Burying Caesar … or Praising Him? Shakespeare and the Populist Right in the United States

Abstract

‘ET TU, BANNON?’ shouted the front page of the New York Post on 4 January 2018, after some of Stephen Bannon’s private comments about Donald Trump had been made public. This was not the first time that New Yorkers were presented with the comparison between the US President and Julius Caesar: the previous summer, the annual Shakespeare production in Central Park had invoked the wrath of Trump’s supporters. Yet the president’s camp has itself indulged in analogies with Caesar, as well as other characters from Shakespeare’s plays. This should be all the warning one needs against the use of Shakespearean paradigms to try and interpret contemporary American politics. There are, however, many examples of attempts to identify Shakespearean precursors to Trump – ranging from Macbeth to Richard III and King Lear – in what has become a subgenre of media coverage of his presidency. Most of these venture a critique of the president-as-demagogue. Shakespeare has also been recruited by a figure like Bannon (whose Shakespearean enthusiasm is eccentric, but certainly not innocuous) into the ambit of white supremacist populism. Teased out, this narrative offers a cautionary tale for scholars in early modern studies, and prompts us to reflect critically both on defences of Shakespeare’s centrality in the classroom and on the practice of what Jeffrey R. Wilson has called ‘Public Shakespeare’.