Uh, give our listeners a little bit of a sense of, of what I touched upon at the top of that introduction, namely that, that for someone who is so famous, uh, how actually we know not as much about William Shakespeare and the specifics of his life and career as we might assume we do.

It's a funny question in certain ways because we do know a lot about the years in which he was working in London from sometime around 1590 until about 1614, roughly a quarter century.

We know very little about his first 25 years other than he was born in 1564 and baptized.

He married at the age of 18 and had three children.

That's really all that we know for sure about his earliest years.

So when you write a, a cradle-to-grave biography of Shakespeare, almost inevitably you have to create a backstory about how Shakespeare got from Stratford to London and what motivated him, what crises, spiritual, familial, drove him there and, and the rest.

And that has made people skeptical, uh, about w- how much we can and do know about Shakespeare.

What are we talking about in terms of the year 1599? How long had she been queen?

Who was he, Jim?

Martin Dyes, as you say, was the son of a congressman.

His father had run and served in Congress on a platform that was America first, anti-immigrant, anti-Asian immigrant in particular.

He had no love for politics.

Easterners, for intellectuals, for what we would now call elites.

And his son inherited all those values and one more, which was what we would call deeply racist and racist.

Profoundly so.

Who were they?

Who was she, Tim?

She's the real star of my book, somebody I knew very little about until I was able to read her great book, Arena, which is about the federal theater, and also go up to Vassar College, where her archives are, read her books.

basically her diary or her memoir that remains unpublished, and understand her relationship to Harry Hopkins.

They were at Grinnell at the same time.

And Harry Hopkins didn't want to pick a New York producer or a Hollywood type to run this federal theater.

He knew Hallie Flanagan.

He knew that she was a professor at Vassar, One of the first women to win a Guggenheim Prize, she had gone abroad in the late 20s to study theater in Europe, had gone everywhere, had met everyone, had gone to Scandinavia, England and Ireland, Germany and Italy, and especially Russia.

Why not, Jim?

Mm.

It's Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Richard III, Hamlet, King Lear, and Othello.

Maybe more recently, The Merchant of Venice and The Tempest are thought, but it's a pretty small mini canon within that canon.

So I wanted to focus on works that really spoke to those issues as directly as possible.

And yeah, I did have to leave out stuff, including plays that I love, Henry V, and even situations that I thought Shakespeare was, played a major role in.

I'll, I'll give you one example.

In the, uh, late 1890s, in 1895, there was a railway strike.

Mm.

But even with all that gore and horribleness, there was often a moment that people waited for, and in a way, we wait for it still, even now.

We want what Elizabethans got at the scaffold, which was a confession.

Before the guy is cut to shreds, he's allowed to confess.

You know, I, I, I heartily, you know, regret the fact that I, uh, killed a young maiden or defamed the king, whatever it is.

The expectation is somebody is made to make his peace with his maker before he dies.

That's what you do.

And at the very end of the play, when everyone finds out what Iago's done, Othello asks him, "Why? Why did you do this?" A- and Iago?

He refuses what we fully expect and what everybody on stage at that moment fully expects from him.

Did he reflect on his moments as head of HUAC? Was that the high point of his life, or did he ever write it down, Jim?

No one knew it at the time when he was considered as a potential candidate for president in nineteen forty, or at least vice president at that time.

His name was spoken up.

No one would have guessed that by, uh, by the end of the war in nineteen forty-five, Martin Dies' career would be in the rear view mirror.

And, uh, he left probably because of a health scare, had left Congress, returned, and tried to be returned to the House Un-American Activities Committee, which would last until nineteen seventy-five.

But his fellow members of Congress would have none of it.

They, they thought he was a dangerous man.

Let's tell Houseman first, Jim.

Were they successful, Jim?

Dickstein, Samuel Dickstein panicked, uh, about the rise of Nazism.

When you have rallies in Madison Square Garden, when you have thousands of neo-Nazis marching in New Jersey for, uh, a man who was the son of a Russian rabbi born in Russia who had emigrated to New York and taken over a, uh, a House seat from Lower Manhattan, this was his obsession.

Samuel Dickstein was really intent on getting Congress to investigate Nazism.

What was only discovered in, in fairly recent times was Dickstein was also a spy for Russia trying to take as much money as he could from that communist country and, uh, Russia in turn hoping to infiltrate Congress.

Samuel Dickstein is a member of Congress who is spying for a foreign country, who wants to run, uh, a House special committee.

But because he's Jewish and foreign-born, McCormack, uh, of Massachusetts is asked to chair that committee, initial committee.

Whose idea is it to focus on the Federal Theatre and not Hollywood? Because he tries Hollywood, and he backs off.

Uh, Jim, who is Rose McClendon? Who is Jacques Houseman? Before we introduce the play.

It's almost a play within a play, to tell you the truth, John.

Um, the personalities are all larger than life.

One of the, the goals Hallie Flanagan set for the Federal Theatre was to develop Black talent, and you, you couldn't be a, a Black usher in a New York Broadway house.

So this was revolutionary, and the Federal Theatre, under Flanagan, established what it called Negro Units from Hartford, Connecticut, to Seattle, Washington.

And these were intended to allow Black actors and Black directors to create plays and to reach communities really underserved by theater.

And the great, great theater, the Lafayette Theatre in New York City, in Harlem, was chosen to be the site of New York City's, uh, Negro Unit.

What was Federal One, Jim?

Federal One was a way of putting artists, and under that rubric I would include painters, historians, actors, writers, and musicians, putting them to work.

Harry Hopkins is one of the great forgotten Americans, and he deserves far more creditFor helping this country in an hour of need.

He was one of the very few men who were trained as a social worker in the nineteen twenties and early thirties.

And when the Depression hit, he had worked for the Red Cross, he had worked in New York State, he had worked on a large scale, and he understood that if you put people back to work, you had to put them in work that suited them.

In other words, you don't take a violinist and put a pickaxe and a shovel in her hand or his hand and say, "Dig a ditch." You put a fiddle in their hands and you said, "Entertain your fellow Americans." And by the time he got to Washington and had been, been put in charge of the WPA by President Roosevelt, he had understood how to make this work on a large scale.

Federal One was an opportunity to create five organizations for musicians, for painters, for theater artists, for writers, and for historical researchers, and put them to work.

Who was she, Jim?

Why not, Jim?

The previous two novels that Sinclair Lewis had made had been mega hits for Hollywood, had pulled in millions of dollars.

So that investment from the perspective of the Hollywood folk was, uh, a very [chuckles] minimal one, considering what they expected the return on their investment to be.

And they hired the best screenwriter they could to produce what would have been the great 1930s film about the rise of and threat of a fascist takeover i-in America.

And Sinclair Lewis was married to one of the great journalists of his day who had interviewed Hitler, who came back to the United States, wrote a book about it.

Uh, he's probably a little jealous of his wife and jumped the gun, and quickly in Barnard, Vermont, wrote, uh, in that summer this extraordinary novel and setting in rural, rural Vermont, uh, the story of what happens when, uh, America elects a president who is going to strip rights from Jews and women and Blacks and others and run America as a dictatorship.

This was in the background of Mussolini and Hitler, much discussed at the time, and no novelist, uh, whatever you think of him as a stylist, no novelist had his finger or her finger on the pulse of America as well as Sinclair Lewis did.

Is that, is that where it still is, Jim?

Is Macbeth a victim of the witches, of the curse, or is he a victim of his own weakness? Can we tell? And is that a tension in Macbeth that was solved by Voodoo Macbeth?

The first thing you have to realize is how novel it was to update Shakespeare in this way, to have what we now call modern dress performance, and to locate this in nineteenth-century Haiti.

That just wasn't done.

There had been a production of Macbeth virtually every year from 1900 till 1935 on Broadway, and every one of them was traditional.

You...

The Scots wore kilts and plaids, and everybody looked like they were from, uh, medieval Scotland.

This was different.

How so? Explain that.

Uh, Jim, who is Rose McClendon? Who is Jacques Houseman? Before we introduce the play.

It's almost a play within a play, to tell you the truth, John.

Um, the personalities are all larger than life.

One of the, the goals Hallie Flanagan set for the Federal Theatre was to develop Black talent, and you, you couldn't be a, a Black usher in a New York Broadway house.

So this was revolutionary.

And the Federal Theatre, under Flanagan, established what it called Negro Units from Hartford, Connecticut, to Seattle, Washington.

And these were intended to allow Black actors and Black directors to create plays and to reach communities really underserved by theater.

What was Federal One, Jim?

Federal One was a way of putting artists, and under that rubric I would include painters, historians, actors, writers, and musicians, putting them to work.

Harry Hopkins is one of the great forgotten Americans, and he deserves far more creditFor helping this country in an hour of need.

He was one of the very few men who were trained as a social worker in the nineteen twenties and early thirties.

And when the Depression hit, he had worked for the Red Cross, he had worked in New York State, he had worked on a large scale, and he understood that if you put people back to work, you had to put them in work that suited them.

In other words, you don't take a violinist and put a pickaxe and a shovel in her hand or his hand and say, "Dig a ditch." You put a fiddle in their hands and you said, "Entertain your fellow Americans." And by the time he got to Washington and had been, been put in charge of the WPA by President Roosevelt, he had understood how to make this work on a large scale.

Federal One was an opportunity to create five organizations for musicians, for painters, for theater artists, for writers, and for historical researchers, and put them to work.

Who was she, Jim?

Did he reflect on his moments as head of HUAC? Was that the high point of his life, or did he ever write it down, Jim?

No one knew it at the time when he was considered as a potential candidate for president in nineteen forty, or at least vice president at that time.

His name was spoken up.

No one would have guessed that by, uh, by the end of the war in nineteen forty-five, Martin Dies' career would be in the rearview mirror.

And, uh, he left, probably because of a health scare, had left Congress, returned, and tried to be returned to the House Un-American Activities Committee, which would last until nineteen seventy-five, but his fellow members of Congress would have none of it.

They, they thought he was a dangerous man.

Uh, Joe McCarthy thought he was the greatest communist hunter of all time, but that, uh, McCarthy was an exception.

Let's tell Houseman first, Jim.

Were they successful, Jim?

Dickstein, Samuel Dickstein, panicked, uh, about the rise of Nazism.

When you have rallies in Madison Square Garden, when you have thousands of neo-Nazis marching in New Jersey for, uh, a man who was the son of a Russian rabbi, born in Russia, who had emigrated to New York and taken over a, uh, a House seat from Lower Manhattan, this was his obsession.

Samuel Dickstein was really intent on getting Congress to investigate Nazism.

What was only discovered in, in fairly recent times was Dickstein was also a spy for Russia, trying to take as much money as he could from that communist country, and, uh, Russia in turn, hoping to infiltrate Congress.

Samuel Dickstein is a member of Congress who is spying for a foreign country, who wants to run, uh, a House special committee.

But because he's Jewish and foreign-born, McCormack, uh, of Massachusetts is asked to chair that committee, initial committee, and when the Dies Committee was established, it was largely because Dickstein kept pushing and pushing for a new committee, a large-scale committee, and he was kept off that committee, and Martin Dies and others were put on instead.

Whose idea is it to focus on the Federal Theatre and not Hollywood? 'Cause he tries Hollywood, and he backs off.

Who was he, Jim?

Martin Dies, as you say, was the son of a congressman.

His father, uh, had run and, uh, served in Congress on a platform that was America first, anti-immigrant, anti-Asian immigrant in particular.

He had, uh, no love for, uh, Easterners, for intellectuals, for what we would now call elites, and his son inherited all those values and one more, which was what we would call, uh, deeply racist, uh, and, uh, profoundly so.

So when Martin Dies ran for Congress for the first time, he used the N-word quite freely, knowing that he didn't have to win any Black votes.

There were no Black votes in Democratic primaries when he first ran for office in the eighteenth, uh, second congressional district in, in Texas.

Martin Dies was six foot four, imposing physically, incredibly charming, would work through eight cigars a day in the course of a congressional hearing, uh, had studied drama in school, uh, spoke beautifully, eloquently, much as his father had.

Did they know, Jim, that trouble was coming?

Hallie Flanagan had been so careful to push out of the program a handful of truly radical socialist, uh, extreme Marxists who wanted to do plays that attacked the Supreme Court and, and attacked, uh, mainstream American values, and she did push them out.

But she thought by embracing what, uh, FDR had spoken of in his second inaugural address as one-third of a nation and the problem of housing, she thought this was a progressive winner.

This was something that the average American would truly understand, and brought together a great team over the summer, uh, in Poughkeepsie, New York, of designers and directors and movement coaches and actors, and they worked on this and produced One-Third of a Nation, and it opened in New York City on Broadway.

Uh, you can only imagine what it was like being in a theater and, and watching a play that begins with a fire on stage, which is always a terrifying thing.

And the set, of course, is a tenement building where there is a tenement fire, and people suffer and die from it.

This was one of what were called the living newspapers, which were fact-based accounts of problems, in this case, real estate and others of socialized medicine, uh, utilities, subjects that Broadway and Hollywood never handle, but the Federal Theatre was bringing into the lives of everyday Americans.

Who were they?