Shakespeare and Early Twentieth-Century American Values

MARGARET KNAPP: They looked in Shakespeare for the values and the issues and ideas that they were interested in. So that of course meant they had to ignore parts of Shakespeare that didn't agree with their ideas.

So, where Shakespeare is always very suspicious of the mob, the crowd, the kind of popular population of the era, and you see that in plays like Coriolanus and the Henry VI plays, the Americans would borrow things that suggested that Shakespeare would have believed in a democracy or a republic, that he would have been interested in the New World because it was new, and that he would have seen in American self-reliance and American how-to, and the qualities that were important to Americans then, the qualities that he would consider to be important.

Now it took some digging in some cases, to find these sorts of things. There was a headline in one of the New York papers about how Shakespeare's Henry V play shows the need for preparedness for war, and of course in 1916 America was debating whether it was going to get into World War I. So that particular newspaper, which was taking a pro-war stance, used Henry V, which is a play about war, to argue that Americans needed to be prepared for war.