ABSTRACT
There may be no one play that can be characterized as the definitive Shakespearean text for the American experience, but a select few have made their presence felt throughout the history of the United States. Early on, Richard III and Othello were most frequently presented (Sturgess 16-17, 56-57); the relatively unproblematic depiction-at least in stage versions-of a tyrant’s rise and fall and the profoundly problematic consideration of blackness in the midst of white culture understandably connected with the issues at work in the nation’s political and economic founding. In time, however, Hamlet and Julius Caesar figured prominently on stage and through references in public discourse. Charles H. Shattuck has commented on the enduring popularity of both plays, captured vividly in the partnership of Edwin Booth and Lawrence Barrett in the late nineteenth century (2: 31-48); the acclaim, of course, was mingled with notoriety, since Edwin’s brother John Wilkes Booth had been President Abraham Lincoln’s assassin in 1865, casting himself in the role of a tyrannicide such as Shakespeare’s Brutus (Furtwangler 97-100). Late twentieth-century political references regularly return to Hamlet. George Shultz, Secretary of State for President Ronald Reagan, has repeatedly insisted that the United States should not become “the Hamlet of nations,” keeping itself from decisive action by undue concern for consequences (Shultz A25; see also Cartelli 99). Not long after the time that Shultz first drew this analogy, filmmaker Oliver Stone proclaimed the United States a nation of Hamlets in his film J.F.K., as his cinematic rendering of conspiracy theorist Jim Garrison equates America with the Prince of Denmark seeking to solve the mystery of Old Hamlet’s death: “We have all become Hamlets in our own country, children of a slain father-leader whose killers still possess the throne” (quoted in Steel 32).
