Shakespeare and the Red Scare, with Marjorie Garber

FARAH KARIM-COOPER: From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I’m Farah Karim-Cooper, the Folger Director.

[Music fades]

FARAH KARIM-COOPER: Sometimes governments take a surprising amount of interest in the media. They can try to apply pressure on news organizations to get more favorable coverage.

A punitive approach to mass media from the US government is actually nothing new. In 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committee investigated Communists in Hollywood. That led to the infamous Hollywood blacklist, which banned artists like Orson Welles and Paul Robeson from employment.

And back in the 1930s, the committee looked for Communist propaganda in New Deal programs like the Federal Theatre Project. That program put on thousands of productions in small towns and cities across the country, performing in front of millions of people who had never seen live theater before. One of the most famous was an acclaimed production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth with an all-Black cast.

A new book by the critic Marjorie Garber examines these official investigations of popular culture. It’s called A Treacherous Secret Agent: How Literature Spoke Truth to Power During the Red Scare.

Garber finds surprising resonances between those hearings and the texts of the plays, poetry, and music that came under attack. Literature, she argues, always poses a threat to those in power, something Shakespeare understood all too well. Here is Marjorie Garber in conversation with Barbara Bogaev.

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BARBARA BOGAEV: Well, Marjorie Garber, welcome back to the podcast.

MARJORIE GARBER: Thank you. I’m delighted to be here.

BOGAEV: So, you begin the book with a prologue called “Poetic Revenge,” and that really is a throughline to your story, so, why don’t we start there? What do you mean by “poetic revenge?”

GARBER: “Poetic revenge” is a variant of the more familiar term “poetic justice.” Now, “poetic justice” is an old-fashioned term from drama that suggests that a play ought to have a happy ending, virtue rewarded, wickedness punished, and so forth, and the word “poetic” in that context is a kind of decorative word.

When I use a term like “poetic revenge,” which is my coinage for this book, I suggest that it’s actually the poetry that enables the revenge and has the revenge. In case after case that I looked at in this Red Scare material, I found that bits of poetry, whether it be Shakespeare or Marlowe or George Herbert or the Bible, would crop up in unfamiliar contexts and speak back to the hypocrisies and the hidden stories that were being told.

BOGAEV: Oh, thank you for that. That’s very lucid. So, that’s the poetic part and somewhat the revenge. By “revenge,” do you mean the way also that literature echoes through cultural conflicts and somewhat becomes part of the story?

GARBER: Well, I do mean that. One of the things that I try to stress in the book is that we often talk about poetry and literature as timeless, and it is timeless in some sense, but it’s also very timely, which is to say that it intersects with the moment—with the historical moment, with the literary moment, with the political moment—and we find this over and over again, that bits of Shakespeare, that bits of poetry in general can be deeply relevant to the political issue that’s going on. Sometimes it happens within a production of the play, sometimes it is simply cited or quoted by someone either in the hearings or after the hearings, but it’s the poetry itself that it is, to quote the title of my book, the “treacherous secret agent” that speaks back against the lies of the McCarthy era.

BOGAEV: Great. Let’s get to the echoes, then, of literature. One of the early and most famous ones from this Red Scare era occurred in 1938, and it was during a hearing with Hallie Flanagan, who was the director of the Federal Theatre Project. That’s that remarkable New Deal program that funded live performances across the US, and we’ve talked about that before here. First, why did the House Un-American Activities Committee, or HUAC, target Hallie Flanagan?

GARBER: Well, because she was working in favor of a workers’ theater—a  theater that could change culture and change politics by giving employment to workers who were otherwise unemployed. She was extremely efficient and effective at this.

She also was a great director, and she published essays in magazines and journals that spoke out in favor of the worker. Now, this was not a fashionable point of view from the point of view of the committee.

BOGAEV: And in the code of the Red Scare era, advocating for the worker in any way means you’re a Communist?

GARBER: “Worker” is Communist. That’s right.

BOGAEV: So how does Shakespeare’s contemporary, Christopher Marlowe, show up in this hearing?

GARBER: Well, Flanagan wrote an essay. She had just been directing a production of Marlowe, Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, starring Orson Welles, an extraordinarily powerful production, and so Marlowe was on her mind. She was praising the power and the ambition of the workers’ theater to try to change culture and society without money, and she called that a “Marlovian madness.”

The result of this was that one of the members of the committee, a congressman from Alabama, said, “Well, you quoted this Marlowe. Is he a Communist?”

And she was quite abashed, and she said, “I’m sorry. I meant Christopher Marlowe.”

And he said, “Well, yes, but is he a Communist? What are his politics?”

And she said, “Well, he’s one of the most famous playwrights other than Shakespeare in Shakespeare’s own time,” and so on.

He then tried to rebound back by talking about Mr. Euripides, and to show that he himself had some dramatic culture.

BOGAEV: “Mr. Euripides.”

GARBER: “Mr. Euripides.” We give the guy his credit. This became, as you say, an extremely famous flashpoint. It has been cited over and over again by other people as an example of the kind of cultural innocence, or inexperience, or ignorance of the committee.

BOGAEV: Right, and this has gone down in history as this howling gaffe, as you say. But what’s the poetic revenge?

GARBER: Well, the poetic revenge is that Marlowe, in fact, not only can be cited as an aspirational figure—because of course Dr. Faustus is all about aspiration and all about the ambition to control the world and to understand everything—

BOGAEV: Right, overreach.

GARBER: Marlowe’s heroes are all overreachers in one way or another, whether it’s Faustus or it’s Tamburlaine, and it’s this ambition that she was praising on the part of unnamed workers who were bounding together to try to create a new theater. A theater, as I’ve said, without money, without major funding.

BOGAEV: Yes, and the layers go on and on because Christopher Marlowe, also a spy. Interesting, in this context.

GARBER: Yes, indeed. I mean, the irony here, of course, is that if they’d known anything about Marlowe’s history, they would have known that he himself was probably a double agent for Walsingham’s spy network during the time of Elizabeth I.

BOGAEV: It’s interesting you talk about this term “poetic revenge” in your prologue too, as very deliberate in comparison to or in contrast to poetic justice, because in many of these cases, justice isn’t served in the end. I’m thinking particularly of Hallie Flanagan, who was this remarkable woman who had an incredible opportunity with this WPA Federal Theatre Project but was not well-served by history after it all came crashing down as a result of these investigations. And there wasn’t really justice for many of the actors who were involved, and directors, and all the artists who had their moment in the sun.

GARBER: Well, many of these people were blacklisted, lost their jobs, lost their livelihoods, had to write sometimes with pseudonyms or somebody else had to be a front for them. It was disastrous for the art and culture of this period, and that’s why it strikes me as so ironically effective that it’s literature itself that comes, however belatedly, to their defense.

BOGAEV: Well, another Shakespeare-related story you tell involves, I guess, another HUAC blunder, and that hinges on the ancient Greek storyteller, Aesop, as in Aesop’s Fables. So first, how does Aesop figure into the Red Scare?

GARBER: Well, the name of Aesop is found in the phrase “Aesopian language” and Aesopian language was said to be the coded language in which Communists communicated with one another.

BOGAEV: That’s so interesting, and you also say that Aesopian code was used to avoid censorship in Czarist Russia and used by writers like Boris Pasternak during the Soviet era?

GARBER: Yes, and it was used by the Committee as a way of inverting really what people would say, because they could not find, in fact, any quotation in which any of these figures that they were interrogating were advocating violence.

So why were they not advocating violence? Because they were speaking “Aesopian language” in which not advocating violence meant advocating violence. So, it became a sort—

BOGAEV: So, they could justify anything?

GARBER: That’s right. They’re speaking in Aesopian language, and even though Aesop is briefly mentioned at the beginning of the testimony, he’s never discussed further.

It’s as if Aesopian is a language like Russian or Greek. Aesop disappears from this narrative and is replaced by this kind of hypothetical Aesopian language which allows them to communicate their treacherous views with one another.

BOGAEV: Just curious, why did they choose Aesop for a code? Why did the Russians originally start using this?

GARBER: Well, because indeed, it’s a parable, it’s a metaphor, it’s a figure of speech, and it can easily be disavowed because you say, “Well, no, no, I was only talking about a bird. I was only talking about a beast. I wasn’t really talking about people at all. It’s just a little story, like a comic book.”

Many of the Aesopian stories, the stories of Aesop, that is to say, are about comeuppance of one kind or another so that it’s particularly ironic that it should be cited here as the dangerous language, because in fact it is.

BOGAEV: So, what is the upshot of the Aesopian code story for you and for your thesis? What it says to me is the slipperiness of language and of poetry and its many nuances is exactly what HUAC exploited but also never understood.

GARBER: Well, language is a code. Language, stories, poetry, this was befuddling to them and infuriating to them because it seemed to be a way that people could communicate with one another in a kind of secret way—that an allusion could speak in code, and that poetry does do that. It speaks differently to different circumstances—a  citation from Lady Macbeth can be taken out of context and made to do a different kind of work.

This was, to them, infuriating and also baffling. They couldn’t quite get it, and they didn’t like education in and of itself. One of the heads of the HUAC committees found that education was a very bad thing because if we educated the poor, if we educated the Black, if we educated the immigrant, they would assume a power that they really should not have.

So, poetry was at the heart of this notion of secret codes, special information, and it enraged them.

BOGAEV: Well, here’s another maybe more direct Shakespearean poetic revenge resonance, and it’s in HUAC’s investigation of journalist Edward R. Murrow. Maybe you could walk us through the Julius Caesar echoes that you hear in that journalist’s encounter with McCarthy.

GARBER: Oh, there are many, many of them. Let me begin at the end, so to speak, with Murrow himself doing a program about McCarthy after McCarthy had attacked him. In 1954, he did a whole program about McCarthy, and he ended with the very famous quote:

[CLIP from “A Report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy on See It Now, featuring Edward R. Murrow]

MURROW: Cassius was right. “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.” Good night, and good luck.

GARBER: He omitted the end of that line, which is, “That we are underlings” because it wasn’t about being underlings in his view. It was because people were not acting, because they weren’t speaking back, and that’s just what he was doing.

Now, Murrow was a very well-educated guy. He was also a very highly respected journalist.

BOGAEV: And he really knew his Shakespeare, inside and out.

GARBER: He knew his Shakespeare very well. He’s, interestingly, responding to McCarthy’s one Shakespeare quote that I can find here, which is when McCarthy says, “The quotation says, ‘Upon what meat does this our Caesar feed?’”

Now the fact that McCarthy calls it a quotation probably means that somebody gave it to him on a piece of paper rather than because he remembered the whole play.

BOGAEV: Right, or he kind of doesn’t really know what he’s saying.

GARBER: He has no idea.

BOGAEV: Yeah.

GARBER: But it’s only a few lines later that we get “The fault, dear Brutus” line. So, that the very famous Edward R. Murrow quotation follows after this reach on the part of McCarthy to speak Shakespeare.

BOGAEV: Right, he’s able to turn almost his own words against him.

GARBER: That’s right.

BOGAEV: They’re dueling using Shakespeare as a shared, not really a shared language, but I guess a shared historical inheritance that we all have.

GARBER: I think it’s McCarthy trying to… it’s like the “Mr. Euripides” moment. It’s sort of, “Yes, I can. I can do this.”

BOGAEV: Right. You reach for legitimacy when you quote Shakespeare.

GARBER: Exactly. But once you see some connection between Julius Caesar and McCarthy, you can see it everywhere.

You can see, for example, the famous Cinna the poet episode in which Cinna the poet has the same name as Cinna the conspirator, and after the assassination, he’s walking down the street and somebody says, “What’s your name?”

And he says, “My name is Cinna.”

And they say, “He’s a conspirator. Tear him, tear him.”

And he says, “No, no, I’m Cinna the poet. I’m not Cinna the conspirator.”

“Tear him for his bad verses. Tear him for his name.”

So, this idea that anybody can be dragged into a place where they’re made to feel guilty or made to feel vulnerable—the same thing happened with McCarthy and a woman by the name of Annie Lee Moss, whom he persecuted. She was a Black woman, a poor woman. He persecuted her for her supposed Communist associations. It turns out, as she pointed out, that there are three Annie Lee Mosses in the Washington phone book, but again, her name was all that he needed. Just as Cinna the poet’s or Cinna the conspirator’s name was all that was needed in order to persecute.

BOGAEV: I’m thinking another twinning example that you give in the book, or resonance of a Shakespeare play with a blacklist target, is the story of the great performer Paul Robeson and Othello, which was his landmark role he became so identified with. How do you see Robeson’s life story mirrored in this role?

GARBER: Well, Robeson was identified with Othello, really, much of his life. Even as a football player, he was thought of as a kind of valiant Othello figure. Up to this time, Othello was almost always played by white actors.

Ira Aldridge in Europe, an American actor—an American Black actor—was playing the part and was very successful.

Robeson did so in New York, and it was the longest-running Shakespeare play on Broadway. His Othello in the ’40s was tremendously powerful.

His performance piece that he was asked to perform over and over again was the, “I have done the state some service, and they know it,” speech toward the end, at the very end of the play.

[CLIP from Othello featured in Paul Robeson – Complete Recordings. Paul Robeson as Othello.]

OTHELLO: I have done the state some service, and they know ’t.
No more of that. I pray you in your letters,
When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,
Speak of me as I am. Nothing extenuate,
Nor set down aught in malice.

GARBER: He would be asked over and over again to speak those lines. He spoke them on platforms all over the world.

The head of the House Un-American Activities Committee to whom he was responding was Francis Walter, and Francis Walter was the co-sponsor of the McCarran-Walter Act, which is the anti-immigrant act. Very much against the idea of bringing people from other parts of the world to the United States.

And when Robeson is being interviewed by Walter, who doesn’t introduce himself, he says, “May I know who you are?”

“My name is Francis Walter.”

“Ah, the Walter of the McCarran-Walter Act. You who don’t want people to come in from other places, people like me, people of color.”

And he says, “Yes, yes, exactly. We want real Americans.”

And at this point, Robeson turns around and he says to him, “You are the non-patriots, and you are the un-Americans. And you should be ashamed of yourselves.”

BOGAEV: So, he uses HUAC’s language against them.

GARBER: That’s right. That’s right. With this language of patriotism. Yeah. Un-Americans.

BOGAEV: You can picture it or hear it with that amazing voice of his.

GARBER: With that voice.

BOGAEV: And the force. Yeah.

GARBER: Right. When Robeson played Othello in England, Dover Wilson, the great critic, great Shakespeare critic, called him the “Great African gentleman with the golden voice.” That is the voice that you hear when he says this—and they are full of consternation. They bang on the table with the gavel. The interview is over. “It should be over,” he says. This is, again, his Othello moment, “I have done the state some service.” He is doing it right there.

BOGAEV: Well, a broader point you make is that people use Shakespeare’s words and those of other writers to rally people to their cause and to establish legitimacy for themselves, which is really using them as propaganda, and that’s really always been the case. In fact, Shakespeare’s a classic example. His history plays are often described as Tudor propaganda.

GARBER: Propaganda’s an old word. It comes from the propagation of the Catholic faith. By the time it gets to HUAC, it’s almost as if it’s a word from the Russian— “propaganda.”. And the idea, somehow, that Shakespeare was a propagandist surfaces particularly in the conversations that they have with Joe Papp.

BOGAEV: Who’s the founder of the New York Shakespeare Festival.

GARBER: That’s right. And Shakespeare in the Park.

BOGAEV: Right. He was interrogated by the committee, and they asked him if his Shakespearean productions included Communist propaganda. But I guess in the eyes of HUAC, you don’t even have to say the word “Communist.” Propaganda is always, was always Communist.

GARBER: Exactly. “Communist” is assumed in parentheses when you say “propaganda.”

And he says, “Well, you know, some of the plays might be considered propagandistic,” and here, again, he’s talking, as you mention, about Tudor propaganda, on the one hand. That is to say, the idea that the interpretation of Shakespeare’s history plays as a kind of crescendo leading up to the time of Queen Elizabeth.

But when Papp uses it, he’s really talking about stage plays and how they can be interpreted, and that indeed, Julius Caesar, with its two sets of kinds of conspirators, has been interpreted in many different ways. So, Papp is talking about the ways plays could be staged. Maybe some of these plays could be thought of as propagandistic. And they are outraged.

BOGAEV: And Julius Caesar itself interrogates this idea or dramatizes this idea of propaganda and the uses of it.

GARBER: And it’s, again, not only the play, but this is also the time that Joseph Mankiewicz’s film of Julius Caesar starring Gielgud as Cassius is produced and is hugely popular.

And this is a production in which they restore a scene which had often in previous productions of Caesar been cut, and that’s the scene in which Mark Antony and others sit around and decide who will die. So, it’s blacklisting, but it’s blacklisting toward death, not only the end of your career. But that’s exactly what they’re sitting around and doing, saying “Okay, one of yours, one of yours, one of yours. There they go.” And that was a scene, again, that had been cut as somehow irrelevant in many earlier productions. Mankiewicz restores it, and it speaks directly, again, to the scenes of HUAC interpretation.

BOGAEV: It’s such a powerful, important scene. It’s amazing it gets cut.

GARBER: I know.

BOGAEV: But to get back to the Papp story, Papp responded in this interchange that the plays speak for themselves. So, what happened then?

GARBER: Well, then they become outraged. “We are not accusing Shakespeare of being a Communist. That’s a Communist thing to do to accuse Shakespeare. We are not fools.” Because they’re remembering their consternation around, “Is Marlowe a Communist?” And they just don’t want more bad publicity.

And so, “It’s ludicrous that you should be suggesting that this committee might say any such thing about Shakespeare. We are not talking about Shakespeare and Communism. We are not.”

So, it’s way over-the-top defensiveness because, again, it resonates across these earlier moments when their own literary ignorance rebounded in the public press to give them a bad reputation.

I should say that Papp was succeeded by Oskar Eustis, who did a Julius Caesar in which a Donald Trump-like figure with a red tie was the Caesar in that production, and it was shocking to a lot of people, but pertinent in its own way.

BOGAEV: This just keeps coming up, obviously, over and over again in your story, which is that politics are intrinsic to Shakespeare’s plays. There’s no such thing as a straight production devoid of ideology. You bring interpretation to a production, but you also hopefully leave things open for your audience to decide for themselves. And this is what the poetry does, and literature, and this is what the committee members never seem to understand about Shakespeare in particular, and art, period, that it’s both political, yet it transcends politics. Is this the “treacherous” in your title: A Treacherous Secret Agent?

GARBER: Well, yes, it is treacherous to them because it can turn things around from what they think is the case. It can speak back to them. It can speak truth to power.

And it is secret to them because they’re expecting literature to be a kind of ornamental, pretty thing, if anything else. I mean, they know the name “Shakespeare.” They know the names of some of these plays. But they don’t know the plays, and they don’t have any sense of the power over the ages of these plays to be mounted specifically for political purposes in order to evoke a certain kind of effect on a populace.

Their notion of poetry is that it really should stay in its place, and that it shouldn’t make trouble. And poetry makes trouble all the time. It’s “the good trouble.”

BOGAEV: And makes trouble now. We should bring this conversation up to the present moment where I think you can fairly say McCarthy’s tactics and policies and language echo pretty loudly, and you hear many resonances today with the Red Scare era. What are they?

GARBER: In so many ways, this is really why I wrote the book because I was so struck by the commonalities between this moment and that moment, and how, in a way, things have come round again.

The wheel has turned again. We’re back in a place where we perhaps never thought we would be once again in which bigotry of this kind and the celebration of ignorance, the idea that books should be banned because they might be dangerous. This was a big move in McCarthy’s time, and they sent Roy Cohn and other people looking for books in American libraries to get rid of, and we’re, in a way, back with that kind of censorship again.

BOGAEV: Attacks on higher education.

GARBER: Absolutely, attacks on higher education. Attacks on all education. And it’s both a warning and also something of, I can’t say a consolation exactly, but a spark of hope that Shakespeare and Donne and Herbert and Aesop are there, and they speak truth to power.

BOGAEV: I can’t imagine, though, someone reading your book or listening to this podcast and thinking, “Okay, McCarthy and his ilk were a bunch of ignorant non-literary politicians scrambling for power the way politicians do. So what if they didn’t know their Shakespeare or these other poets?” How do you reply to that?

GARBER: They lost. They had their moment, but they didn’t even understand their own moment.

And what these literary texts make clearer, what they didn’t understand, was that the poetry that was underpinning this would last longer than them, would last longer than the perfidy or the ignorance that they stood for, and would come back to tell the story in a different way.

What’s marvelous about literature—and by literature in the book, I mean also pop songs, folk music, various other kinds of things—is how it can speak to a different cultural moment in its own way.

BOGAEV: So, you’re optimistic?

GARBER: I’m hopeful. Optimistic would be a difficult thing to say at this moment in historical time. But I still find all this literature thrilling and new every time I encounter it, and I’m sure that that is true for hundreds and hundreds and thousands of people.

And so long as we remember that that is also our heritage, one of our set of heritages, to be able to incorporate the poetry of now with the poetry of then—to do productions of Shakespeare in ways that have not been done before, that will teach us new things about these plays and also about humanity—about this, I am optimistic, yes, that the power of literature and the power of Shakespeare will last longer than any politician.

BOGAEV: Well, thank you so much for talking today, and thank you for this really relevant book.

GARBER: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

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KARIM-COOPER: That was Marjorie Garber, interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. A Treacherous Secret Agent: How Literature Spoke Truth to Power During the Red Scare is out now from Yale University Press.

This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had technical help from The Sound Company studio in London and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Our web producer is Megan Fraedrich. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

If you’re a fan of Shakespeare Unlimited, please leave us a review on your favorite podcast app.

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