Calendar: James Shapiro: Shakespeare in a Divided America

Award-winning author James Shapiro reveals what Shakespeare can teach us about US history & politics

What can Shakespeare’s plays tell us about American life and politics? Could they help mend the nation’s divide?

Award-winning author and professor James Shapiro discusses his latest book Shakespeare in a Divided America, and explore the nation’s fault lines around race, gender, immigration and free speech.

In a narrative arching across the centuries, from Revolutionary times to the present day, Shapiro traces the unparalleled role of Shakespeare’s four-hundred-year-old tragedies and comedies in shedding light on the many concerns on which American identity has turned.

James Shapiro is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, and author of the award-winning 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare and The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606. He has edited an anthology on Shakespeare in America for the Library of America, and presented the BBC4 documentary The King and the Playwright.

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