Here is an excerpt from an especially interesting article written by Douglas L. Wilson and featured online by the website of The American Scholar, the venerable but lively quarterly magazine of public affairs, literature, science, history, and culture published by the Phi Beta Kappa Society since 1932. In recent years the magazine has won four National Magazine Awards, the industry’s highest honor, and many of its essays and articles have been selected for the yearly Best American anthologies.

In 2006, The American Scholar began to publish fiction by such writers as Alice Munro, Ann Beattie, Steven Millhauser, Dennis McFarland, Louis Begley, and David Leavitt. Essays, articles, criticism, and poetry have been mainstays of the magazine for 75 years.

Inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous speech, “The American Scholar,” delivered to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard College in 1837, the magazine aspires to Emerson’s ideals of independent thinking, self-knowledge, and a commitment to the affairs of the world as well as to books, history, and science.

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As a lifelong reader of Shakespeare’s plays, Lincoln had reservations about how they were presented.

Abraham Lincoln’s courtship of Mary Todd was anything but smooth. At one point it helped bring on a bout of severe depression that left the future president nearly dysfunctional for a brief period and caused him to avoid Springfield’s social world for several months. In a letter to an absent friend, the future Mrs. Lincoln lamented this state of affairs and wished “that he would once more resume his Station in Society, that ‘Richard should be himself again.’ ” The expression she used is clear enough in meaning, but Lincoln’s biographers have been less certain about its source. In fact, the expression “Richard’s himself again” was in vogue in antebellum America, deriving from one of the best-known speeches in the most performed of all Shakespeare plays, Richard III. But that speech, as Lincoln himself would later point out, was not written by Shakespeare.

This curious state of affairs is surprisingly emblematic of the undernourished state of our knowledge of Lincoln’s famous affinity for Shakespeare. We have so many well-attested stories of Lincoln extolling Shakespeare as a young man in New Salem, of his carrying a volume of Shakespeare’s works around with him on the judicial circuit, of his ability (and willingness) to recite from memory long passages from Shakespeare at the drop of a hat, and of his reading from the plays by the hour to his secretaries and guests as president, that there can be little doubt of his longstanding attachment to the writings of the Bard. And although he seems to have had few opportunities to see Shakespeare’s plays performed before becoming president, he frequently attended the theater in Washington, including many performances of Shakespeare. But this well-established pattern has led his biographers and other commentators to make some unwarranted assumptions and surmises, while neglecting clues that lead to strikingly different conclusions.

To begin with, Lincoln’s pursuit of Shakespeare in Washington theaters has long been overstated. A recent biographer relates that as president, Lincoln “rarely missed an opportunity” to see Shakespeare, but existing records of performances and the president’s attendance indicate that this is a clear exaggeration: he had been in office for two years by the time of the first reliable record of his attending a Shakespeare play. If such a common overgeneralization is hardly a crime against scholarship, it leads to another assertion that takes us even further afield: “He enjoyed them all.” Lincoln undoubtedly attended performances of his favorite plays, such as King Lear, Hamlet, and Macbeth, but the evidence that he enjoyed them is sketchy at best. This alone should give us caution, for it signals an important qualification of his attachment to Shakespeare.

Circumstances kept Lincoln away from the theater during his first two years in office—the rebuilding of one of the major theaters, the burning of another, the death of his son, and his almost total immersion in a grave national crisis that was going badly. But another reason we have no record of his going to see Shakespeare performed during this period is likely that he preferred to slip into theaters unannounced and without fanfare.

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To read the complete article, please click here.

Douglas L. Wilson is codirector of the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. His most recent book is Lincoln’s Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words.