Review

Michael A. Anderegg, Lincoln and Shakespeare. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2015. Pp. 224.

 
While it is a commonplace that Abraham Lincoln had an affinity for the works of William Shakespeare, comparatively little scholarly attention has been paid to the subject and no serious, in-depth study has been forthcoming. At least a dozen articles and essays address the subject directly, but except for the occasional provocative insight, they tend to be superficial, reporting the same meager collection of factual details and the same comments from contemporary observers. Part of the problem is admittedly Lincoln’s own relative silence on the subject, which is no doubt an aspect of his personal reserve and general disinclination to write about his own tastes and preferences in virtually all spheres. Unfortunately, the paucity of basic information has inevitably led to some misguided assumptions, such as the notion advanced by some biographers that Lincoln relished the dramatic presentations of Shakespeare that he witnessed on the Washington stage during his presidency.

It is thus encouraging to report that Michael Anderegg’s new book, Lincoln and Shakespeare, is a major step in the right direction. Although a fairly compact study, it is easily the most extensive of its kind to appear. The research is commendably resourceful and casts a wide net. For example, to measure the extent of Lincoln’s opportunities to see Shakespeare performed prior to his presidency, the author takes great pains to identify theatrical performances in both Springfield and Chicago that Lincoln might have seen. In the same way, the coverage of Lincoln’s demonstrable experience with the actors and plays he witnessed as president is extensive and lucidly presented. To take a different kind of example, the author deftly demonstrates how undocumented testimony about what Lincoln said regarding Shakespeare can be exposed by taking the trouble to run down its true sources.

In addition to diligence in research, Anderegg’s work is also notable for the deliberate caution of its judgments and conclusions. Being fully aware of how dodgy the testimony about what Lincoln said or did can often be, he is quite circumspect about which sources to credit and what conclusions might be justified. Early on he writes: “Without entirely dismissing what might be thought marginal evidence, I will here focus primarily on Lincoln’s own words as written down by him or as recorded contemporaneously by acquaintances and associates in diaries and letters. I will also rely on public information from newspapers and other more or less ‘official’ sources when those references are closely contemporary to the events they describe or report” (23).

Such scholarly diligence and caution make for a notably useful study, especially in its thorough and discriminating survey of existing scholarship, such as it is, on Lincoln and Shakespeare. But it is necessary to add that they also make for a modest result. While this study takes notice of some of the larger questions presented by its subject, launching new ideas and interpretations is generally beyond its purview. This is not to deny the virtues of the work but rather to suggest that they lay a solid groundwork for future study.

There are any number of promising directions that the study of Lincoln and Shakespeare might take. A determined inquiry into the influence of Shakespeare on Lincoln, for example, would be of great interest, but it would necessarily involve a fair amount of speculation, since Lincoln himself volunteered little, if anything, on the subject. A starting place might be William H. Herndon’s first lecture on his great law partner: “He read when young the Bible, and Shakespear when of age. This latter book was scarcely Ever out of his mind.”[1] Not everything Herndon offers about Lincoln is equally plausible or interesting, but, unlike his joint biography, his letters and lectures leave no doubt that his major fascination was Lincoln’s mind. A reason for giving this comment some weight is its context, for Herndon, a rabid reader and eager student of the philosophical currents of that day, says that he repeatedly offered Lincoln the loan of his latest books in hopes of inducing his partner to share his own intellectual enthusiasms, almost always without effect. As he allows here, Lincoln’s mind was such that he preferred instead to re-read Shakespeare. As president, Lincoln was credited with frequent recurrence to the Bible, but his visiting brother-in-law noticed that “Lincoln read Shakespear Every Evening—not the Bible.”[2]

Another topic with a larger reach might be the significance of Lincoln’s affinity for Shakespeare in the context of American culture. So many of the other consequential American writers contemporary with Lincoln—Emerson, Whitman, Melville, and Dickinson, for example—shared a similar fascination with Shakespeare, with Dickinson going so far as to ask, “Why is any other book needed?”[3] This topic, it seems to me, is particularly rife with likely openings for investigation.

Another avenue of fruitful investigation is surely Shakespeare’s text. Although he never acknowledged or perhaps even noticed it, Lincoln lived in a period in which great strides were being made in textual scholarship, culminating in the landmark Cambridge edition of Shakespeare that appeared at the end of Lincoln’s life. If this seems an inconsequential matter, or at a great remove from Lincoln’s experience, consider the issue of adaptations. In Lincoln’s day, several of Shakespeare’s most popular plays were known through exposure to performances based not on an authentic Shakespeare text but on adaptations crafted by actors. The most performed of Shakespeare’s plays in America and Great Britain during Lincoln’s era was Richard the Third, the standard acting edition of which featured an adaptation written in 1700 by Colley Cibber, a drastically rewritten version that had been preferred to Shakespeare’s original by both actors and audiences for 150 years.

Lincoln was part of a whole new generation of modestly educated people being brought to the appreciation of Shakespeare by reading rather than by theatrical performance. This widespread experience of the page rather than the stage would eventually make the adaptations unpopular for the same reason that Lincoln objected to them: because they were not Shakespeare but rank imitations. This generational change is a small but clear indication that during Lincoln’s time, Shakespeare was becoming important as a cultural symbol in America and that Lincoln’s attitudes were not merely idiosyncratic but indicative of a significant cultural development.

From his first exposure to the highly professional theatrical productions he saw in Washington, Lincoln actively complained to the actors and others about not only the use of adaptations but the practice of cutting lines, speeches, and whole scenes of Shakespeare’s text from stage performances. Lincoln’s famous letter to the actor James Hackett can be seen in its subtexts as the opening shot in what Lincoln’s son Robert characterized as his “battles” with Hackett over “the Poet and the Acting Editions.”[4] Hackett, it seems, could not bring Lincoln into sympathy with the theatrical reasons for cutting one of the best-known scenes in Henry the Fourth, Part I, or what the president regarded as the finest soliloquy in Hamlet. All of this helps to illuminate a remark he made to his friend Noah Brooks after seeing Edwin Booth in a production of The Merchant of Venice with no fifth act: “It was a good performance but I had a thousand times rather read it at home, if it were not for Booth’s acting.”[5]

From our perspective, we can now see that the general rise of literacy, the burgeoning classes of new readers it produced, and the revolutions in papermaking and printing that would make Shakespeare’s works much more affordable would eventually have a dramatic effect on the primacy of what had long been a theater-based Shakespeare. By following the connections between Lincoln’s intellectual preoccupations and the cultural developments of his time, Lincoln scholarship might extend its reach and utility.

1. Manuscript of William H. Herndon, “Analysis of the Character & Mind of Abm Lincoln,” Ward Hill Lamon Papers LN1947, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

2. Ninian W. Edwards (W. H. Herndon interview), [1865–66], Herndon’s Informants: Letters, Interviews, and Statements about Abraham Lincoln, ed. Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 446.

3. Quoted in Richard B. Sewall, The Life of Emily Dickinson, 2 vols. (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1974), 2:566.

4. Robert Todd Lincoln to James Hackett, March 17, 1871, Alfred Whital Stern Collection, Library of Congress.

5. Noah Brooks, “Personal Reminiscences of Lincoln,” Scribner’s Monthly 15 (Feb.–March 1878), 675.