I will offer my own solution to why Americans embraced Shakespeare after the American Revolution below.
In Shapiro's "Introduction," he discusses the twenty-two-year-old Orson Welles' 1937 production of Julius Caesar at Broadway's Mercury Theatre (pages xviii-xx). Shapiro says, "Reviewers at the time struggled, without much success, to reconcile the production's warnings about the dangers of fascism with its equal insistence on the limits and cluelessness of liberalism. Welles, who saw both sides, was drawn to the play precisely 'because Shakespeare has feelings for and against everyone in it'" (page xix).
Shapiro also says, "As Welles told the New York Times, 'It's the same mob . . . that hangs negroes in the South, the same mob that maltreats Jews in Germany.' For Welles, the heart of the play was the assassination scene, the funeral orations, and the death of [a poet and conspirator named] Cinna" (page xx; Shapiro's ellipsis; but my bracketed insertion).
In addition, Shapiro says, "Welles was focused on fascist Europe, Eustis on Trump's America. Eustis too retained the scene in which Cinna is assaulted. . . . Eustis also included the proscription scene ["in which an ascendant Antony and Octavian callously horse-trade over which of their political enemies in Rome they will kill off," to quote Shapiro's characterization of the scene] ; in his staging of it, Cinna the poet, assaulted and arrested earlier, is summarily executed along with Trebonius and others implicated in the assassination of Caesar or unluckily swept up in the crack down that followed" (pages xx-xxi; my ellipsis and my bracketed insertion).
Now, Eustis' 2017 production of Julius Caesar was controversial, in part, because the actor playing Julius Caesar looked like President Donald Trump (born in 1946). Consequently, the famous assassination of Julius Caesar by the Roman Senators appeared to depict the assassination of a Trump-like political leader presumably in the name of saving the Republic. As we know, the assassination of Julius Caesar did not save the Roman Republic, and the imaginary assassination of President Trump might not save the American Republic.
However, in fairness to the historical Julius Caesar, I want to say here that he was an enormously more sophisticated and talented person than Trump is.
In Shapiro's "Introduction," he tells us that "Trump had won less than a fifth of the vote in New York City" (page xxi) where Trump had been born and raised. But Shapiro does not tell us how many people in New York City saw Eustis' controversial 2017 outdoor production of Julius Caesar in Central Park in New York City which is kind of reminiscent of the outdoor amphitheaters in ancient Athens.
In Shapiro's "Introduction," he makes a certain point that will serve as the springboard from which I will jump to my promised solution to the mystery of why Americans embraced Shakespeare after the American Revolution:
"Shakespeare's habit of presenting both sides of an argument is especially characteristic of his Roman tragedies: Does Lucius mount a coup at the end of Titus Andronicus, backed by foreign soldiers, or is this simply a restoration of order? Are Antony and Cleopatra tragic figures or rather 'a strumpet's fool' and a 'Triple-turned whore'? (1.1.13; 4.12.13). Does Coriolanus celebrate the defeat of authoritarianism or lament its loss? In habitually offering competing perspectives, and in assuming that his audiences were capable of appreciating this, Shakespeare was very much of his age, a product of an Elizabethan educational system that trained young minds to argue in utramque partem, on both sides of a question" (page xxvi).
Regarding the Elizabethan educational system, Shapiro (page 227) refers to Joel B. Altman's book The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama (1978).
Now, my favorite scholar is the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and cultural historian Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955).
As far as I know, Ong does not explicitly discuss the Elizabethan educational system anywhere in his 400 or so publications that would be relevant to Shapiro's point about it.
However, in far broader terms, Ong's massively researched book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (1958) is relevant to what Shapiro says about Shakespeare's tendency to present "both sides of a question" which is the central characteristic of what Ong refers to in his subtitle as the Art of Discourse.
By contrast, what Ong refers to in his subtitle as the Art of Reason is systemically monological in the sense of not including any systematic recognition of or refutation of any real or imagined adversarial positions. Ong sees the French Renaissance logician and educational reformer and Protestant martyr Peter Ramus (1515-1572) as laying the conceptual framework of the Art of Reason as practiced in the Age of Reason (also known as the Enlightenment) in Western culture, including the American Enlightenment as exemplified in the Declaration of Independence.
The classic study of Ramism and Ramist logic in American culture is Perry Miller's massively researched book The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (1939). In it, he reports that he found only one self-described Aristotelian in seventeenth-century New England in a sea of self-described Ramists.
Perry Miller (1905-1963), an alcoholic in English at Harvard University, served as the director of Ong's massively researched doctoral dissertation at Harvard University, which was published in two volumes by Harvard University Press in 1958. I've already mentioned Ong's primary volume. The second volume is titled Ramus and Talon Inventory. It is an annotated bibliography of over 750 volumes (most in Latin) by Ramus, his allies (such as Talon), and his critics that Ong tracked down in more than 100 libraries in the British Isles and Continental Europe.
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