James Shapiro

Reflecting on 40 years of Shakespeare at Columbia.

By Kate Sibery

Illustration by Audrey Wang

James Shapiro is the Larry Miller Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia where he has been teaching Shakespeare since 1985 and was an undergraduate in the 70s. He has published numerous books including, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, Shakespeare in a Divided America, and most recently, The Playbook: A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War. He is the Shakespeare Scholar in Residence at the Public Theater in New York City and currently serves on the search committee for the new University president.  

There was no time for pleasantries when I met Shapiro at his office on the sixth floor of Philosophy Hall. He ushered me in, leaving little more than a moment for me to scan the rows of books lining his office walls. I did manage to glimpse a framed photo of this past summer’s production of Twelfth Night in Central Park sitting on one of the shelves above his desk. In class, Shapiro is a performer. He enjoys cold-calling, having students act out scenes from Shakespeare’s plays, and even the occasional prop. But sitting in his office in Philosophy, the performance was stripped away. It became clear that after four decades of teaching, Shapiro’s fascination with the different ways in which students engage with Shakespeare—and what that reveals about our culture—hasn’t wavered. Over the course of our conversation, we talked about the relationship between Shakespeare and the American political landscape, the importance of learning how to argue, and the existential threat of AI. 

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

. . . 

The Blue and White: You’ve been teaching Shakespeare I since 1985. This is your last semester teaching it. Was it daunting when you first inherited the class?

James Shapiro: No, it wasn’t. Before I came to Columbia, I was a Shakespearian and it was just exciting being at a place where I had been a student in the seventies. I never took [my predecessor] Ted Taylor’s course because he gave Ds to all my friends and was reputedly a very hard grader. And it was a blessing because I would’ve—like a lot of his students or disciples—been pulled into his way of seeing the plays, which was one that focused on language rather than the theatrical. 

B&W: A lot of your work focuses on the mythology surrounding Shakespeare—his identity, his life, the cultural phenomenon of Shakespeare. At what point do you see the text getting left behind and the mythology taking on a life of its own? 

JS: One of the challenges I face in class is the tension between spending more time doing close readings and the larger stakes. Is it more important for me to take you through ten or twelve lines of text slowly or to explain things like the green world? So whether to focus on the language or on things that allow you to connect the play to your experience, to the world in which you’re living, to the world you will have to reckon with years from now when you leave Columbia. I think I lean more heavily towards those larger concerns than I might have earlier in my career, in part because the pressures on your generation are much more severe than the pressures that students in the eighties or nineties faced. Back then, I was really confident that students who wanted to go to grad school or go into publishing or the like, if they were good, wouldn’t face any obstacles—and now there are really great obstacles. When we’re talking about Bottom the Weaver and what it means to be in a monotonous job and seeking some kind of release through art, that lands for me much more powerfully now than it might have twenty, thirty years ago. 

B&W: You said in class that you can gauge something about the students you’re teaching based on how they respond to the question of whether or not Richard III should be played by a disabled actor or not. What, over the past few years, have you been able to glean through how we’re responding to Shakespeare? 

JS: Well, I had a student come up to me after class maybe fifteen years ago and said ‘I really don’t like the way you handled the disability issue’ and I realized ‘wow that student is right.’ I had another student maybe five years before that who stood up and said ‘I’m not going to sit through the class on Lucrece in which I have to experience sexual assault through the eyes of the criminal,’ and she got up and walked out. So, I would say fewer students get up and walk out these days, fewer students come up and challenge me in those ways. And one of the ways you learn as a professor is when students call you out. So if I had to recognize a single change it would be that students are more wary or cautious for whatever reason about challenging authority.

B&W: In the final chapter of your book, Shakespeare in a Divided America, you talk about the 2017 production at the Delacorte Theater of Julius Caesar, in which a Trump-like Caesar is assassinated onstage. You mention how the varying reactions to that production indicate the extreme partisanship in American politics and culture. How do you see this extreme partisanship impacting students? 

JS: What I didn’t understand when I published the chapter in that book was that that was a dress rehearsal for January 6. And I buried it in a footnote in the back, but the person who first ran onstage to disrupt that production was Laura Loomer, who is now an essential Trump advisor. So, for me, that episode exemplified the ways in which Shakespeare and battles over Shakespeare are at the center of a lot of the divisions within this country. I probably make my liberal values known in class a little bit, but I’m a deep believer in the diversity of ideas, and when I’ve had a class with a lot of G.S. military veterans, it has a different quality than a class that has a lot of actors and theater people in it. The composition of the class determines the politics of the discussion. It’s a place where people get to argue. There's been a little less argument in recent years. The Covid generation has lost that muscle a little bit. When you’re on a screen in high school, you don’t learn how to argue with the person sitting next to you. I miss that a bit, I try to encourage it, but I don’t belabor it because you can’t force people to do what they’re not comfortable doing. 

B&W: I find myself thinking a lot about what my humanities-centered education will bring me. I think reading and writing well will hopefully forever be invaluable. 

JS: I think so, but I think knowing how to argue effectively is the third wheel there. You have to read, write, and argue. As AI begins to lap up like a rising tide on what people for a long time have been able to do without computers, the ability to read and write and argue effectively is going to be the last bastion really. I mean I really feel bad for kids whose parents said ‘Learn how to code, don’t read Shakespeare,’ because now they’re out of work and will be. So, it’s very hard and because I have no social media whatsoever, I only got an iPhone three years ago, and one of the reasons for that is you get a lot more written if you don’t exist on social media, but the disadvantage of that is you are disconnected from the world. And that’s a tricky balance. As a professor you have to be connected enough to the world, so again, that’s another indication that it’s time to give somebody, more connected in those ways, more connected to where students are, a shot at teaching Columbia students. 

B&W: I wanted to ask you about the Shakespeare in the Park production this past summer, which I was lucky enough to get to see with my grandma. 

JS: And you’re going to get to write about it for your final paper. 

B&W: As the resident scholar, did you have any insight into the choice to reopen the theater with Twelfth Night? 

JS: The short answer is no. Oskar Eustis, the artistic director at the Public Theater, makes that call. Do people at the Public ask me what I think will be a good play? They do. This past summer Twelfth Night really landed because these are hard times economically and politically. People just needed some joy. Saheem Ali, the director of that production, understood that with that joy you could speak to issues like gender fluidity or immigration—and that New Yorkers could feel good about seeing these things enacted. It was just one of those productions that people lined up for at midnight or earlier to see it the next day. I saw it probably 15 times and it was always exciting watching the crowd’s reaction. I wish I could say ‘You need to do Romeo and Juliet next summer,’ but that’s not my role. My role is to go in on the first day of rehearsals, spend a week or so at table work with the actors, and make sure that they know the language, the Elizabethan conventions, how other productions have done things and, with the director, having made the cut or given instructions on how to make the cut. Having cut for thirty or forty productions you get to understand what works and what doesn’t. 

B&W: Do directors tend to want to have the scenes that elicit discomfort cut?

JS: No. They just want—like Saheem said ‘Can you give me something that’s an hour and forty-five minutes?’ and I did but the actors kind of stretched it to an hour fifty-one, so those extra six minutes weren’t on me—I’m joking. But directors have a clear sense of what their expectations are for their audience. It sounds very mechanical, but it actually matters because at the two-hour mark the cellphones come out, people start checking their texts. 

B&W: I always go with my grandma and that’s when her head starts to droop down a little bit. 

JS: And not only her.  

B&W: No, no. We usually go with a group of her friends, so it’s me and a bunch of 80 and 90-year-old women.

JS: This was as hot a ticket as there’s been I’d say. It was really gratifying to see that people love Shakespeare. 

B&W: I think having the year-and-a-half without it really emphasized how much it really is part of summer in New York. 

JS: For me as well, but I did much more theater-going when I was your age in the U.K. than I did here. I never took a Shakespeare class or studied him formally, but my body of knowledge of Shakespeare is based on what I learned from my summers in college. I would hold down a job from May 15th to August 1st as a street messenger or selling Guatemalan handicrafts and then I’d leave August 1st, fly to London on a $99 each way flight, sleep in church basements or youth hostels and see, for a student ticket of what was the equivalent of less than a dollar, a Shakespeare play every day. I’d see twenty plays in twenty days and I’d come back and do it the next summer. And after four or five or six years of doing this in my late teens and early twenties, I’d seen a couple hundred productions which are all tattooed in my skull now. So when I’m teaching you in class they’re all swimming around up there and fighting to shape what I’m saying. 

B&W: This isn’t directly related to Shakespeare, but you’ve mentioned in class that you’re involved in a lawsuit against OpenAI. 

JS: I am, OpenAI and Microsoft. 

B&W: Could you take me through some of the details of that? 

JS: I am one of 13 writers who are suing OpenAI and Microsoft for stealing our books, which are under copyright, and then using them to train their models. I was recently deposed for seven hours by their lawyers in anticipation of the court proceedings in which we’re going to ask for damages for this violation of copyright. It may settle, it may not. They run the risk of, if they’re shown to be in violation, up to $150,000 or so per book. Not that that would bankrupt OpenAI. I suspect they’ll want to settle for a number that’s closer to the settlement that just took place with another artificial intelligence company that was sued by writers and the Anthropic case. 

I’m a member of the board and have been for a long time of the Author’s Guild which represents writers and I think it’s really important to have not just novel writers or bestselling authors, but also academics represented in this suit. I’ve enjoyed, as you can tell from my classroom experience, bantering with lawyers for the other side. The hardest part for me is in a deposition you should really try to keep to ‘yes’ ‘no’ answers but that’s just not my style, but my lawyers gave me some free reign. When I spoke earlier about being able to read, write, and argue effectively, this is that real world situation. I’m representing not just 12 other writers, but the authors of over six million books that have been stolen, so my ability to effectively argue the case, that this is not fair use, that this is in violation of copyright requires high-level argumentative skills—this is what I’m trying to train you all to be able to do. 

B&W: Well, I think that’s—

JS: But I most enjoy being in class Monday and Wednesday 10:10 to 11:25 and I’m sure next Fall when Monday at 10:10 hits—I mean I’ve missed one class in all those years and I’ve been sick for one class in all those years— I’m sure I’ll wake up and think I should be in class.