James Shapiro: Shakespeare in a Divided America

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 will be in conversation with Second Home co-founder Rohan Silva to discuss 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 sheddng 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.

This event has now passed. You can watch it back on our youtube channel here, or listen to the talk on our Creative Collisions podcast here.