Welcome to the American Story.

Stories about what it is that makes America beautiful and worthy of our love.

This is Chris Flannery with the Claremont Institute.

April 23rd is This is Chris Flannery with the Claremont Institute.

April 23rd is the date on which William Shakespeare's birthday is traditionally celebrated.

We released this episode in honor of the occasion. Since Americans assume to their

separate and equal station among the powers of the earth, no other poet has

so deeply penetrated and thoroughly inhabited the souls of the American people as William Shakespeare.

I call this one our greatest poet.

In Hollywood, as Philip Marlow says, anything can happen, anything at all.

Hollywood, City of Dreams, right in the lap of Lotus Land, City of

dreams right in the lap of Lotus Land, city of forgetfulness.

What breed of men is nurtured in this dreaming world?

What happens to civilization when it hangs its hat in LA?

The city that seems forever to be cruising Sunset Boulevard in the eternally new convertible?

When I was barely old enough to vote or drink, my older sister took me to an early gathering of the Shakespeare Society of America, founded in West Hollywood in the late 1960s by a Shakespeare lover from

Idaho named Thad Taylor.

We saw, if I remember, Henry IV, Part 1, performed in the Tudor style mansion where the society got started.

Sitting next to me at the play was a distinguished old gentleman, well dressed, who would move his lips to the dialogue in many scenes.

I spoke with him after the noble Percy had become food for worms and asked him about his way of following the play.

I always want to sound the words, he said, to breathe them, feel them with my tongue and lips and teeth and palate.

Feel them quiver in my chest and even somehow resound inside my head. You can't understand Shakespeare altogether if you don't talk him, and you can't

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