{epub download} Shakespeare in a Divided America What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future FREE EBOOK

Step-By Step To Download this book:
Click The Button "DOWNLOAD"
Sign UP registration to access Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us
About Our Past and Future & UNLIMITED BOOKS
DOWNLOAD as many books as you like (personal use)
CANCEL the membership at ANY TIME if not satisfied
Join Over 80.000 & Happy Readers.
{epub download} Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About
Our Past and Future FREE EBOOK

{epub download} Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and
Future FREE EBOOK
{epub download}
Shakespeare in a
Divided America:
What His Plays Tell
Us About Our Past
and Future FREE
EBOOK
Description
From leading scholar James Shapiro, a timely exploration of what Shakespeare’s plays
reveal about our divided land, from Revolutionary times to the present day
The plays of William Shakespeare are rare common ground in the United States. They are read at
school by almost every student, staged in theaters across the land, and long valued by
conservatives and liberals alike. For well over two centuries, Americans of all stripes—presidents
and activists, writers and soldiers—have turned to Shakespeare’s works to explore the nation’s
fault lines, including such issues as manifest destiny, race, gender, immigration, and free speech.
In a narrative arching across the centuries, from Revolutionary times to the present day, leading
scholar James Shapiro traces the unparalleled role of Shakespeare's four-hundred-year-old
tragedies and comedies in illuminating the many concerns on which American identity has turned.
Reflecting on how Shakespeare has been invoked—and at times weaponized—at pivotal
moments in our past, Shapiro takes us from President John Quincy Adams’s disgust with
Desdemona’s interracial marriage to Othello, to Abraham Lincoln’s and his assassin John Wilkes
Booth’s competing obsessions with the plays, up through the fraught debates over marriage and
same-sex love at the heart of the celebrated adaptations Kiss Me, Kate and Shakespeare in Love.
His narrative culminates in the 2017 controversy over the staging of Julius Caesar in Central Park,
in which a Trump-like leader is assassinated. Deeply researched, and timely, Shakespeare in a
Divided America reveals how no writer has been more closely embraced by Americans, or has
shed more light on the hot-button issues in our history. Indeed, it is by better understanding
Shakespeare's role in American life, Shapiro argues, that we might begin to mend our bitterly
divided land.