Narrator: Imagine a warm summer night in New York's Central Park. An audience settles in to watch a classic play, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. But as the character of Caesar takes the stage, a murmur ripples through the crowd. He’s not wearing a toga; he’s in a modern business suit, with a familiar shock of blond hair and an overly long red tie. When the famous assassination scene arrives, this modern Caesar is brutally stabbed to death. The reaction is immediate and explosive. It’s not just applause; it’s outrage. Protesters leap onto the stage, shouting about the normalization of political violence. Corporate sponsors pull their funding overnight. The theater and its staff are flooded with death threats. How could a 400-year-old play ignite such a firestorm in 21st-century America?

In his book, America's Shakespeare: How Our National Poet Confronts Our Divides, author James Shapiro reveals that this incident isn't an anomaly. Instead, it’s the latest chapter in a long and turbulent history. For centuries, Shakespeare's plays have been less a source of unifying culture and more a battleground where Americans have fought over their most profound divisions: race, class, gender, and politics.

Narrator: In 1833, former President John Quincy Adams, a staunch opponent of slavery, attended a dinner party where he sat next to the famous British actress Fanny Kemble. Knowing her reputation for Shakespearean roles, Adams launched into a tirade against the Bard. He saved his greatest venom for Othello. He declared that Desdemona’s love for the Moor was “unnatural,” a violation of filial duty and natural law, purely because of Othello’s skin color. He went further, stating that when Othello smothers her, the audience feels she got what she deserved.

Kemble was horrified into silence. Adams’s view, which he later published, reveals a deep contradiction at the heart of the American project. Here was a leading abolitionist who could not stomach the idea of an interracial marriage, even in fiction. His mother, Abigail Adams, had expressed a similar revulsion decades earlier after seeing the play, wondering if her disgust at seeing a black man touch a white woman was a natural antipathy or a learned prejudice. Her son had no such doubts. For him, the line was clear. This episode demonstrates how Othello became a flashpoint for America’s anxieties about race and miscegenation, showing that even the most progressive minds could harbor deep-seated prejudices that Shakespeare’s work brought to the surface.

Narrator: On May 10, 1849, the streets outside the Astor Place Opera House in New York City looked like a war zone. A crowd of 10,000 people, mostly working-class, hurled paving stones at the theater, trying to burn it to the ground. Inside, the elite of New York society were trying to watch the British actor William Macready perform Macbeth. The state militia was called in, and when the chaos couldn't be contained, they were ordered to fire into the crowd. By the end of the night, more than 20 people were dead and dozens more were wounded.

This was the Astor Place Riot, and while it was sparked by a feud between two actors, its real cause was class warfare. The American actor Edwin Forrest was a hero of the working class, known for his muscular, distinctly American style. Macready was his refined, intellectual British rival, the favorite of the upper crust who had built the Astor Place Opera House as an exclusive club, complete with a dress code and high prices to keep the common folk out. For Forrest’s supporters, Macready’s performance was an aristocratic invasion. The riot wasn't just about acting styles; it was a violent, desperate battle over whose culture mattered, who belonged, and who got to define what it meant to be an American. Shakespeare was the battlefield on which this bloody conflict over class and national identity was waged.

Narrator: In the final days of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln was aboard a steamboat, sailing back to Washington. He turned to his companions, opened a volume of Shakespeare, and began to read aloud from Macbeth. He didn't read the triumphant speeches, but the words of the guilty king, haunted by the murder he committed: "Methought I heard a voice cry ‘Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep.’" For Lincoln, a man burdened by the immense death and suffering of the war, Shakespeare was a source of solace and profound human insight into guilt, grief, and the weight of leadership.

At the very same time, another man was steeping himself in Shakespeare for a very different reason. The actor John Wilkes Booth, obsessed with his own legacy, saw Lincoln not as a burdened leader but as a tyrant. After assassinating the president, Booth wrote in his diary, "I am here in despair. And why? For doing what Brutus was honored for." He framed his act of terror through the lens of Julius Caesar, casting himself as the noble Brutus, striking down a dictator to save the republic. The two men, Lincoln and Booth, represent two sides of America's engagement with Shakespeare. One found in the plays a deep well of moral complexity and empathy. The other found a twisted justification for violence and a script for his own tragic, self-aggrandizing role in history.

Narrator: As millions of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe arrived in America in the early 20th century, a wave of nativism swept the country. Anxieties ran high about the dilution of America's "racial stock." In this fight, Shakespeare was weaponized. In 1916, a massive pageant called Caliban by the Yellow Sands was staged in New York, ostensibly to celebrate Shakespeare and unite the city's diverse immigrant communities through art.

But the production revealed the era's deep-seated prejudices. The character of Caliban, the brutish, half-human native from The Tempest, was used in the press and by social scientists as a stand-in for the "undesirable" new immigrants. At the same time, powerful figures like Senator Henry Cabot Lodge argued for immigration restrictions by claiming Shakespeare as the exclusive property of the Anglo-Saxon race. He argued that the founders of America brought Shakespeare’s language and ideals with them, and that this legacy was now under threat. The Bard was no longer a universal poet but a symbol of a specific, exclusionary vision of American identity, used to justify building walls, not bridges.

Narrator: In 1948, as America was grappling with the aftermath of World War II and shifting gender roles, the musical Kiss Me, Kate opened on Broadway. The show, a reimagining of The Taming of the Shrew, became a smash hit because it perfectly captured the nation's conflicted attitudes toward marriage and female independence. The on-stage plot is Shakespeare's original story, where the headstrong Katherine is brutally "tamed" into submission by her husband, Petruchio.

But the musical’s real genius is its backstage story, which follows the divorced lead actors, Lilli and Fred. Backstage, Lilli is an independent, successful, and fiery career woman, a far cry from the submissive wife she plays on stage. This duality mirrored the reality for many American women, who had left the workforce for domestic life after the war but retained a newfound sense of independence. Decades later, the 1998 film Shakespeare in Love would navigate a different set of cultural anxieties. Produced during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, the film carefully managed its story of adultery and toned down themes of same-sex love to appeal to a broad American audience, once again showing how Shakespeare is constantly reshaped to fit the moral landscape of the moment.

Narrator: The book concludes by returning to the 2017 Julius Caesar controversy. The backlash was not spontaneous; it was a highly organized campaign, amplified by right-wing media and social media activists. Corporate sponsors were pressured into withdrawing support, and the theater was subjected to a torrent of abuse. Shapiro contrasts this with a screenplay of Coriolanus written years earlier by Steve Bannon, which reimagined the play as a violent race war between street gangs. Bannon’s script reveals a worldview that thrives on chaos and stoking rage, not engaging in a battle of ideas.

This, Shapiro argues, is the new reality. For centuries, both sides of America's divides at least agreed that Shakespeare's plays were a worthy stage for their arguments. But in today's hyper-polarized climate, one side increasingly sees the plays not as a forum for debate, but as a threat. The cultural rope that once connected Americans, even in conflict, is fraying. When a shared cultural touchstone like Shakespeare becomes just another front in the culture war, it signals that the common ground itself may be disappearing.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from America's Shakespeare is that the Bard has never been a static, revered monument in the United States. He has been a living, breathing, and often bleeding presence in the nation’s history. His plays have served as a dynamic mirror, reflecting America's ugliest prejudices and its highest ideals, and providing the language for its most bitter conflicts.

The book leaves us with a deeply unsettling question. For generations, Americans have used Shakespeare to argue with each other. But what happens when we can no longer even agree to share the same stage? The story of Shakespeare in America is the story of a nation struggling with itself, and its future is as uncertain as the next act in an unwritten play.