From Ben Franklin to George Washington to Abraham Lincoln, American founders and many early Americans as a whole read and revered Shakespeare. As a result, echoes of Shakespeare can be heard in some of the most fundamental documents in American history, including the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, and Shakespearean themes and influences have resonated throughout some of America’s biggest crises, from the Civil War to COVID-19. Last week, three of America’s leading authorities on Shakespeare—Barry Edelstein of The Old Globe Theater in San Diego; Kevin Hayes, author of the new book, Shakespeare and the Making of America; and Lucas Morel of Washington and Lee University and author of Lincoln and the American Founding—joined National Constitution Center President and CEO Jeffrey Rosen for a look at how Shakespeare has shaped the country, and how his work relates to American constitutional values today.
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PARTICIPANTS
Barry Edelstein is the Erna Finci Viterbi Artistic Director of The Old Globe and a stage director, producer, author, and educator. He has directed over half of the Bard’s plays. His Globe directing credits include The Winter’s Tale, Othello, and Romeo and Juliet. He also directed All’s Well That Ends Well as the inaugural production of the Globe for All community tour. He is the author of two books on Shakespeare, including Thinking Shakespeare and Bardisms: Shakespeare for All Occasions.
Kevin Hayes is emeritus professor of English at the University of Central Oklahoma. He is the author of several books about American literature and culture, including George Washington: A Life in Books; The Mind of a Patriot: Patrick Henry and the World of Ideas; The Road to Monticello: Thomas Jefferson and the Life of the Mind; and most recently Shakespeare and the Making of America.
Lucas Morel is John K. Boardman, Jr. Professor of Politics at Washington and Lee University, where he teaches courses on politics, political theory, and politics and literature — including the seminar in Political Philosophy: Theories of Statesmanship in Shakespeare's Henry V. He is the author of several books, the most recent of which is Lincoln and the American Founding.
Jeffrey Rosen is the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization devoted to educating the public about the U.S. Constitution. Rosen is also professor of law at The George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor of The Atlantic.
This episode was engineered by the David Stotz and Greg Scheckler and produced by Jackie McDermott, Tanaya Tauber, John Guerra, and Lana Ulrich.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
- Kevin Hayes, Shakespeare and the Making of America
- The Old Globe Theater
- Barry Edelstein, Thinking Shakespeare: A How-to Guide for Student Actors, Directors, and Anyone Else Who Wants to Feel More Comfortable With the Bard
- Lucas Morel, Lincoln and the American Founding
- Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
- Thomas Jefferson, Literary Commonplace Book
- Project Gutenberg, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
- Shakespeare & Beyond, "The Astor Place riot: Shakespeare as a flashpoint for class conflict in 1849"
- James Shapiro, Shakespeare in a Divided America What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future
- Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address (1865)
- Barry Edelstein, Bardisms: Shakespeare for All Occasions
- Lucas Morel, "Charnwood's Lincoln: Biography as Civics Lesson"
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TRANSCRIPT
This transcript may not be in its final form, accuracy may vary, and it may be updated or revised in the future.
Jackie McDermott: [00:00:00] Welcome to Live at the National Constitution Center. I'm Jackie McDermott the show's producer. Echoes of Shakespeare can be heard in some of the most fundamental documents in American history, including the Constitution. Last week, NCC president Jeffrey Rosen was joined by a panel of authorities on Shakespeare to explore how his work influenced American values past and present. Here's Jeff.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:00:25] Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the National Constitution Center and to today's convening of America's Town Hall. I am Jeffrey Rosen and the president of this wonderful institution. And let us inspire ourselves in the discussion ahead by reciting together the National Constitution Center's mission statement. Here we go. The National Constitution Center is the only institution in America, chartered by Congress to increase awareness and understanding of the United States Constitution among the American people on a non-partisan basis. And now it is such a pleasure to introduce our panelists.
Barry Edelstein is the Erna Finci Viterbi artistic director of the Old Globe Theater in San Diego. He is one of America's leading authorities on the works of Shakespeare and has written the superb book, "Thinking Shakespeare," now the standard text on American Shakespearian acting. He's also the author of "Bardisms: Shakespeare for All Occasions."
He's an acclaimed director, who's previously served as director of the Shakespeare Initiative at the Public Theater, and a dear old friend of mine from grad school. It's a such a pleasure to see you, Barry. Thank you so much for joinning.
Barry Edelstein: [00:01:40] Thank you for having me, Jeffrey.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:01:42] Kevin Hayes is emeritus professor of English at the University of Central Oklahoma. He's the author of many books about American literature and culture, including most recently, "Shakespeare and the Making of America," and he is currently writing a book on the intellectual life of Benjamin Franklin. And Lucas Morel is John K. Boardman, Jr. professor of politics at Washington & Lee University.
He is the author, most recently, of "Lincoln and the American Founding" and a frequent guest on National Constitution Center programs. Kevin, it is wonderful to see you.
Kevin Hayes: [00:02:20] Thank you.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:02:21] And Lucas. Welcome back to the National Constitution Center.
Lucas Morel: [00:02:24] Thanks for the invitation, Jeffrey.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:02:26] Barry, set the stage, as it were, for us. Americans have turned to Shakespeare during moments of crisis throughout American history. Tell us how and why.
Barry Edelstein: [00:02:37] Well, you know, Jeffrey, it's really an extraordinary thing to trace just how deep Shakespeare runs in American political life and civic life. We think of Shakespeare as the national writer of England, he sailed across the ocean with those who settled the colonies and the new world in the early 17th century, and never really left. And there's some, he's so deeply entwined in sort of every major moment, including the crazy crisis, the pandemic that we're in right now, that he sort of rises to a level of depth and I don't know, cultural penetration, if you will that, it's hard to imagine anything other than say the U.S. Constitution and the Bible coming anywhere near, you know, and the famous line about this in the early 19th century, French philosopher de Tocqueville, Alexis de Tocqueville, took a tour of the United States in 1830s, I believe, and sort of then wrote it up in a famous book called "Democracy in America." And he said the famous line about there scarcely a pioneer's hut where you can't find a copy of Shakespeare.
He was everywhere. My two esteemed colleagues here know a lot more about the presidents of the United States and their relationship to Shakespeare than I do. But there again, it's hard to find an American president, well, most of them, that haven't quoted Shakespeare, in some way. And even in the last four years, you know, I'm sort of keeping a little unofficial count of commentators describing the Trump administration in some Shakespearian form.
And I'm up to 12 different characters that the president has been compared to. So there's a, there's a deep link between these old plays and the American experience. I'm in the middle of it now, as I try to pilot a Shakespeare, a theater that's famous for doing Shakespeare, through this extraordinary crisis.
And there's something about a) the kind of widespread connection to this material. Everybody has a little piece of it. It's in the common core. There was some study in the nineties, as I recall, that's said something like 92% of American students had read at least a little Shakespeare in high school. So even in the 21st century, everybody has some kind of relationship to Shakespeare. And he's one place where all different sides can meet.
It's one of the very, very few things we have left in our culture that everybody can refer to. So, when you have a huge crisis around the assassination of a president, or a civil war, or a gigantic riot on the streets of New York about post-colonial America's relationship to Britain. It's not surprising to find Shakespeare in there because he's the one thing that everyone can touch.
He becomes a site of dispute, a site of disagreement. Sometimes, as in this moment, he becomes a place of solace and a place of hope. And it's just impossible to imagine civic life in America, without this thread running through it.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:05:53] What an inspiring introduction to our topic and what is striking quotation from de Tocqueville, "there's hardly a Pioneer's hut that does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare."
Barry Edelstein: [00:06:04] We could ask how many pioneers huts he was hanging out in. I'm not sure that's, I'm not sure that's where he was really spending his time. But, somebody told them that that was the case.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:06:14] I was so struck by the quote, I couldn't help, but look it up. And he continues, "I remember I read the feudal drama of Henry the fifth for the first time in a log cabin." Absolutely amazing.
Barry Edelstein: [00:06:23] He's great.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:06:25] Well, let us turn to your superb new book, Kevin Hayes, and in "Shakespeare and the Making of America," you both discuss how deeply marinated the Founders were in Shakespeare and also how it was central to the ratification debate. You talk about how Federalists use Mark Anthony as a pen name for refuting an essay refuting Brutus, and how both Mercy Otis Warren, the anti-federalist friend of John Adams, invoked "The Tempest" in questioning the consolidated nature of the Constitution and how the Federalist papers themselves end with, both the famous quotations from the St Crispin day speech, the band of brethren, and also Cardinal Wolsey's swan song in Henry the Eighth, "whenever the dissolution of the union arrives in America will have reason to exclaim, in the words of the poet, farewell, a long farewell to all my greatness." Tell us about how implications of Shakespeare pervaded, the ratification debates.
Kevin Hayes: [00:07:27] Well, thank you. Pretty much all of the members of the Constitutional Convention new Shakespeare, read Shakespeare, had copies in their libraries that home, and, it was a kind of shared language. You could, you could make a quotation from Shakespeare and everyone would get the reference.
And so, this is something that, no matter what side of the debate that you were on, that they shared. They shared a knowledge of Shakespeare. Now, Shakespeare himself did not represent the kind of constitutional republic that we were forming, but I mean, there's lots of little speeches within Shakespeare that did express universal ideas that helped to make the founders, make the members of the customers convention, give them something that they could share. Now, one of the things that I looked at in my book is to look at all of the articles that were written after the Constitutional Convention had ended, and how people defended it or, denied it, argued against it. And how many times Shakespeare was being quoted, and they quoted, I mean, you mentioned Henry the Eighth, Cardinal Wolsey's speech, but also too, there was Henry the Fifth, Othello they quoted.
And lots of, lots of Hamlet. It seems the tragedies and the histories were most often quoted, and most often read. They knew the comedies less, although John Adams was a great, great fan of the comedies and of all Shakespeare, really. So, Shakespeare just gave them a shared language that they could use to strengthen their arguments.
And sometimes they quoted Shakespeare verbatim. Sometimes they kind of forced fit the quotations to suit their arguments, but Shakespeare had good rhetorical value. And a quotation from Shakespeare was an added strength to your argument. One of my favorite quotations, and this is not from the Constitutional Convention, but from someone who was on the committee to draft the Declaration of Independence, Robert Livingston, said, "I would rather have one speech from Shakespeare than a thousand books of Harrington or Sidney or Adams.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:09:42] That's a striking sentiment, especially when you realize is, as you note in your book, that Jefferson, when he's writing the Declaration says that he's just synthesizing the ideas of Sidney, Bacon and Locke.
And of course, you describe in great detail how Jefferson had in his commonplace books, expensive quotations from Shakespeare, and yet the notion that a founder would say that the works of Shakespeare were worth more than all of that philosophy is striking indeed. Lucas, how, how do you account for the founder's devotion to Shakespeare in the founding era? And one of our attendees asks: is the fact that so many of the founders were lawyers and judges have something to do with their fascination for Shakespeare?
Lucas Morel: [00:10:26] Well, I think in general, it's safe to say that in Shakespeare, the founders drew, not just lessons on morality, but lessons on politics, at least in the indirect way.
I see them as, you know, the histories as was mentioned earlier and a few of the tragedies. They saw in those at least indirect object lessons, sort of a don't let this happen to you. And we have the most outspoken, at least on paper, if you can be outspoken on paper, as was already mentioned in John Adams. And my goodness, the correspondence between Adams and his wife, Abigail, they drop, allusions if not outright quotations from Shakespeare left and right as if it was nothing.
So, in particular with Adams, you see someone who is concerned about constitution-making having balance. And this is what precisely you lack in the history plays in Shakespeare. We see the problems of not having say a written constitution, lacking consent, you know, prerogatives of whether Lords or the Royal family that are unwritten, that these are things that lead to a contest for political legitimacy.
The only play, I believe where England is at peace with itself and with its neighbors, is King Lear. Right? And so in Lear, you've got this play that sets itself up, not in terms of what would make for good rule, but what would make for a legitimate succession. Who will follow Lear? Is at least implicitly one of the themes of that great play. And what Adams and I believe the founders, drew from a playwright who did not write about democracies was precisely the lessons that we need to have to make sure that power, whether wielded by the few or the many, how power needs to be accountable, it needs to be transparent, and it needs to be structured, this brings us to the Constitution, in such a way that it cannot be wielded by either the few, or the many, without being balanced by others.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:12:22] Many, thanks for that. And very interesting to note that, given the multiplicity of political views within Shakespeare himself, the founders were able to extract from him a suspicion of concentrated power and to quote him so repeatedly. Barry, tell us about the difference between the way Americans, especially in the 18th and 19th century, experienced Shakespeare on the page and in the theater. We have lots of examples of the founders quoting Shakespeare from memory, but Adams saw him perform live in London. And then in the 19th century, as you and I have discussed at the Constitution Center, there was an explosion of performances of Shakespeare that were kind of popular entertainment. So how did that affect the way Shakespeare, infiltrated American culture?
Barry Edelstein: [00:13:11] There was a huge amount of Shakespeare being performed in this country from the earliest times. In Williamsburg, Virginia, there were professional theaters, in Washington, DC, in the 19th century, there were many, many theaters.
We know that, during the Gold Rush, we know that the prospectors brought Shakespeare with them and put on little amateur theatricals. Right? There's a famous story of Ulysses S. Grant when he was a grunt soldier in Texas dressing up in a dress to play Desdemona in a production on some army base in remote Texas.
So, Shakespeare has this double life even today in the library and in the theater. And that was true from the very, very earliest. Now one of the key points I think, to make about this, is how different Shakespeare in the theater and Shakespeare in the study really are. There's this misconception that we have even today, that the works that we received in print from Shakespeare's period, the first folio in 1623, and productions that reached print, half of Shakespeare's plays, while he was alive.
We tend to think that the theater then worked like it does today, where the script that we buy in a bookstore is exactly what was spoken on stage, because that's now in contemporary American theater. That's just gospel. Right? The thing that reaches print is the thing that was said. Not true, back then. And the life of a play onstage and the life of a play in print were extremely different. So much so that Shakespeare famously makes a joke about it in Hamlet, where he tells the clowns not to say more than has been set down for them. And we know that the plays were shorter in performance. Then they were printed with a more complete version than would have been seen on stage.
And so when you see Shakespeare borrowed for political ends, you see a kind of change to the text. The most famous example, of course, is Julius Caesar. And one of the weird things about Julius Caesar is it's a play that does not tell you who the good guys are and who the bad guys are. If you read the play on cut, you can see plenty of reasons why it's a bad idea for Shakespeare, for Caesar, excuse me, to become this kind of sole, King-like, monarchical power.
But then there's also a lot of arguments in the play for why that's a good idea. You see plenty of arguments for why Brutus and the conspirators are doing a bad thing, but then you see a lot of arguments that make you say, yeah, they're kind of good. I remember when I directed the play in Central Park, a number of years ago, I had a young nephew who was about eight or nine at the time, come to see it.
And he asked me at the end, Uncle Barry, who's the good guy and who's the bad guy? The play doesn't want to come down on either side. And that's what makes Shakespeare so useful to politicians. And we know Julius Caesar was performed many, many times during the revolutionary period. My colleagues here will know more about that than I, but you'd have to cut the play to make a strong unambiguous case for killing somebody for deposing, a tyrant because Acts Four and Five of Shakespeare's play show, gee, that was a really bad idea to do that. So, we know that what would happen is a speech would be lifted out, right? Just as Professor Hayes said, the founders knew speeches, but pulled out of context, they can say very, very different things than when they're embedded in the overall context of the play and the theater in the late 18th and throughout the 19th century did that very liberal rewritings of the plays. So anybody who had a particular point of view that they wanted to make could just sort of extract the stuff that said the things that they wanted to say, and then ignore the rest.
And that's typically what happened. It's not until the really kind of early 20th centuries, thirties, forties, where you start to see the tradition of Shakespeare on the American stage going back to fully uncut versions and where there's an intellectual armature that tolerates ambiguity in a different kind of way, that allows both sides to kind of stand.
So this deep theatrical presence of Shakespeare in America also comes with a deep freedom to say, I'm going to pull from Shakespeare what it is that says the thing that I want to say, and I'm going to let the rest of it sort of lie on the cutting room floor.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:17:36] Such a powerful reminder of the impossibility of reducing a great theatrical performance to a simple political message as your production of Julius Caesar showed, and fascinating also that as Shakespeare less bowdlerized in the 20th century, there was more tolerance for the complexity. Kevin, one of our questioners, Kenneth Rose, asked: did Ben Franklin, quote, Shakespeare? You have an entire chapter of your book, Benjamin Franklin and the governors, and you note that in "Poor Richard's Almanac," he quoted, "proclaim not all that thou knowest, all that thou owest, all that thou hast," from Lear. Tell us more about how Franklin quoted him in and then contrast him with perhaps a way that a Jefferson quoted him. It's striking that in Jefferson's commonplace book we see extensive quotations from Shakespeare, but we've seen most Jefferson most drawn to Shakespeare for its moral advice. What can we discern from the passages that individual founders were drawn to?
Kevin Hayes: [00:18:35] Well, it's interesting to see Franklin quote Shakespeare or make brief references to Shakespeare because he's the, he's the creator of Poor Richard. And you can see that in his references to Shakespeare. They're very short, and Othello was his favorite. I mean, just gauging by the number of references in Franklin's writing, he made three or four references to Othello. But I also found references to Lear and Hamlet and a couple of other plays in Franklin. Now, Franklin was also very... he was not one to cite his sources.
I mean, he would, he would draw from, from his vast reading. And, but wouldn't necessarily say this is where I read it, or this is where I got it from. And so he was very much more subtle than others, like Adams, in terms of citing his sources. Now, Jefferson, if you mentioned the commonplace book, and he has lots of quotations from Shakespeare in the commonplace book, but it's almost like what Barry was saying, is that he just took them out of context or found something memorable that he liked and he wrote it down.
One of the things I remember is that he took from two different speeches from two different characters and then combined them into one transcript. I mean, he didn't write down who was saying what. He just found some, a memorable quotation and it becomes, you know, like Jefferson's version of Bartley's quotations, that he found something he liked and wrote it down without the context of the plays.
Washington, I think was very similar to Benjamin Franklin in terms of his, you know, he would read and read the plays and synthesize them and be able to quote them from memory. But again, he didn't necessarily say, okay, now I'm going to, I'm going to quote from Shakespeare. But then it becomes tricky in terms of analyzing the evidence.
To what extent are these sayings from Shakespeare? Have they already become proverbial? And they're just part of the part of the culture? Or are they being quoted directly from them from Shakespeare? Now, in Washington's case, I mean, that was probably the hardest one to decide, but in a couple of times I saw him quoting say, two different speeches fromOthello , so that made it more convincing that he had indeed read Othello and Henry the Fifth too, you know, he quotes a couple of different passages from Henry the Fifth's St Crispin's Day speech, and also the "once more to the breech" speech, that's another one that Washington quoted.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:21:06] Wonderful. Thank you so much for all that. Lucas, you have written extensively about the influence of Shakespeare on Lincoln. You note in your piece on charmworlds Lincoln, that Carl Sandburg said Lincoln remarked, "it matters not to me whether Shakespeare would be well or ill acted with him, the thought suffices."
And you go on to note that after seeing the Merchant of Venice played by Edwin Booth, Lincoln said "it was a good performance, but I had a thousand times rather read it at home. If it were not for Booth's playing, a farce or a comedy is best played, a tragedy iss best read at home." Tell us about the overpoweringly important influence of Shakespeare on Lincoln.
Lucas Morel: [00:21:46] With Shakespeare, of course, what Lincoln discovered there, in part informed by his great reading of the Bible, even though he wasn't a conventional church go-er or church member, I should rather say, he did go to church and actually rented a pew, but he never pledged membership. He wasn't a conventional Christian believer, shall we say, but deeply steeped in the Bible. And of course you see that suffused in Shakespeare. So, in Shakespeare, Lincoln is seeing someone who is not just rendering morality plays, if you will. You're seeing someone teaching about the heights and depths, mostly the depths, of what especially great human beings can go, what they can achieve and how far they can fall.
And Lincoln was moved by this. He went to Shakespeare for solace and consolation. Shakespeare was one of his chief escapes from the foibles and frailties and sins, if you will, of humanity all around him. You cite the Merchant of Venice. I mean, he cites the Merchant of Venice without quotation at a very pivotal time in our country's history.
It's in May of 1862. He has to, he chooses to revoke General Hunter's proclamation of freedom to slaves in the Southeastern part of America because Lincoln does not want it left up to generals to decide what should happen to at least the legal property of American citizens. And in fact, he is contemplating issuing an emancipation proclamation himself.
And so in revoking the order, he issues a proclamation, not just to revoke the order. It's a proclamation to the American people as a reminder of what he has been trying to do for months, which is to persuade the loyal so-called border slave states to adopt gradual emancipation plans in their own states.
This is something that would not be sent to the Supreme Court. It would therefore be not open to constitutional challenge as it would, for example, the president of the United States liberating legal property under the Constitution. And so he said, look, we have these great majorities of the House and the Senate have already passed a bill that would loan you the money to adopt gradually emancipation plans. And this is, this is what he says he is, and this is the allusion to Merchant of Venice. He says, "the change it contemplates would come gently as the dues of heaven, not rending or wrecking anything." So, right, the great line from the Merchant of Venice, the great speech on mercy, "the quality of mercy is not strained to drop us as the gentle rain upon the place beneath."
And I'll be corrected because I'm doing that from memory. And so Lincoln thinks nothing of quoting Shakespeare here and presuming that his audience, the American people, will understand, wow, this is going to be, if you will, a political ac t that is akin to an act of mercy and act of grace, if you will, to have this done and in a way that he thinks will forshorten the war. And of course, none of the states take them up on it. But most famously, Lincoln frequented plays as often as he could, not just Shakespeare in plays, but, he was quite taken by this particular actor named James Hackett, who sent Lincoln a book about acting and Shakespeare and, Lincoln decides out of all the things he could do, he's gonna write back to this actor.
And he says that "some of Shakespeare's plays, I have never read while others, I have gone over perhaps as frequently as any unprofessional reader." And then he cites Lear, Richard, the third Henry the Eighth, Hamlet, and then this astounding confession, he says, "especially Macbeth. I think nothing equals Macbeth. It is wonderful." Now, do you know anything about Macbeth? You think maybe that's the last play a president of the United States should quote, because it is about the ascension of a devoted patriot, to the state who becomes, of course, issues his own coup d'etat, kills Duncan and becomes a King himself.
And, it is a play about ambition. And Lincoln, of course, was a man who was supremely ambitious, but thankfully, conjoined with the soul that was supremely moral, in my opinion. So, we lucked out on that one. But, here's a guy speaking to a professional actor, confessing that he thinks MacBeth, that there's just nothing like it in Shakespeare.
And of course, Hackett, being the scoundrel that he was, publishes this letter. And of course, Lincoln is ridiculed mercilessly, for saying what he did about these plays. So, yeah, with Lincoln, I think the quote that you began with is the best quote, about with him, "the thoughts suffices," right.
There's watching the plays, that's great. But you know, with Lincoln, you see a guy who spent a lot of time reading and he loved to read out loud, ad nauseum to the people around him and almost tp sleep, if you will.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:26:32] So moving to think of Lincoln, studying Shakespeare himself in his log cabin, forming his great prose by his reading of Shakespeare and several have noted that writing was so good and oratory in 19th century politics because people read Shakespeare and the Bible, and Lincoln was the preeminent example. Barry, there are a bunch of questions about performance history and education of Shakespeare in the 19th century. John Freed asks, please ask one of the panelists to discuss the significance of the riot in New York City in 1849, that protested a performance of Macbeth with an English actor in a leading role. I don't know if you happen to know about that incident, but maybe you extrapolate from that, if people are rioting over who's playing Macbeth, obviously this is hugely popular entertainment that people care a lot about. Tell us how at the same time, Bonnie opera Zedick asks, as public education emerged in the U.S. with Shakespeare routinely taught him with their variations, such as the geographic location of the schools. So give us a sense of how Shakespeare as popular entertainment and central to the curriculum in the 19th century.
Barry Edelstein: [00:27:40] I will. And I'll try to be brief. We could do a whole panel on the Astor Place riots of 18, I think, 45. The exact dates kind of slip my mind. 1847. Something like that. First, let me just say, you know, when I teach actors, I use Lincoln to teach Shakespeare, because one of Shakespeare's most famous tools, right? The quality of mercy is not strained. It droppetj off as the gentle rain from heaven, his opposition, or to use the rhetorical term, antithesis. It's everywhere in Shakespeare. To be, or not to be. I come not to praise Caesar, but to bury him. Right.
This sense of opposition. And of course, every famous Lincoln quote, does that--the world shall little note, nor long, remember what we say here, but that it shall never forget what they did here. Again and again and again. And so for me, what's a lot of fun is that when I'm introducing students, acting students, to this idea of antithesis, I wheel out Lincoln speeches.
And, you know, not that he was emulating Shakespeare consciously, but it's impossible for me to imagine that a guy who was as steeped in Shakespeare as he was didn't unconsciously find those kinds of Shakespearian rhythms working their way into his own writing. So that's a, sorry about, that's not the question you asked.
So the Aster Place Riots have a big Philadelphia see a connection because they revolved around this actor named Edwin Forrest, who was a Philadelphian, and, left his home to indigent actors on Walnut Street and owned a copy of the Shakespeare first folio, which was burned in a fire and is in the library of the University of Pennsylvania, a great Philadelphian.
And he was the most famous American actor of the early 19th century. Maybe the first national superstar actor. Big guy, very muscular, big features. Was known for his extravagantly athletic, over emotional, very, very robust style and very, very manly. And there's a lot of stuff tied in about early American ideas about masculinity.
The greatest English actor of the time was a guy named McCready, William Charles McCready, who was, you know, if you were to design the opposite of Forrest, you'd have a harder time coming up with somebody as exact. If feat, intellectual, poetic, sort of light on his feet in his acting style, notorious for his very, very ornate, complicated, interpretations of moments in Shakespeare.
He's famous for a mad dance with a handkerchief as Hamlet and, Forrest went to Scotland to go see McCready, perform this and stood up in the middle of the theater and hissed him when McCready did this handkerchief dance. So they hated each other. And the rivals, as it turns out, they were scheduled to do performances of Shakespeare blocks from each other. Forest on the Bowery in New York city, McCready in the Astor Opera House, which stands right around the corner from where the Public Theater is today. This great home of American Shakespeare stands right around the corner from where this thing took place. The Astor Opera House was the place where the fancy, wealthy, very pro-English aristocratic New Yorkers came. Whereas the theater that Forrest played in on the Bowery was a place for working Americans, and also very heavily Irish, who hated the English.
So there was this huge class distinction going on between the fancy toffs who were patronizing McCready, the feat Englishman playing Shakespeare, versus the working masculine, tough guy, sort of boisterous loud Americans around the corner. There was also a lot of other stuff tied in around war debt and a terrible time in Anglo-British relations, then, that had all sorts of political ramifications going on. I'm giving the story very, very short shrift, and there are a couple of really good books about it that go into the political disputes. And so, Forrest became this kind of boisterous populist, nativist, and McCready became the kind of cosmopolitan internationalist and Forrest's people went and protested at at McCready's theater, it didn't quite work out.
They planned a second protest a couple of days later that erupted into violence. Gunfire. I think 30 or 35 people ended up dead on the streets of New York outside. This incredibly violent, it was at the time, the worst piece of... the worst moment of civil unrest in America and what was in the middle of it? Shakespeare. Shakespeare, and ideas about who owned Shakespeare, Shakespeare, and ideas about how the culture gets constituted. So I want to refer everybody to go read more about the Astor Place Riots. It's one of the most extraordinary episodes in 19th century America, and also the figure of Edwin Forrest, who in this moment of a renewed surge of populism and anti-intellectualism in American politics, Edwin Forrest was there, way, way, way before, extremely interesting character, full of wonderful vignettes.
And, in many ways, just as one little footnote, it was after that riot that the New York City police began to arm themselves. So, right, that was the first moment in American history when policemen armed themselves. So you see these strange Shakespeare things, that we're still, you know, armed police on the streets of New York controversial today. And it sort of traces it's back to this place where Shakespeare is kind of the pebble in the shoe, if you will.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:33:13] Oh, what a marvelous telling of the significance of the Astro Place Riots. Thank you so much for that. Thanks for your suggestion of further reading and Sid Fox notes that James Shapiro "Shakespeare in a Divided America" talks about the Astor Place Riots, so that would be good.
Barry Edelstein: [00:33:28] Indeed, he does.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:33:29] Kevin, tell us, we have several questions about the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists and their indication of Shakespeare. And we, Derek Webb asks, do we know whether the Anti-federalists cited Shakespeare and criticism of the post constitution? You give several examples of those who did as well as whether Hamilton and other Federalists cited Shakespeare. So, and you note that both sides, would call themselves Brutus at different times. George Washington, when he was criticizing King George, in opposition to the Caesar of George and then the Anti-Federalists when they were criticizing the Federalists. So, tell us about those dueling quotations.
Kevin Hayes: [00:34:10] Okay. Well, when I was looking into the Constitution and the relationship to Shakespeare, I did notice that James Madison had a copy of Hamlet in his library. Now, I suspect he read more than that, but as far as I know that that's the only one Shakespeare volume that Madison had in his library now. In the Federalist papers, we talked about this a little bit earlier that John Jay, who wrote Federalist No. 2, quoted two different Shakespeare plays, Henry the Fifth and also Henry the Eighth.
There's not, in the Federalist papers, there's not too many other Shakespeare quotations, but the Federalist papers were just one of many newspaper articles after the Constitutional Convention. I mean, there were news, there were articles in every newspaper, throughout early America either defending the Constitution or arguing against the Constitution.
I think that probably Julius Caesar was the most often quoted play. And Brutus came out, came out the best. Brutus really came out better than any of the other characters in Julius Caesar. More people identified with Brutus and then thought he was the one good guy in there. He was trying to defeat Caesar, overthrow Caesar, but he had motives behind it, where all the other ones were just kind of going along with it or doing it for their own self-aggrandizement.
Whereas Bruce had more unselfish motives. And so he gets quoted a lot, especially by the people on the pro-Constitution side. But also, I saw lots of quotations from, Othello, too, and Hamlet. The To be, or not to be speech, which is what I end my book with, is quoted more often, probably, than any other speech in the arguments for the Constitution.
And it really is, I mean, it's an existential question. It's absolutely applicable. Is this nation, is this new nation going to be, or is it not to be? And so I think that the, the simplicity of the, well, it's the simplicity of the question and the complexity of the underlying ideas behind the question that really appealed to early Americans who were arguing the importance of establishing a new and strong government.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:36:35] Fascinating, thank you for all that. Lucas, we have a question from Janice similar Edmond about whether Shakespeare informed the slavery issue, either at the founding or during the antebellum issue. And then use that to maybe tell us whether Lincoln's reading of Shakespeare informed his thoughts about slavery. You have a completely fascinating passage about how Lincoln considered the abortive prayer of Claudius over a thought that that was more important than the more famous Hamlet soliloquy and that Lincoln found in Shakespeare, a sort of complicated view of Christianity that was relevant to Lincoln's thinking. So, disentangle the influence of the Declaration and the founders on Lincoln to the influence of Shakespeare and tell us whether it influenced his thinking about slavery.
Lucas Morel: [00:37:25] Sure, beginning with that first question, in terms of the anti-slavery movement, Frederick Douglasssssss quoted Shakespeare probably 10 times as often as Lincoln did and his were either explicit quotations in quotations or in a number of allusions.
And so, Douglas like Lincoln, right, they were autodidacts, they were chiefly self-taught. And so they share that background and upbringing, if you will. By far of course, Douglas, having the more difficult go at it because he was legally enslaved, until he escaped when he was 20.
And so, the quoting of Shakespeare was fairly, I don't know if it was commonplace, I haven't exhausted my reading of the abolitionists, but it was certainly one that, that Frederick Douglas who, who wrote the King's English, if you will, it came to him readily and, so I'll just leave that at that.
And in terms of Lincoln, it's the same letter to Hackett, where he mentions, he closes by asking Hackett, you know, to be, or not to be, you know, is the most popular, the most famous, speech from Shakespeare. But I think the one that you mentioned, right, the King Claudius speech that begins, "Oh, my offenses rank," where he's trying to confess his sin, but he realizes, I like the fruit of my sin too much, and so it is an abortive prayer. And, Lincoln loved that. He says, this is humanity. We want to do well. We recognize, unless we're completely corrupt, we recognize our baseness, our sinfulness, our frailty, our willfulness, but darn it. Sometimes the goods that we get from it still tastes sweet. And Lincoln thinks, I think we can extrapolate from that soliloquy, that prayer of Claudius, an analog that Lincoln drew to American slavery. Here was a country that, at least in Lincoln's mind, began by acknowledging this is evil, but it's a longstanding one.
What I call a pre-existing condition, if you will. It's one we could not rend ourselves from, or extricate ourselves from immediately, but one that we knew we needed to get rid of to be consistent with our republic and a slave-holding republic is a contradiction in terms. And so they did what they could to prevent slavery from further entrenching itself. Right. Cutting off its importation in 1808 and then banning it in the only territory that they had held, the Northwest territory, in 1787. And it was re-upped by the first Congress. But then, of course, the invention of the cotton gin in 1792/93, threw that out the window and it became too lucrative.
Even though it was, abolished, principally, through gradual emancipation in six out of the original 13 States. And Vermont came in with, you know, 14th state as an anti-slavery state, anti-slavery constitution, but darn it. We're stuck. And, and we've got this slavery it's too good to get rid of. And yet we know in our heart of hearts that it is wrong. And so Lincoln wants to know from this actor, what do you think, to be, or not to be? Yes, it flows trippingly across the tongue, but boy, the one that really gets at the soul of the human condition is not whether one is contemplating suicide, which by the way, Lincoln, as a melancholic, odds are, he did contemplate that time and time again because he was congenitally depressed, for him to say, not to be or not to be, but the, Oh, my offense is ranks soliloquy. That's the one we really need to mull over. I think he is, bearing the soul of the nation to Hackett in saying that this is our problem, our problem with slavery, we recognize that as a problem and the tragedy, the great tragedy of America is we couldn't get rid of it peacefully, which is to say politically.
It came to a war and a war that he confesses himself later, second inaugural most explicitly, but then after the second inaugural in a letter to Thurlow, he confesses, I didn't even begin this war of self-defense in an effort to get rid of slavery, right? It was an outcome that no one seriously expected.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:41:42] Wow. So powerful. Thank you for that. Barry, several of our friends in the Q&A are asking when did Shakespeare in America gradually cease to become blockbuster entertainment and become perceived as highbrow stuff for high school and educated people? Does quoting Shakespeare fall off precipitously post-Lincoln? And then when did he stop being taught in schools routinely? And then to give us a sense of the present, a time when Shakespeare is less taught and less considered blockbuster entertainment that was in the 19th, maybe you'd like to share with us your experiences teaching Shakespeare in prisons.
Barry Edelstein: [00:42:18] Sure. Well, you know, we have sort of the great 20th century apotheosis of mass Shakespeare would be Orson Wells and the Mercury Theater on the radio. And, you even see, Lucille Ball trying to act with Orson Wells on an episode of I Love Lucy right there. So Orson Wells, I would, you know, this is a little armchair here, so forgive me, but that's kind of the end point of mass popular Shakespeare. After that you start looking at movies of Shakespeare, they perform terribly, right? They... even things that we think of like, Kenneth Branagh's Henry the Fifth, a great, incredibly successful Shakespeare movie made $20 million, right? Somewhere in the post-Orson Wells, post-war, American world of entertainment, Shakespeare precipitously, declines. You know, you'd have to get cultural critics to help unpack it more, but I'm sure the rise of television has a huge amount to do with this. I'm sure the decline of reading generally has a huge amount to do with this. However, I would say that it's not the case, necessarily, that Shakespeare is still not taught. He's on the common core, and that would make him pretty much the only writer that's universally taught in school systems around the country that follow the common core.
And again, maybe my colleagues will remember when this was, there was some survey, I'm going to say late 1980s, early 1990s, that said that 90 something percent of American students had read Shakespeare. It's also true, and this'll tie it back to what I do for a living, there are a huge number of Shakespeare theaters around the United States.
Now we are, you know, a very sort of niche art form. Last year, in 2019, 30 million Americans bought theater tickets. Compared to the number of people who bought movie tickets, that's a very, very small number. A success at the old globe of a Shakespeare play will be seen by 30,000 people.
That will be a monumental, world-shaking success for a majorSshakespeare theater like the old globe, and those numbers are tiny compared to what you would reach on television or what you would reach in the movies. So, I think you have to look at sort of forties and fifties when you start to see a real earthquake happen and the society generally, move away from a kind of reader culture, a Shakespeare culture. But, let me, let me tie this back into the second part of the question you asked. Now, the old globe, we are the, at least before COVID, we were the third largest regional theater in America. And one of the things that we do in addition to putting on a lot of plays is something that we call arts engagement, where we bring theater to disenfranchised, marginalized, underserved populations around San Diego County. And we serve refugees, seniors, the homeless, veterans, populations that for whatever reason, don't enjoy regular access to our shows and our headquarters in Balboa park, because those tickets are expensive or because you physically have to be able to get there.
And we have an extremely robust, one of the country's leading programs of theater with incarcerated populations. And all of that work circles around Shakespeare. In fact, we just received a huge grant from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to run Shakespeare programs in state prisons in California.
Right now in COVID it's on television. There's a closed-circuit television system in the state penitentiary system and that's where we are. And it's all about Shakespeare. And the question is why? Why is Shakespeare speaking to incarcerated populations, as eloquently as he does? On one level, it's about emotional intelligence and the same things that made Shakespeare appealing to Lincoln.
You know, you want to talk about guilt. You want to talk about loss. You want to talk about family. You want to talk about violence and whether or not it is a useful strategy to achieve progress and to get what you want. Well, you're going to find all that stuff in Shakespeare. And, you know, one of my favorite stories, seeing a guy do Romeo's banished speech, he has a long speech about being banished, banish-ed, as Shakespeare writes it.
And you know, I've never seen the speech done more powerfully than by a guy who is living the life of a man who's banished behind bars; put away for decades, talking up Romeo's language of banishment. For me, it's not about Shakespeare as a means of self-improvement. We're not bringing Shakespeare to penitentiaries to sort of make people better.
We're bringing Shakespeare to penitentiaries, to help people find voices for themselves. In Shakespeare, they can find ways to express things that they maybe aren't able to express themselves. They find a language that puts specific expression to their own thoughts, to their own feelings, that perhaps they're not able to find without that help.
And so Shakespeare becomes a meeting place. Shakespeare becomes a place of gathering, a place where people can find a version of themselves and their own story that they can't necessarily find within. And I can report to everybody, maybe he's not thriving so well in the cinema, maybe he's become a little marginalized in our reading, but in the world of the prison system, the refugee community here in Southern California, the homeless community here in Southern California, the globe, other theaters like us, keeping Shakespeare very, very much alive because he is a place where people can find their experience in a, in a way more eloquent than anywhere else that they can look.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:48:08] What an inspiring story of the vanishing speech and what heartening a report that Shakespeare remains so powerful as a means of emotional expression in the prisons and remains as relevant to the American experience. Thanks to your path, bricking educational efforts. Lorna granted, Jerry reports, I just heard President Obama cite the impact of Shakespeare's tragedies. I would say Shakespeare, said President Obama, continues to be a touchdown. I think he's foundational for me and understanding how certain patterns repeat themselves and play themselves out between human beings. Kevin, Barry draws an interesting distinction between Shakespeare as self-improvement and Shakespeare as a means of emotional expression or conveying a sense of the arc of history, what was he for the founders? And maybe share with us in our final round, some of what you think some of the most significant invocation of Shakespeare by the Founders was?
Kevin Hayes: [00:49:10] Well, Shakespeare really satisfied the dual purpose of literature in the 18th century. I mean, this was a, this was the time before art for art's sake. This was the time when people believed that any work of good literature had to do two things: they had to both delight and instruct. And one that didn't instruct, was not as good as one that did both delighting and instructing and, for readers in the 18th century, Shakespeare did both.
And, and so they, you know, he was very much appreciated for that. I think the one reason why his history plays and his tragedies were more liked and more read than his comedies was because they did instruct more than just delight. One of my favorite references to Shakespeare in Jefferson's writings, he's giving some advice to a young student, who's looking to read more and wanting some advice about what to read.
And Jefferson says, oh, you don't need to read moral philosophy. You know, our God has given us the, the natural ability to understand what's right from wrong and understand a moral philosophy. And if you want to know more about moral philosophy, just read King Lear. And so, Shakespeare was very much a way to enjoy reading, but to learn some of the fundamental ideas about how humans should behave toward one another and how they should act and what happens if you don't respect your fellow man, and you serve his powers. And so I think that, that's true for Jefferson. I think that's true for Washington and Adams and many of the founders, probably perhaps all of the founders who've read Shakespeare.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:50:49] Wonderful. Thank you for that. Lucas, I guess I'll ask you a version of the same question. What were the indications of Shakespeare by Lincoln or Douglass or other Civil War era figures that were most significant? And are there particular moments that really crystallize the crisis through Shakespeare in ways that you'd like to share with the audience?
Lucas Morel: [00:51:12] Well, I have to, if you had asked me what is two plus two, my answer would still be the second inaugural address. I think that is the most sublime, suigenerous, political speech by an American president, perhaps by any politician in American history.
And, I believe that the inspiration for at least the most harrowing part of the second inaugural, where he talks about the possibility that God might be using the war as a scourge, as a punishment upon both sides for, you know, 250 years with a bond man's toil, right? A quarter of a millennium, for, you know, exploiting, the labor of this particular race of people on American soil.
I think Lincoln, I mean, it's an understatement to say that Lincoln set the bar high for himself, in a political speech, which Frederick Douglass said sounded more like a sermon, than a state paper, but there, I'm going to have to cite another abortive prayer. And it's the final prayer of Henry the Fifth, right before the battle where the odds are massively against them.
And he's trying to get God on his side. He's trying to, get God on his side of a war that he unjustly provoked, as Shakespeare presents it. And he tries to share with God, look, all these good things that I've done. I'm paying for people to pray in these chanceries and he's got this wonderful passage.
I'm going to get back to the second inaugural as a result. This is what Henry says: "Oh, not today; think not upon the fault my father made encompassing the crown. I, Richard's body, have entered a new, and on it have bestowed more contrite tears, then from it issued force of blood." That contrast of tears, Henry the Fifth crying over the dead body in contrast, with blood, I think possibly suggested this from Lincoln: "if God wills that it continue the war until all the bond men's wealth right, 250 years of unrequired toil should be sunk. And until every drop of blood drawn with the last shall be paid by another drawn with the sword. As was said, 3000 years ago so still it must be said, the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."
Here is a president, the first time confessing that slavery is wrong in public to the nation and saying we might be getting punished for this thing that has been going on for so long in this country. But now, with the Emancipation Proclamation and the passage of the 13th Amendment, which is on its way to ratification in March of 1865, it happens eventually in December.
Lincoln is showing the justice that God may be exacting upon America for expropriating this labor of the lives of so many Black people in a war that right now, every time we count, it goes up, right? It's, you know, three quarters of a million people that lost their lives. Lincoln says if the war were to continue, but as we know it doesn't continue, it only continues for about four or five more weeks and it's over. He says, if it were to continue, the believers in the living God would say, well, yeah, this sounds like the God that we're familiar with in the Bible. But the fact that it's about to be ended, as Lincoln knows, everybody knows in March. And everybody's thinking of Reconstruction.
What Lincoln is actually saying is, this, we must count as an act of mercy on God's part, precisely because he doesn't let this war go on indefinitely. But for that passage in the second inaugural, the last paragraph and the last sentence, which is the most famous part of the second inaugural, would follow as a non-sequitur right with malice toward none with charity for all.
You don't get to that without showing this depiction of God's character as one who is both just and merciful. And as he says, right, both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, but came to different conclusions about the justice of slavery. He says, if that's your God, perhaps, as this war comes to a close, we should all start acting a lot more like him.
Jeffrey Rosen: [00:55:33] Beautiful. Thank you so much. Barry Edelstein, Kevin Hayes, and Lucas Morrell for an inspiring discussion of the relevance of Shakespeare to the Founders in American history. Thank you, friends, for joining for an hour to learn together. And you're homework, if you choose to accept it is to read the books of these great scholars.
Barry Edelstein's "Thinking Shakespeare,"Kkevin Hayes' "Shakespeare and the Making of America," and Lucas Morrel's "Lincoln and the American Founding." And of course, dear friends of the National Constitution Center, let us together read the works of Shakespeare. Thank you so much, and see you soon.
Jackie McDermott: [00:56:19] This episode was produced by me, Jackie McDermott, along with Tanaya Tauber, John Guerra and Lana Ulrich. It was engineered by Greg Sheckler. Please rate, review, and subscribe to Live at the National Constitution Center on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen, and join us back here next week. On behalf of the National Constitution Center, I'm Jackie McDermott.
