Posted Friday night, January 22, 2021.
Daniel Day Lewis (left) as President Abraham Lincoln discussing mathematics, not Shakespeare, with a young Union officer played by Adam Driver in Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln".
Dependable listeners? That’s one way to put it. Another is “captive audience.” Insert a winking emoji face with a chin beard and a stovepipe hat here. Never mind. I can hear him in my head reciting from "Macbeth." But I wish I'd been there when he read from "Merry Wives" or Spielberg had had room to put it in the movie...
Lincoln relied on a few dependable listeners, including the young men who worked in the War Department’s telegraph office, which he visited on a daily basis to keep up with news from the front and convey instructions to his generals. While [waiting], Lincoln recited Shakespeare from copies of the plays he brought with him. David Homer Bates, who worked there for the duration of the war, remembered a time in late 1863…, when the president carried with him “a well-worn copy...of Macbeth, and one of The Merry Wives of Windsor, selections of both of which he read aloud to us.” Bates remembered on visit in particular, when I was his only auditor, and he recited several passages to me with as much interest apparently as if there had been a full house.”
---from “Shakespeare in a Divided America” by James Shapiro.
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Yep. Adam Driver. "Lincoln" hit the theaters in November 2012. I didn't watch "Girls", so I didn't know him from...um...Adam, and I didn't take note of his name in the credits. But he made an impression on me, and I recognized him immediately three years later the moment he appeared without his helmet in "The Force Awakens". Daniel Day Lewis, of course, made an impression, by not doing an impression of Lincoln but by being Lincoln. My idea of him, at any rate. I remember wondering at the time, though, whether the scene with Driver was factually true or true to life. The scene from Shapiro's book has me thinking it was true and there's a record. I'll look it up. Meanwhile, though, here's the scene:
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