Shakespeare in America by Various

Author:Various [Shapiro, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-5985331-6-3
Publisher: Library of America
Published: 2014-01-03T02:10:00+00:00

George Santayana

(1863–1952)

Shakespeare: Made in America

The philosopher, essayist, novelist, and poet George Santayana—his full name was Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás—was born in Spain and moved to America as a child. He was educated at Boston Latin School and then Harvard, where he later joined the illustrious philosophy department. His upbringing and training—not so much of America as in it—allowed Santayana to view American culture from a unique perspective, one that he brings to bear in this essay on the value of Shakespeare in early twentieth-century American culture. A great deal is going on in what appears to be a playful essay, first published in The New Republic. Santayana wrestles here with his ambivalence toward America as well as with his limitations as a poet, while struggling to come to grips with his disappointment with Shakespeare as philosopher and moralist (what he later called the “strange absence of religion” in Shakespeare, that kept Santayana from fully approving of him). Santayana’s aphorism in The Last Puritan—“America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences”—offers a clue to his “experiment” here, a translation into contemporary American idiom of Shakespeare’s great sonnet “When in Disgrace with Fortune and Men’s Eyes.” His was not a Shakespeare “for all time,” but one, rather, whose language is now anachronistic if not obsolete, the cultural legacy of his words and world largely unavailable to modern American culture—a conclusion that underscores the challenges facing truly original modern poets.

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