Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future

by James Shapiro,
Psychology Today, March 16, 2020

When he visited the War Department’s Telegraph Office to get news from the front and send instructions to his generals, Abraham Lincoln read lengthy passages of Shakespeare’s plays from texts he brought with him. During the last two years of his life, the president watched dozens of Shakespeare’s plays in Washington, D.C. theaters and grilled leading actors who visited the White House about their interpretations of characters and changes and omissions to what the Bard had written. When Lincoln was assassinated, mourners turned again and again to Macbeth, likening him to the slain Duncan, who “Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been/ So clear in his great office that his virtues/ Will please like angels, trumpet-tongued, against/ The deep damnation of his taking-off.”