James Shapiro, America and Othello

Yesterday as part of the 2025 Dalkey Book Festival James Shapiro talked to Fintan O’Toole about his book Shakespeare in a Divided America (my book of 2020) and more besides. He is always a compelling speaker.

He said he was grateful for the opportunity to leave the US for a while, and thus reduce his blood pressure, and the current state of his country under the Trump administration dominated everything. He retold the story from the final chapter of his book on America, about the 2017 Delacorte Theater production of Julius Caesar (dressed à la Trump), its final weeks upended in turmoil by an incident when a woman rushed the stage. He did not give her name in the main text of his book, but it’s there in the notes, and certainly in the NYT report. Laura Loomer has since become notoriously embedded in the Trump camp. On this video, her accomplice seems to shout at the ‘Gerbils’, which turns out to be Goebbels.

Nothing could have more dramatically shown how deeply Shakespeare is still intertwined with American culture. Shapiro said that he certainly did not see how this was a kind of dress rehearsal for the January 6th Capitol attacks, but here we are now in 2025 with Trump and his supporters back in the Oval Office. Shakespeare is still the most-read author in America, and still part of the curriculum in 90% of high schools; both sides of the cultural divide claim him as theirs. But that status is under threat, due to brutal cuts to the theatre and other arts. Shapiro’s most recent book, The Playbook, is about how the destruction of the Federal Theater Project, was a blueprint for the current culture wars, a kind of canary in the coalmine. Now he thinks The Playbook was published a year early: current events bring the 1930s into a dismayingly bright spotlight.

Shapiro’s next book will be on America’s relationship with the play Othello, obviously highly charged given the centrality of race to the country over the centuries. He worked with Denzel Washington on the recent Broadway production (Othello’s fit in the middle of the story was there a PTSD-breakdown prompted by his military service).He believes that the first man to be called Othello in the country was a slave put to death in 1741 on Chambers Street in New York City, an event watched by an audience, at a time when there were 10,000 inhabitants of whom 2,000 were slaves. This was the in the so-called Slave Insurrection (Shapiro said it should more accurately have been called the White Panic).

Judging by Shakespeare in a Divided America, and the way Shapiro wrote about King Lear in 1606, his book on Othello will be enormously resonant. Shakespeare’s importance in America is being re-confirmed year after year.