Shakespeare was central to Burke’s theorizing. At one point early in his career, before the “urgencies and abruptness of social upheaval” of the 1930s interrupted him, Burke “had decided that, ideally, for each of Shakespeare’s dramatic tactics, modern thought should try to find the corresponding critical formation.” Despite Burke’s work with the Popular Front, his engagement with Marxist thought was oblique, and inevitably Burkean. In a thirty-year retrospect on his participation in the 1935 American Writers’ Congress, Burke recalls that “when the Leftists first began to move onto the scene, I began to fear that they were dishonoring Shakespeare. For a couple of years there, I took all sorts of notes for articles in defense of Shakespeare.” Burke thus stood in a fraught center between activists politically to his left, and fellow critics who found Burke’s own politics too radical. Burke was perhaps recollecting Mike Gold as one “dishonoring Shakespeare.” Gold’s 1930 manifesto for “Proletarian Realism” stridently envisions an advent (for now, deferred) of “a proletarian Shakespeare.” Gold’s opposition of proletarian literature to Shakespeare, or at least a proletarian Shakespeare to a bourgeois Shakespeare, involves forgetting an immensely populist culture of Shakespeare performance and oratory in the nineteenth century, as has been recovered by Lawrence Levine. Burke’s attempts to revoice Shakespeare for a modern audience were in the spirit of this strangely curtailed tradition of a demotic American Shakespeare, and akin to some of the same inclinations that led Orson Welles to his Everybody’s Shakespeare series in 1934 and his modern-dress Julius Caesar in 1937. As early as 1935 Burke contemplated a series of “Wolves’ Tales from Shakespeare,” playing off Charles Lamb’s Victorian retellings for children. Like his pieces on Twelfth Night and Julius Caesar, these were to be written in the first person, with a character stepping out of his role, à la Brecht, and rhetorically exposing himself to the audience. Drafts of Burke’s Othello essay were begun around this time, with Iago defending himself in his own voice. In subsequent revisions, Burke eventually dropped this approach, as it became burdensome for what grew into a far more sophisticated argument, but this initial gambit further supports the continuity between his impulses of the 1930s and his later, albeit more ideologically muted, studies of Shakespeare’s plays. Moreover, Burke’s work with Shakespeare and his social critique were reciprocal.

His analysis of Mark Antony’s “Friends, Romans, countrymen” speech in Julius Caesar fits more directly this “defense of Shakespeare.” Burke’s ventriloquism of Antony speaks to at least three audiences: the supposed 44 BCE Roman mob onstage; the 1599 “Elizabethan gluttons” in Shakespeare’s Globe; and the 1935 readers of “The Southern Review” (and, by extension, anyone who should be concerned about understanding demagoguery in demagogic times). This is much the same strategy of rhetorical unmasking Burke applied to Hitler’s shaping of his audience just a few years later. Even in the midst of the economic and political turmoil of the 1930s, in the midst of his trying to understand what it meant to be a committed intellectual, Burke could still imagine that if we lived in “an ideal world now, we’d all be spending our best hours trying to specify just what all is implied in the works of Shakespeare.”