The Briefing The history behind today’s news
“In many ways Shakespeare speaks more clearly and directly to American preoccupations than to English ones”
and directly to American preoccupations than to English ones. America embraced Shakespeare as its national poet even after the US broke with England in 1776, and he’s never really had a rival as the writer that everyone in the nation reads. One of the things I learned while writing my new book is that America’s Shakespeare is not England’s or Britain’s Shakespeare. Certain plays, such as , take on a distinctive political and social meaning here matter in terms of class in the UK in a way they don’t in the US.
