Shakespeare in a Divided America by James Shapiro

This book, which the New York Times picked as one of the five best nonfiction books published in 2020, is addressing the fact that America has always been divided, from the very beginning, and then examining what our long standing love affair with Shakespeare tells us. He looks at the popularity of particular plays at particular times, and weaves that in with some specific things that happened in the time period he is examining in that chapter, then brings about some insight into what we can draw from the two things put together. There is the longstanding obsession with Othello at the time of the Revolutionary War, which tells the story of a white woman in love with a black man. The prohibition of such relationships and the apparent shcok related to it does not jive with what was happening in the SOuth, with slave owners raping their slaves and the evidence, their offspring, were irrefutable evidence of their crime. he tells this part through the eyes of a British actress who had to leave because the hypocracy was too much for her to bear. She had a slave owning husband herself, after all. It then goes forward to the Civil War, with several interesting stories, including Ulyssess S. Grant being quite feminine, to the point where he was cast in female roles in Shakespeare plays, which did nothing for his career advancement, and to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln by a Shakespearean actor. Booth played Brutus in Julius Caesar, and he was convinced that people, at least people in the South, would see if as a valiant act on par with Brutus killing Caesar. He was a bad judge of the climate, and was widely villified throughout the United States, the South included. The divide that the author explores throughout the book is the divide between those who think that men are created equal and those that do not. He explores next the changing role of women, and then on to modern politics, but the underlying message is that Shakespeare shows us the range of human behavior, and that we can continue to learn from what his plays contain and tell us.