James Shapiro: Theatre and democracy are mutually supportive – when one is in danger, both are in danger

“I hated Shakespeare in school,” James Shapiro says cheerfully. “I didn’t get it. I didn’t even get the dirty bits in Romeo and Juliet that my classmates all seemed to get.”

It’s an unexpected admission from an internationally renowned expert on Shakespeare. A writer and professor of English at Columbia University, Shapiro’s book 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare won the Baillie Gifford Winner of Winners prize last year, having first won the award in 2006 (it was then known as the Samuel Johnson prize). What changed his mind was seeing Shakespeare’s plays performed.

“I started backpacking in Europe in my late teens with my big brother, ended up in London, discovered you could see a play in a subsidised theatre with a student ID and live in a church basement or a youth hostel for a pound or so. I saw 30 plays in 30 days. By the time I was in my early 20s, I had seen perhaps 250 productions, which are all still tattooed in my skull.”

He was hooked. “It was a drug that was affordable, that did no lasting damage. It is no longer affordable for my students, who will not have the opportunity I had.”

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But in the United States, affordability is only one aspect of the problem; theatre there has been dragged into the conflict between politics and culture. For example, new legislation in Florida targeting “sexual conduct” means Romeo and Juliet can no longer be taught in full (no more “dirty bits”, presumably). The Addams Family, the country’s most popular school musical, was banned by a school district in Pennsylvania on the grounds that its themes are too dark.

“I got an email this morning from a director in Massachusetts who was trying to direct a production of Coriolanus,” Shapiro says. “He was told by the local library board of trustees that it would promote fascist tendencies and therefore they don’t want to let him do it.”

What begins as a war on theatre won’t stop there, Shapiro contends in his new book, The Playbook: A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War.

“Theatre and democracy were twinborn in ancient Greece, and there’s a reason for that,” he says. “Both in the theatre and in the political realm, ideas are debated. People are engaged collectively in these enterprises. Theatre and democracy are mutually supportive and when one is in danger the other is too.”

“I’m immersing myself in the issues that are tearing my country apart. Issues of democracy and theatre, issues of race, issues of immigration, issues of a deep political divide. I’m also obviously interested, as the subtitle of the book makes clear, [in the question] where do these culture wars which overwhelm us come from? And when did the right develop a playbook that destroyed progressive theatre in America?”

Shapiro began The Playbook “from the perspective of ignorance and curiosity”.

“When Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, I had been writing books about daily life in Elizabethan England and Jacobean England, and I suppose my publishers would have been very happy after 1599 and 1606 [his book about King Lear] to see me do 1612,” he says.

To Martin Dies, a bigoted white supremacist congressman from Texas, nothing could be more frightening than a progressive interracial theatre that one in five Americans had seen

“I realised that I’ve been writing about politics and theatre in Shakespeare’s England and knew very little about the relationship between politics and theatre in America, then or now. I immersed myself in what’s turned out to be a trilogy of books.”

The first, Shakespeare in a Divided America, was published in 2020. He is working on the third, a biography of Othello.

Shapiro believes that today’s attacks on American theatre originate in a struggle that took place in the 1930s, a time when the country’s politicians believed the arts were as vital as industry and agriculture. The Playbook opens with a fascinating description of the Federal Theater Project, a relief measure established in 1935 under President Roosevelt’s New Deal. Run by Hallie Flanagan, a theatre professor at Vassar College, the Federal Theater Project funded live performances and entertainment, creating employment for artists, writers, directors and theatre workers whose livelihoods had been seriously hit by the Depression and the popularity of movies.

“By November 1938, 25 million Americans had seen a Federal Theater Production in the last few years for free or for a pittance. These are plays about bad housing, the rise of fascism, power plants ... things that Broadway and Hollywood were not interested in,” says Shapiro.

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According to audience surveys, two-thirds of attendees had never seen a play before. At its peak, the project employed more than 12,000 artists, some of whom, such as Arthur Miller and Orson Welles (his production of Othello “was celebrated as a real triumph for Harlem and the 150 black actors involved in it”), would go on to become household names.

In 1939, following a campaign by Martin Dies, then director of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Congress axed the programme’s funding.

“To Martin Dies, a bigoted white supremacist congressman from Texas, nothing could be more frightening than a progressive interracial theatre that one in five Americans had seen,” says Shapiro.

“Its popularity from the position of the cultural right was terrifying because politicians would go to see a play staged across America on substandard housing and they would all start changing the laws in their jurisdictions about bad housing ... When you have playwrights engaging issues like this, and these plays are being seen, not just by the literati but by many people across a cultural and class spectrum, it leads to change. For some that change is threatening and for others that change is what’s necessary.”

Roosevelt’s government aimed to subsidise all the arts. “But when it came to the congressional attack on these, it’s a lot easier holding salacious, or seemingly salacious, lines or provocative lines from a play, than it is pointing to a mural at a post office or to a song, or photograph, and saying, ‘This is scandalous. So theatre in 1939 was the only part of this federal entity which had its funding completely cut.” The project shut down and was largely forgotten.

Ireland has invested in its writers, especially young writers, and the United States is so far from that that I don’t expect that to happen again in my lifetime

Shapiro was a judge on the Booker Prize last year and is clear about why he thinks so many Irish writers made the longlist: “Return on investment. Ireland has invested in its writers, especially young writers, and the United States is so far from that that I don’t expect that to happen again in my lifetime.”

Of Paul Lynch’s winning novel Prophet Song, he says, “It certainly popped the first time I read it ... a book has to be very strong to withstand four really critical readings from five judges.”

Of the novels entered for the award, he says, “There was no Pride and Prejudice or Oliver Twist in there, or Ulysses for that matter – a book that we would all say, we’re not even going to bother reading the next 40 books, this is going to be the Booker winner. There are just 30 to 40 books that are, in my estimation, in that year extraordinarily good. At that point it becomes somewhat arbitrary, based on the values and the backgrounds and the interests of the judges.”

Being a Booker judge is a big commitment. Shapiro signed up for it, he says, because his novel-reading habit had, “dropped to maybe a dozen novels a year, one a month, and my wife Mary Cregan is reading three or four novels a week, so I was a bit embarrassed and a bit concerned that the nutritional value of novels was not entering my diet.” (Cregan is also a writer – her memoir The Scar is one of the most thoughtful yet vivid accounts of depression and recovery I have read.)

He is adamant that “the playbook developed by the cultural right to squelch the arts, and theatre in particular, has to be exposed for what it is,” and that the arts deserve federal support.

“Arthur Miller, Orson Welles ... these people were supported at a crucial point when they were young and needed government support. There are people like Arthur Miller and Orson Welles out there who are not getting that today, and we will never hear of them.”

James Shapiro appears at three Dalkey Book Festival events: Biographer’s Ball; and Strangling Dissent: From Oppenheimer to Cancel Culture (both Friday 14th); and Shakespeare in America (Saturday 15th). The Playbook: A Story of Theatre, Democracy and the making of a Culture War, is published by Faber.