A virtual fellow’s forum with Jeanie Grant Moore, Professor Emerita from the University of San Diego and University of Wisconsin from November 9, 2022. Recording available.  

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Presentation Overview

Old Shakespeare, a poet who should not be spit on,
Although he was born in an island called Britain.
(1778 Broadside)

Despite his hostility toward many things British, Thomas Jefferson retained his affinity for Shakespeare’s works. As the epigraph indicates, he was not alone among his fellow pre- and post-Revolutionaries in his appreciation; however, his was a particularly intense attachment to Shakespeare. Jefferson’s love for beautiful language and his view of Shakespeare as a moral guide explain part of the attraction, but a common interest in social and political issues, as well as similar patterns of thought, further demonstrates why he returned again and again to Shakespeare. Entries in Jefferson’s “Literary Commonplace Book” signal a significant leaning toward political plays such as Julius Caesar and Coriolanus, both of which feature rebellions and reflections on government.

Although the theory of Natural Law as articulated by Locke and espoused by Jefferson post-dated Shakespeare, similar ideas can be found far earlier, even among the philosophers of ancient Greece. Shakespeare exhibits awareness of such concepts. Note, for example, his passages on equity and his interrogation of kingship. Jefferson’s outspoken abhorrence of tyranny is well-known; subject to heavy censorship, Shakespeare employed more subtle means of posing a challenge: his history plays, except for Henry V, depict weak kings or tyrants. Though no revolutionary, Shakespeare, like Hamlet, could tell “a hawk from a handsaw.”

Perhaps most relevant for us are the conflicted ideas about racism that appear in the writings of these men. Both Shakespeare and Jefferson reflect and reveal the limitations of their eras while simultaneously presenting more generous emergent ideas that reach toward the future.