Collecting Shakespeare: The Story of Henry and Emily Folger by Stephen H. Grant, and: Shakespeare in America: An Anthology from the Revolution to Now ed. by James Shapiro (review)

America’s longstanding love affair with Shakespeare manifests itself most visibly on the stage and in the classroom, but Stephen Grant’s Collecting Shakespeare and James Shapiro’s Shakespeare in America together illuminate many other indications of our embrace of the Bard. Collecting, for example, so obsessed Henry and Emily Folger that they found little time actually to read the books they bought. American authors constantly borrow plots, themes, and characters from specific Shakespeare plays, as Shapiro amply demonstrates with selections like Jonathan Sewall’s 1778 poem “Epilogue to Coriolanus,” Cynthia Ozick’s story “Actors,” and Jane Smiley’s lecture on the genesis of her novel A Thousand Acres. Grant’s book might be described as the biography of a somewhat reclusive couple and their archive, while Shapiro’s is a wide-ranging collection of Shakespeare-inspired writings. What these books have in common is how vividly they convey the passion that drove those collectors and authors. Excitement about Shakespeare’s plays fairly radiates from the pages of both.

Shapiro’s volume ranges beyond the strictly literary to include parodies, song lyrics, reviews of stage and screen productions, personal letters, interview transcripts, and even an 1895 political tract by Jane Addams. Shapiro also alludes to “Duke Ellington’s iconic 1957 jazz reinterpretation of Shakespeare, Such Sweet Thunder” (517). Perhaps the only forms of American Shakespeare spin-offs not represented here (very likely cost-prohibitive) are visual ones like paintings, sculptures, and cartoons in which the jokes derive from familiar quotations. The seventy-one selections that comprise Shakespeare in America, each introduced in a headnote by Shapiro, present an astonishing written panorama from 1776 to 2004—a finely tuned balance of diversified authorship, historical periods (indeed, the only decade not represented by at least one selection is the 1810s), representative and idiosyncratic attitudes, obligatory pieces, and surprises.

Interestingly, the 1860s get eleven entries, far more than any other decade and certainly appropriate, given how integral Shakespeare’s works were to American thought during the years before and after the Civil War. The first of the 1860s pieces is William Wells Brown’s eyewitness account of performances by Ira Aldridge as Othello and Hamlet in England, extracted from Brown’s 1862 book The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements. Other highlights of that decade include Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Recollections of a Gifted Woman” (1863), a fascinating and generous-spirited recollection of his personal acquaintance with the early Shakespeare-authorship-doubter Delia Bacon. President Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 letter to actor James Hackett is the sine qua non of this collection, and Shapiro’s headnote adds interesting commentary. John Wilkes Booth invokes Brutus in his self-justifying 1865 “Letter to the National Intelligencer.” An idealistic poem on the 1864 Shakespeare Tercentennial shows poet Oliver Wendell Holmes turning to Shakespeare as an antidote for war-weariness. Two humorous entries are Mark Twain’s 1864 prose parody of Julius Caesar and G. W. H. Griffin’s “Shylock,” A Burlesque (ca.1867). Herman Melville’s four-stanza poem “The Coming Storm” (1866), inspired by Sanford Robinson Gifford’s Hudson River School painting “A Coming Storm” and by the fact that Edwin Booth had originally owned it, mentions Hamlet once and Shakespeare twice.

The old truisms that you read Shakespeare to find yourself or that you find what you want to find in Shakespeare are reaffirmed by many selections in Shapiro’s collection. William Dean Howells’s heartwarming 1895 recollection of his boyhood enthusiasm for Shakespeare on the page (as opposed to the stage) is a case in point: “I had shared the conscience of Macbeth, the passion of Othello, the doubt of Hamlet; many times, in my natural affinity for villains, I had mocked...