Echoes and parallels of Shakespeare’s plays can be found in many aspects of the Lincoln assassination, as Shakespeare scholar John Andrews explains. Six months earlier, for example, his assassin John Wilkes Booth acted with his brothers Edwin Booth and Junius Brutus Booth, Jr., in Julius Caesar, a play which, like Macbeth, deals with the subject of assassination. Not long before his death, Lincoln was haunted by a dream that he compared to the persistent ghost of Banquo at Macbeth’s table.
John Andrews
Editor of The Everyman Shakespeare, executive director of the Washington branch of the English Speaking Union, president of the Shakespeare Guild
The Booths, Lincoln, and Julius Caesar
Shakespeare and Lincoln’s assassination
