of the book we're diving into today: America's Shakespeare: How Our National Poet Confronts Our Divides by James Shapiro. Kevin: Shapiro... that name rings a bell. Isn't he that huge Shakespeare scholar at Columbia University? The one who's won a ton of major awards for his work? Michael: That's the one. He's a giant in the field. And in this book, which the New York Times named one of its ten best of the year, he makes this powerful argument that for over two centuries, Shakespeare's plays have been a kind of cultural canary in the coal mine for America. Kevin: A canary in the coal mine? What do you mean by that? Michael: He means that how Americans react to, interpret, and fight over these 400-year-old plays reveals the most toxic prejudices and the deepest fractures in our society. The plays become a mirror, and we don't always like what we see. Kevin: Okay, I'm intrigued. A mirror showing us our ugly side. Where do we even start with that? Michael: We start at a dinner party in Boston, 1833, with a former President of the United States who has a very, very strong opinion about Othello.

Kevin: A former president? Who are we talking about? Michael: John Quincy Adams. And this is what makes the story so stunning. Adams was one of the most prominent anti-slavery voices of his time. He was a fierce abolitionist. He's at this dinner party with a famous British actress, Fanny Kemble, and the topic of Shakespeare comes up. Kevin: Right, so you'd expect him to be enlightened, progressive for his time. Michael: You would. But when they start discussing Othello, Adams launches into this tirade. He says he finds the play disgusting. He argues that Desdemona's love for the Moor, Othello, is "unnatural" solely because of his color. Kevin: Wait. He's an abolitionist, but he's disgusted by an interracial relationship? That feels like a massive contradiction. Michael: It's a huge one. And it gets worse. Shapiro uncovers essays Adams wrote where he argues that when Othello smothers Desdemona in her bed, the audience feels that "she has her deserts." Kevin: He said she deserved it? For marrying a Black man? That is absolutely chilling. How can someone fight to end slavery but hold such a deeply racist view? Michael: That's the central puzzle Shapiro presents. In the 19th century, there was a sharp line for many, including Adams, between being against the institution of slavery and believing in what they called "amalgamation," or racial mixing. They could see the economic and moral evil of slavery, but the idea of social equality or interracial marriage was a bridge too far. It violated their sense of natural order. Kevin: So Othello wasn't just a play for him. It was a test case for a future he couldn't stomach. It was the mirror showing a prejudice he couldn't even see in himself. Michael: Precisely. And it wasn't just him. Shapiro notes that Adams's own mother, Abigail Adams, had a similar reaction decades earlier. She saw Othello on stage and wrote about her "disgust and horror" every time she saw the actor in blackface touch the "gentle Desdemona." She at least questioned if it was a learned prejudice, but the feeling was visceral. Kevin: Wow. So this anxiety over race was just simmering there, and Shakespeare's play brought it right to the surface. You mentioned riots, though. That feels like a step beyond just being uncomfortable at a dinner party. Michael: It's a huge step. And it shows the mirror cracking. In 1849, New York City erupted in what's known as the Astor Place Riot. And what was it about? A feud between two actors over the "correct" way to perform Macbeth. Kevin: A feud over acting styles? Michael: On the surface, yes. You had the American actor, Edwin Forrest, who was brawny, loud, and very "American." And you had the British actor, William Macready, who was more subtle, intellectual, and "aristocratic." But it was really about class warfare. The working-class Bowery Boys championed Forrest, while the city's elite backed Macready at their fancy new Opera House. Kevin: So it was a proxy war. Michael: A proxy war that turned into a real one. Thousands of Forrest's supporters stormed the theater, throwing stones and chairs. The militia was called in, they fired into the crowd, and by the end of the night, more than twenty people were dead and over a hundred were injured. All because of a fight over Shakespeare. Kevin: That's insane. People were literally dying over who got to "own" Shakespeare. At that point, it feels like more than just a mirror reflecting things. It feels like it's become a weapon.

Michael: That is the perfect word for it, Kevin. And there is no more powerful, or tragic, example of Shakespeare as a weapon than the story of Abraham Lincoln and his assassin, John Wilkes Booth. Kevin: I know Booth was an actor, but I never really connected him and Lincoln through Shakespeare. Michael: They were both obsessed with him. But they drew completely opposite lessons. Shapiro paints this incredible portrait of Lincoln, a man burdened by the immense grief and guilt of the Civil War. He found profound solace in Shakespeare's tragedies. He would read them aloud for hours in the White House. Kevin: Which plays were his favorites? Michael: The dark ones. Macbeth, Richard III, and especially Hamlet. Just days before he was killed, he was on a steamboat, the River Queen, and he started reading from Macbeth—the passage right after Duncan is murdered, where Macbeth is tormented by guilt and can't sleep. Lincoln told his companions how perfectly Shakespeare captured the mind of a man haunted by a terrible deed. Kevin: That gives me chills. He's seeing the weight of the war, the death, reflected in Macbeth's guilt. He's using the play to process his own burden. Michael: Exactly. It was a tool for introspection, for understanding the human cost of his decisions. Now, contrast that with John Wilkes Booth. He's a famous actor, from a family of famous Shakespearean actors. He also loves Shakespeare. But he doesn't see a mirror for introspection. He sees a playbook for action. Kevin: What do you mean, a playbook? Michael: He saw himself as a Shakespearean hero. Specifically, he saw himself as Brutus from Julius Caesar. In his mind, Lincoln wasn't a president; he was a tyrant, a Caesar who had to be struck down to save the Republic. After he shot Lincoln, while on the run, Booth wrote in his diary, "I am here in despair. And why? For doing what Brutus was honored for." Kevin: Unbelievable. So for Booth, Shakespeare wasn't a source of comfort or wisdom. It was a permission slip. It was his justification for murder. Michael: It was his script. He even shouted "Sic semper tyrannis!"—"Thus always to tyrants!"—after he shot Lincoln, the very words some attribute to Brutus. So you have these two men, the president and his killer, both steeped in Shakespeare. One uses it to understand grief and responsibility, the other uses it to rationalize political violence. Kevin: It's like they read two completely different authors. The same words, the same plays, leading to empathy in one man and assassination in the other. That story about Booth and Julius Caesar is haunting. You have to wonder if that play is still... I don't know, cursed or something. Does it still cause trouble?

Michael: You have no idea. Let's fast forward 152 years from Lincoln's assassination. The year is 2017. The place is the Delacorte Theater in New York's Central Park. The prestigious Public Theater is staging a free production of... you guessed it, Julius Caesar. Kevin: Oh boy. I have a bad feeling about this. Michael: The director, Oskar Eustis, decides to stage it with a modern twist. The character of Caesar is a populist, blond-haired businessman with a long red tie and a wife with a Slavic accent. Kevin: So... a Donald Trump-like figure. Michael: Unmistakably. And in the play, as you know, Caesar is assassinated by the conspirators. The moment the right-wing media got wind of this, a firestorm erupted. Fox & Friends ran segments on it. Breitbart published outraged articles. The headline was basically: "Liberals Stage Assassination of President Trump in Central Park." Kevin: Even though it's a 400-year-old play that has been staged thousands of times. Michael: It didn't matter. The outrage was manufactured and it was effective. Corporate sponsors like Delta Air Lines and Bank of America buckled under the pressure and pulled their funding. The theater and the director received a flood of hate mail and death threats. One email said, "If ever a Theater should Burn to the Ground, Its Yours." Kevin: That's terrifying. Did they have protests? Michael: They did. During one performance, right-wing activists stormed the stage, shouting, "Stop the normalization of political violence against the Right!" The performance had to be stopped. Kevin: So it's the Astor Place Riot all over again. The same play, the same debate about tyranny and political violence, just 150-odd years later. It's the same fight, but with Twitter and cable news instead of cobblestones. Michael: That's exactly it. And it shows how potent this stuff still is. The play became a flashpoint for all the polarization and rage of modern American politics.

Kevin: So after all these stories—John Quincy Adams, the riots, Lincoln and Booth, the Central Park controversy—what's the big takeaway from Shapiro's book? Michael: I think Shapiro's ultimate point is that Shakespeare isn't just dusty, old literature; he's a live wire running through American history. His plays are so brilliant and so open to interpretation that they don't give us easy answers. Instead, they force us to confront the very questions that divide us most deeply: What is a tyrant? What is justice? Who gets to be a "real" American? Who is the hero and who is the villain? Kevin: And it seems like the real battle is over who gets to answer those questions. Who owns the narrative. Whether it's John Quincy Adams with Othello or the protesters at Julius Caesar, they're all fighting to say, "This is the right way to see the story. My interpretation is the correct one." Michael: Exactly. And Shapiro leaves us with a pretty chilling thought at the end of the book. For centuries, both sides of a divide would use Shakespeare to argue their case. Abolitionists and slave-owners both quoted him. Lincoln and Booth both loved him. The plays were a common ground for conflict. Kevin: A shared language, even if they were shouting in it. Michael: Right. But he asks, what happens when that changes? What happens when one side no longer sees value in staging the plays to argue a point, but only sees a threat that needs to be silenced? When the goal isn't to win the argument, but to shut the play down entirely? That's the new and dangerous place we might be in now. Kevin: Wow. That is a powerful and, frankly, a little scary, thought. The idea that we might lose that common ground for debate. It makes you want to go back and re-read these plays with a whole new set of eyes. Michael: It really does. The book is a masterclass in showing how art and life are inseparable, and how the stories we tell ourselves shape our reality. For our listeners who are as fascinated by this as I am, we can't recommend it enough. Kevin: A fantastic and eye-opening journey. Michael: This is Aibrary, signing off.