Phone calls are passed A. Should they be? Faculty at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business

are exploring how less text-based messaging and more talking could improve communication.

Discover more at www.shakagobooth.edu-slashcommunications.

An intriguing setting for a Shakespeare play four centuries on might have us look no

further than 2020, a year of plague, power struggles in a mighty state and larger

than life leaders dividing loyalties and picking fights.

For never was there a tale of such exhilarating woe as that of warring political households

and star cross-lovers separated by the lockdown. For centuries people around the world

have turned to the comedy's tragedies and histories of William Shakespeare to make sense of the

struggles of their own times. And despite there being just one explicit reference to America

in the English playwright's work in the comedy of errors and extra points if you didn't need to

Google it, the US regards a lad from Stratford to Pont Aven as one of its own.

There are nearly 150 summer Shakespeare festivals in America dwarfing the number held anywhere else in the world.

You're listening to the economist ask Simon McHelvoy and this week we're asking

in an era of political turmoil in pandemic what would Shakespeare make of Trump's America.

My guest today has spent his career studying the life and works of the immortal Bard.

James Shapiro is professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University and author

of several books. His latest is Shakespeare in a divided America and it explores the influence

that the writer had on American society and what his works can tell us about the nation's history

and maybe about its future to James Shapiro welcome to the economist asks.

It's so delighted to be here with you. When you started writing this book

coronavirus wasn't on anybody's mind, plagues however do form a key part of William Shakespeare's

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