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It is perhaps unsurprising that Shakespeare, the most canonical of dead white males, should feature in Americas culture wars. But why so prominently, both now and in earlier phases of the USs struggles with race, class and identity during the 19th and 20th centuries? Why should Americans care so much about an Englishman who never visited its shores? In this sprightly and enthralling book, James Shapiro argues persuasively that 19th-century American textbooks, such as McGuffeys Reader (1836), which had sold more than 120m copies by the first world war, and Scotts Lessons in Elocution, played a major role in the process of domestication, for they excerpted many of the most celebrated speeches from Shakespeares plays. Reassuringly, it also helped that the language of Shakespeare resembled the familiar cadences of the King James Version of the Bible, published in 1611.

Regardless of the most obviously transgressive elements in Shakespeare interracial marriage in Othello; themes of incest and suicide in Hamlet; crossdressing and gender instability in the comedies the playwright was firmly incorporated as a defining element within Americas own heritage. Abraham Lincoln devoured the plays, at first largely on the page, and could recite them by the ream, as could the presidents assassin, the Shakespearean actor John Wilkes Booth, whose staple roles were Richard III, Hamlet and Macbeth. An earlier president, John Quincy Adams, had become fixated on Desdemona a white woman with an unseemly lust for a black man as the real cause of Othellos misfortunes. Taking an alternative tack, Mary Preston, a critic with Confederate sympathies, solved the problem by insisting that Othello was, after all, a white man.

In the late 19th and early 20th century, when nativists white Protestant Americans with British, Nordic or Germanic ancestors obsessed over what they saw as a destructive wave of immigration of inferior racial stock, namely Latins from southern Europe and Jews and Slavs from eastern Europe, Shakespeare came to be treasured as an embodiment of Anglo-Saxon values. Charles Mills Gayley published Shakespeare and the Founders of Liberty in America, and Henry Cabot Lodge Sr claimed that it was Americans, not the modern-day English nation, who spoke the authentic language of Shakespeare, which had been transplanted to the New World in the early 17th century. In response, a valiant attempt in New York in 1916 to use The Tempest as the basis of a supposedly more welcoming pro-immigrant pageant foundered on its condescending depiction of Caliban: an emblem of the aliens to be goaded into assimilation.

The identification with Shakespeare continues, albeit without its former racial inflections. Indeed, as Shapiro notes, there are today almost 150 summer Shakespeare festivals held across the US. Until now his work has been common ground for liberals and conservatives. Under George W Bush, one of the flagship projects of the National Endowment for the Arts was Shakespeare in American Communities. Republicans can find plenty of red meat in Shakespeare as his political outlook was, broadly speaking, conservative and hierarchical; but radicals are equally able to perceive in Shakespeare The Merchant of Venice notwithstanding a non-judgmental openness to the human predicament and warm empathy for a variety of types and conditions. But this common ground is at risk of erosion.

Oskar Eustiss 2017 modern-dress production of Julius Caesar in Central Park featured a mob wearing Make Rome Great Again baseball caps, and a Caesar dressed in a business suit and overlong tie, who is married to a tall, Slavic-accented Calpurnia. The problem, of course, comes with the pivotal scene of the assassination of this Trump-like Caesar. Although the play explores the dark, unexpected consequences of tyrannicide, such ambiguities were lost on populist Fox News pundits and on Steve Bannon the author, it transpires, of a leaden adaptation of Coriolanus set in a Los Angeles convulsed by race riots, who emerges here as a green-eyed Shakespeare-wannabe.

Nevertheless, as Shapiro amply demonstrates, for Americans the politics of Shakespeare are not confined to the public realm, but have enormous relevance in the sphere of private life. The Taming of the Shrew, a troubling comedy of patriarchal mastery, provides the starting point for an intriguing chapter focused on the hit Broadway musical Kiss Me, Kate. This show was produced in 1948, in the immediate aftermath of the war, when the disruption of traditional gender roles brought about by total war had not yet been stilled. Shapiro shows how a team of marginal figures the songwriter Cole Porter (a married closeted homosexual), Bella Spewack (a female dramatist, then a rarity) and the producer Arnold Saint Subber (also gay) collaborated, not without niggling tensions, to subvert the tale of Katherina and Petruchio, with a mixed race cast as well as daringly suggestive lyrics. Yet only five years later, in a more conformist America where traditional gender roles had been reintroduced, the Hollywood film of Kiss Me Kate eliminated several of the destabilising motifs found in the Broadway version.

The gender politics associated with Shakespeare remain an abiding feature of the USs culture wars. It was Monica Lewinskys coded Valentines Day personal ad of 1997 in the Washington Post invoking Romeo and Juliet that reignited her intimacies with the president and led ultimately to Bill Clintons impeachment and Senate trial. The contortions undergone in contriving an acceptable ending for Shakespeare in Love bring into focus the skewed ethical compass of the films producer, Harvey Weinstein: a bullying predator on the casting couch, but hyper-sensitive to the ways of a middle America leery about adultery. The tinkering worked, and its success yields insight into the scale of American Shakespearophilia. Shapiro estimates from the box office receipts that roughly 10% of the adult population of the US saw the film during its 33-week run. Nevertheless, after the recent furore surrounding Eustiss Julius Caesar, Shakespeares status within Republican parts of America has now become strangely precarious and uncertain.

Shakespeare in a Divided America is published by Faber (RRP 20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over 15.

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Shakespeare in a Divided America by James Shapiro review the Bard and the culture wars - The Guardian