Part 1

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He first appeared on the American cultural scene in his early twenties, and for three decades afterwards he would influence the American theater as no other playwright had done before and very few have even come close to doing since. His hallmark was versatility; in the course of a distinguished career he would produce everything from heartrending tragedies to side-splitting farces. Nor were his talents limited to the stage-- he also wrote scores of poems to great critical acclaim, and in the twilight of his life he even collaborated with cinema pioneer D.W. Griffith to produce one of the first significant American movie scripts. In short, William Henry Shakespeare left a giant footprint on the American cultural landscape.

Born on April 21^st, 1864 in Stratford, Connecticut, Shakespeare was a glassmaker’s son who got bitten by the theatrical bug at a young age. He saw his first play at the age of ten; by the time Will was 13 he’d become an aficionado of the great 16th century British playwright  Sir Francis Bacon. While many of his adolescent peers made fun of his ambition to become America’s greatest dramatist when he grew up, Will was undeterred-- and in later years he would sometimes use his satires to have a few laughs at their expense.

In the summer of 1882 Will struck out on his own for the first time, traveling by train from Hartford to what would eventually become his second home: New York City. Just as London had been the heart of  the British theatrical scene in Bacon’s time, New York was shaping up to be the nerve center of the American theater in Shakespeare’s day-- and Will had long ago concluded with some justification that he would  need to be close to said nerve center if he were going to fulfill his ambition of becoming a great playwright. During his first few weeks in the Big Apple he saw no less than a dozen mainstream theatrical works  and eleven vaudeville shows; the vaudeville performances in particular would make an indelible impression on young Shakespeare, providing the inspiration for some of his first great stage comedies.

These vaudeville performances had one other critical effect on Will’s life; it was at one of them he first met his future wife, Anne Hathaway. Anne was the daughter of a Columbia University literature  professor and had inherited his fondness for the written arts; while her connection with Will wasn’t as instantaneous as certain romantic Hollywood legends would suggest, she did recognize in him early on a mind that shared her appreciation for literature and theater. Within six months the two were exchanging letters at least twice a week. They would end up tying the knot just before Shakespeare’s 25^th birthday in 1889.

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The idea for Shakespeare’s first dramatic script came to him on a summer afternoon in 1886 as he was walking through Central Park and happened to notice an old soldier sitting on a wooden bench just a few  feet away from him. As he studied the old man’s weathered face, Will was suddenly reminded of the English king Henry V’s legendary "band of brothers" speech to his troops prior to the battle of Agincourt; that same evening, in a burst of creative energy, Shakespeare dashed off  the first draft of what theater-goers now know as Saratoga: Or, A Saga Of The War of Independence. It told the story of a group of Colonial foot soldiers as they prepared to fight (and in some cases die) in the Battle of Saratoga and the struggles of their officers to keep them from getting discouraged in the face of the British Army’s superior numbers.

Shakespeare spent the better part of the next two months refining his script, often with Anne Hathaway’s help. When he finally felt that the play was ready to be read by a theatrical professional, he took a trolley up to Broadway and showed it to a certain famous New York City producer. The producer’s first reaction to the new play was not quite  what the young Shakespeare had hoped; he criticized the characters as being more stereotypes from cut-rate historical romances than anything resembling bona fide human beings and said the dialogue was, to put it kindly, trite. Many other young playwrights in Shakespeare’s position would have gotten discouraged and quit after hearing such a terribly blunt dismissal, but it only made Shakespeare himself that much more determined to see his play brought to life. Upon returning home, he  threw himself into yet another burst of rewriting in hopes of making his play better.

Once he was finished with his revisions, he returned to the producer who’d rejected the play a month earlier and showed him the  changes that had been made to Saratoga since the last time they met. The second time proved to be the charm; duly impressed with all the improvements young Will had made to Saratoga’s script, the producer quickly consented to add it to the cycle of plays his theater would present when the next New York theatrical season opened that fall. Shakespeare rushed to the nearest telegraph office to wire the good news to his parents....

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....and soon thereafter he began to attract the attention of the wealthy Manhattan socialites who were the chief financial angels  of New York’s theatrical scene in those days. Here, the whispers were saying, was a new talent who had the potential to become a legitimate major figure in the American cultural scene, and many a millionaire(or millionaire’s wife) wanted to get in on the ground floor, as it were. The Vanderbilts alone personally contributed at least a third of the total wardrobe budget for Saratoga.

The moment of truth for the new playwright’s debut work finally came in late September of 1886, when an audience of 500 people flocked to a Manhattan theater for a preview of Saratoga. Among the people in attendance that evening was poet Emma Lazarus, whose famous work "The  New Colossus" had been published three years earlier and would one day grace the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal. She left the theater utterly enthralled by Shakespeare’s rhetoric; the next day she penned a three-page letter to a friend describing the performance as a ‘transcendent’ experience. And so it must have been, because shortly after the play made its official premiere the New York World-Telegram printed a two-stanza poem by Lazarus extolling both the play and its young author.  Though it would take a few more years for Shakespeare to make his mark on the national cultural scene, he had established a foothold in the  New York theatrical world-- and would expand that foothold before too long.

On the heels of his success with Saratoga, Shakespeare began work on another historical drama, this one dealing with the life and  assassination of the ancient Roman emperor Julius Caesar. It was a subject bound to strike at least a few chords with a nation that was still binding its psychic wounds in the aftermath of the Civil War and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. It’s even been suggested by some modern theatrical scholars that Shakespeare’s rendition of Julius Caesar’s lead villain, Brutus Cassius, may have been partly modeled on Lincoln’s killer John Wilkes Booth. A number of disgruntled former Confederates certainly seemed to believe this to be the case-- twice during preview performances and a third time shortly after Caesar officially premiered in New York, Shakespeare narrowly escaped death at the hands of men identifying themselves as Booth sympathizers, and the playwright was also the target of scores of anonymous notes that threatened him and his wife with grim fates.

Undeterred, Shakespeare went on tour with Caesar’s cast for a three-month-long series of performances in Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington. In between shows, he worked on the script for his next major dramatic piece, Macbeth(a.k.a. "the Scottish play" as it’s been sometimes referred to by the more superstitious members of the theater world). Set in 16^th-century Scotland, Macbeth weaved the supernatural into a story of political intrigue and murder which was also colored with elements of a tragic fall from grace. The centerpiece of the play was Lady Macbeth’s overwhelming lust for power-- a fact which has led many contemporary feminist critics of Shakespeare to accuse America’s Bard of being a misogynist.

But in all likelihood Shakespeare’s choice to make her the primary villain was probably more motivated by his desire to explore universal themes of human evil and greed. Many of his most notorious heavies are male characters, which tends to undercut the misogyny accusations a bit. Indeed, in the eyes of many theater critics the most notorious villain in the ranks of the Shakespeare repertoire is Caesar’s Brutus, a politically calculating and bloodthirsty man who slays his best friend for the sake of taking over the leadership of Rome.¹ In Mr. Lear, the classic tragedy about a wealthy Boston merchant betrayed by his two favorite children in their efforts to get hold of his fortune, an illegitimate banker’s son named Edmund plays a crucial role in the conspiracy to separate Lear from his money and position of influence.²

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The week before Julius Caesar closed its Washington, D.C. run Shakespeare began writing his final draft of Macbeth. It was the most important dramatic work Shakespeare had done since Saratoga, and he was determined to give the theatergoing public nothing less than his best work. Even in between curtain calls on the night of Caesar’s last performance in Washington he took time to make revisions to Macbeth’s  script(a fact that in later years would be the source of many private jokes between the playwright and his wife). Once the final draft had been completed, Shakespeare boarded a train back to New York City to begin the task of auditioning performers for the new drama’s cast....