About Julius Caesar

So those literary geniuses, Fox News and Donald Trump, Jr., have decided to attack a "New York play" that they allege stages the assassination of Donald Trump. It is, of course, Shakespeare in the Park's production of Julius Caesar. And of course, Fox and Trump's loyal followers don't need to actually see the play to raise an enormous outcry, because denouncing people is too much fun for fact-checking.

It makes me sad, because Julius Caesar has been more important to America than any of Shakespeare's other plays. It was the play most taught in American schools for many decades, because it speaks about questions at the heart of the American experiment: about the nature of a republic and the duties we owe it, about the danger of tyrants and the dangers of civil violence. It's sad to see a public debate based on ignorance about this play.

So, alas, it's time for a special edition of Ask Me About Shakespeare, coming to you this time from Washington, DC, where I'm spending a month at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Let's take it away:

How much of this production was paid for by the NEA? (-Don T., NYC, via twitter)

None of it. Nada. Zilch.


When does a play like this verge into political speech? (-Don T., NYC, via twitter)

It's a play about the Dictator of Rome. It is and has always been about politics. Its central subject is politics. Every major male character is a Roman politician. Come on.

Does that change things? (-Don T., NYC, via twitter)

In that political speech has even more protection under the First Amendment, maybe. Political speech is a guaranteed Constitutional right.

Okay, but Shakespeare isn't about current politics.

Isn't he? Julius Caesar has been used to comment on current politics over and over again. It's been used to critique the rise of Mussolini. And at least once it's been used to implicitly comment on Obama in the same implicit way that Shakespeare in the Park is implicitly pointing at Trump.


One of the basic rules of understanding Shakespeare's history plays is that he is always more interested in the history of his own day than the history he is writing about. Always.

How is it still Shakespeare if it's in modern dress?

People have been doing "modern dress" Shakespeare for more than a hundred years at this point. Let's not act like it's some crazy novelty. And Shakespeare and his partners did "modern dress" themselves; they did Julius Caesar in 16th-century clothes, probably with a few "Roman" costume pieces thrown into the mix. People don't start putting Julius Caesar in togas until the 1800s.

The Public Theater, which stages Shakespeare in the Park, follows a standard rule about modern dress: they change costumes, in ways that are meant to work as visual footnotes, so that Roman senators for example dress like American senators. But they stick faithfully to Shakespeare's actual words and never add any modern language.

This play is not an adaptation of Julius Caesar. It really is Julius Caesar.

Why is Caesar killed by women and minorities? (-Fox N., NYC)

Because the Public Theater has, for the last fifty years or so, been a pioneer in cross-casting across gender and race. Fox News may object to this as political correctness, but it's a way of opening up parts to a wider range of American actors and ultimately making the pool more competitive. It's hard to find good Shakespeareans. Letting talented actors of color into the casting mix, and giving women a wider range of roles to play, definitely improves the overall standard of acting. This has now become standard practice; the last two professional Shakespeare plays I saw (one in DC, and one in Staunton, Virginia) cast across race and gender lines.

If you ever have a choice between seeing a mid-tier white male British actor do Shakespeare and seeing James Earl Jones do Shakespeare, by all means go with James Earl Jones. It's the American thing to do, and you won't be sorry.

But doesn't that look like Trump?

Yes, vaguely. Clearly, the Public is okay with people drawing that connection, which a lot of the audience was probably going to read into this play at this moment anyway. Much the same way that casting African-American Caesars during the last Administration let people draw the Obama connection.

But they aren't calling that character Trump, and Julius Caesar's lines are (how to put this?) deeply unlike the way our current President speaks.

But Shakespeare never depicted a living public figure on stage.

Didn't he? Actors and playwrights in his day were specifically forbidden to depict living people on stage, but they pretty clearly did it anyway. Loves Labors Lost is none-too-subtly about a particular king of France, and gives its King a posse of friends named after actual French noblemen.

Part of Shakespeare's costume inventory was clothing that various noblemen had gotten rid of once it went out of fashion. So there's always been the possibility that his actors could signal a topical reference by dressing like the political figure they were mocking, dressing in the man's actual clothes. Once, a while after Shakespeare died, his acting company bought a much-hated Spanish ambassador's sedan chair when that ambassador went back to Spain. When they carried one of their bad guys around stage in that chair, everyone knew who they meant.


So, they're endorsing Trump's assassination, right?

There is no way that Julius Caesar endorses Caesar's assassination. It is clearly a terrible thing to do, and all of the assassins are punished.

In fact, all of the conspirators except Brutus are clearly self-interested and immoral.  (As Antony says of Brutus:

All of the conspirators but only he
Did what they did in envy of great Caesar.)

Let's go to the Public Theater's own website to describe the play. In its director's words:

"Julius Caesar can be read as a warning parable to those who try to fight for democracy by undemocratic means.
To fight the tyrant does not mean imitating him." – Oskar Eustis

Eustis is right that the play presents both Caesar AND his assassins as dangers to the public. Caesar is a tyrant in the making, who is destroying the Roman Republic and replacing it with an autocracy. But his assassins are, well, assassins. They traffic in blood, and threaten Rome as much as Caesar does.

And this, of course, is why earlier productions could invite an Obama reading: that reading is that Obama is being attacked by these vicious politicians.

The joke here is that Julius Caesar depicts Caesar's enemies pretty much the way most of the people denouncing the play see Trump's critics: as a pack of conspirators who envy the great man's greatness.

Then who's the good guy?

Shakespeare's play doesn't have simple bad guys and good guys. That is why the play is still worth reading. It's morally complicated, just as the world we live in is.


But they show him being murdered on stage!

In the original script. It's been like this since around 1599. And that assassination scene is not designed to make you all excited about assassinations. Oh God, no.

No one treated Democratic presidents like this.
 
Maybe you should read Barbara Garson's Mac Bird! which specifically adapts Macbeth as a critique of LBJ.

Well, they should have left Trump out of it.

They can't. I couldn't be more sorry to tell you this, but there's no way to do that right now. People will make the Trump connection whether you want them to or not.

I just spent a semester teaching Shakespeare's history and tragedies, a semester that started about a week before inauguration. And I never discuss current politics in my classroom, least of all with undergraduates. I never said Trump's name in the classroom. But my students wanted to make the connection, over and over again.

Richard III reminded them of Trump. Hamlet's uncle reminded them of Trump. Macbeth reminded them of Trump. And those characters are much clearer villains than Caesar is. We got to an example of tyranny, or demagoguery or political dishonesty, and I had to keep students from talking about Trump. It got exhausting after a while.

Trump is on everyone's minds. He kind of insists on being on everyone's minds. And so people are going to connect him to plays like Julius Caesar.

Look, it's a play where a successful politician, who attracts huge rallies of the common people, is seen as a threat to centuries of democratic government. That politician has a band of dedicated enemies who are motivated by a mix of patriotism, rancor, and envy. 

You don't have to say Trump to get audiences thinking about Trump. (In fact, Shakespeare in the Park literally never says the word "Trump.") The audience is going to make the connection to Trump no matter what. It's inevitable. So there's a logic to just letting them do that and running with it. This has to be the Julius Caesar about the beginning of Trump's presidency, because no audience is going to let it be anything else.

Well, is Shakespeare really any guide to today's politics?

More than two centuries of American politicians have thought so. And Julius Caesar is also a play about the danger of propaganda and mob fury in politics. It's a play about lying to the people to get them angry. Mark Antony is a gifted orator and a smooth liar, who eventually whips the common people into a murderous frenzy based on falsehoods and distortions and then sends them out to do violence. 

In fact, one of the key scenes in the play has a mob murder a poet whom they've mistaken for someone else. That happens onstage too.

So, angry people on Twitter, remember: Julius Caesar is also a play about the dangers of being whipped up into an angry, undiscriminating mob. Maybe you should log off for a bit and give it a read.

(cross-posted from Dagblog, where comments are welcome. Comments are closed on this site.) 

Trump vs Hamilton

A brash loudmouth from New York City has been taking America by storm lately, to the consternation of the traditional political elite. I'm talking, of course, about Alexander Hamilton, and about Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda's monstrous, Grammy-winning Broadway hit. A rap-driven Broadway musical with a racially diverse cast has managed to delight many conservatives with its joyful, reverent embrace of the Revolution and of the American Experiment. It's sold out a year in advance, and legions of fans, including me, bide time listening to the original soundtrack album over and over. (To quote Miranda's lyrics: his poor wife.) Hamilton isn't just a ground-breaking piece of theater; it's also a vision of America.

It's very different from the idea of America being peddled by that other phenomenal loudmouth from New York City, Donald Trump. Both Hamilton and Trump are enjoying unexpected, unprecedented success right now. So it's worth thinking about the competing national visions they're promoting.

Trump's vision is deeply anti-intellectual. There's a deep streak of know-nothingism in our history; Richard Hofstadter's classic Anti-Intellectualism in American Life makes the case so convincingly it breaks your heart. But Trump represents a new low point. His "speeches," which aren't really speeches but grab-bags of unrelated remarks, are pitched at something like a third-grade reading level, completely empty of anything like a policy, a plan, or an idea. (One of the secrets of Trump's success on Twitter is that he never has a thought too complicated for 140 characters. In fact, most of his tweets include three distinct sentences, with three Trump-sized thoughts.) And he is openly hostile to thinking, to expertise, to knowledge. Remember, this is a guy who believes every dumbass thing he sees on the internet. Trump appeals to a "poorly educated" voter base (Trump's words, not mine) by appealing to their resentment of education, and he's good at channeling that resentment because he shares it.

Hamilton, on the other hand, openly celebrates the Founders' intellectual achievements. America has a long anti-intellectual tradition, but it was founded by some serious thinkers and writers. Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Madison, Hamilton: that's a serious murderers' row of brainpower. The biggest exception, Washington, was a man of action with little formal education, but Washington wasn't bragging about that. He was part of a rich intellectual culture and he valued others for their intellectual attainments. (Compare even a random letter of Washington's with a Trump speech sometime and ask yourself which of them went to college.) The first sentence of Miranda's musical introduces Hamilton as "a hero and a scholar" and there is a constant focus on Hamilton's ferocious intelligence, his "top-notch brain" and his incredible gifts as a writer. ("Hamilton's a host unto himself. As long as he can hold a pen/ He's a threat.") You can watch Miranda pitching the idea of the show to an initially skeptical White House audience a few years ago, saying that Hamilton's success was "all on the strength of his writing; I think he embodies the word's ability to make a difference."

That emphasis on Hamilton's literary power is part of Miranda's surprising but effective case that Hamilton is like a rapper; verbal facility is the key (as is coming up from nowhere and getting in endless beefs). Hamilton recreates a sense of the Founders' intimidating brilliance through the most intricate and dazzlingly complicated raps that Broadway has ever seen. The result is that Hamilton clocks in at a staggering twenty thousand words, performed at a lightning-fast clip: faster than Sondheim, four times the speed of Gilbert & Sullivan, faster even than the famous "Model of a Major-General" song. You come away from Hamilton with the sense that the Revolution and hip-hop are part of a single, larger American conversation. But you also come away with the sense that nothing is more American than being smart. After all, America's inventors were so smart it was scary.

Hamilton is the story of an intellectual, but also of an immigrant. While Trump and bashes immigrants on the campaign trail, Hamilton celebrates its Caribbean-born hero as "another immigrant/ Comin' up from the bottom." Hamilton gets called an "immigrant" over and over, by nearly everyone in the show. (At Yorktown, Hamilton and Lafayette cheer each other with the phrase "Immigrants! We get the job done!") And Hamilton itself is deliberately cast across color lines, with African-American, Latino, and Asian performers playing various white historical figures; that's both a radical move, because casting a black Jefferson is nowhere close to a neutral choice, but also a completely legible move, growing out of decades of color-blind casting in classical theater. (If you can cast a black Juliet on Broadway without the audience getting too literal, a black George Washington is just one more step.) Hamilton is celebrating America as a glorious melting pot and casting a Hispanic writer-performer in the lead while Republicans are seething with xenophobia on the campaign trail and ranting about a wall to keep out Mexican immigrants (because no human smuggler has ever thought of using tunnels. Loser of a plan. Sad!). Hamilton's America looks like America; Trump's America is nativist and whites-only.

So one vision of America is pro-immigrant and pro-intellectual; the other is anti-minority and anti-intellectual. Those combinations are not accidental. They're not inevitable either; Jefferson was both an intellectual and a racist. But anti-intellectualism and either nativism or outright racism have gone tightly together for a long time. One early anti-immigrant party was literally called the Know-Nothings. It comes down to the question of how we define America.

America was created in recent history, as countries go, and that makes it all too obvious that we don't really have to be here. Older nations have grown up over much, much longer periods of time (and went through some long, difficult pains to develop national identities). Being French is pretty straightforward. But being American ... what even is that?

One answer is that America is defined by a set of ideas (and ideals): America is the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the belief in liberty. We're an invented country, and the thing that holds us together is our shared democratic beliefs. That's an appealing story, on a lot of levels, and it's at least partly the truth. That story also has the virtue of providing a relatively clear test that gets around the murkiness that ethnic or racial definitions of America fall into: there are these documents and principles, and if you embrace them you're one of us. That vision lends itself to immigration, because you can be one of us, in the most important way of all, the second you step off the boat. And that's inevitably an intellectual definition of being American; it's about philosophical ideas. Hamilton reflects this time-honored vision.

But that intellectual definition isn't very welcoming to people who dislike abstract thought or who actively resent it. It's all pretty airy-fairy, and not really about concrete facts. So there's always been another answer to the question "What is America?" that gives an answer based in race and ethnicity. Being American is being white, speaking English, being culturally and ethnically like the other "real" Americans. This idea never dies. And it allows people to justify taking things (land, money, labor) from groups who get defined as "not American," so it can, uh, whitewash things like land grabs as noble and virtuous rather than, you know, criminal. It's always had that base economic appeal. Of course, because the question of who a "real American" is, or who counts as white, is never straightforward and has constantly changed throughout our history, this vision of America is always, at best, intellectually incoherent and usually flat-out stupid. (I mean, the main thing that makes us American is ... being like the English? What?) But this is the Trump vision.

This is the vision of America that allows some people to say, matter-of-factly, that New York City is not American. Note that one of Ted Cruz's counterattacks on Trump is that he has "New York City values" which means not being really American. From any sane perspective, New York City is as American as America gets. Is London not English? Is Paris not French? Don't be a jerk.

It would be nice to say that one of these visions is the real answer, and the other is not. Clearly, I prefer America-as-idea to America-as-ethnic-tribe. The truth is that both answers are partial truths, and both have been operating throughout America's history. But that doesn't mean that one vision isn't better than the other. The Hamilton vision is better than the Trump vision in every way, morally and pragmatically. It is worth fighting for. It is worth winning for. And it's no accident that Hamilton is joyous and forward-looking while Trumpism is pessimistic and aggrieved, endlessly talking about past grievances and lost greatness. The politics of ethnic resentment demand that you claim to have been robbed, which is pretty hilarious coming from white Americans, so that it always looks back to the lost good old days and treats modernity as awful. But Hamilton's vision is American in its optimism. The vision of America as ideal can always look forward. Our ideas, our beliefs, will always have a future. We can always build America. We can always make America better. And new Americans will flock to that banner every day. Those of us who embrace America, the idea, have not yet begun to fight.

I'll let George Washington sing us to the chorus:

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog