Lincoln and Shakespeare

Winner: Lincoln Prize Finalist

It was the measure of Shakespeare’s poetic greatness, an early commentator remarked, that he thoroughly blended the ideal with the practical or realistic. “If this be so,” Walt Whitman wrote, “I should say that what Shakespeare did in poetic expression, Abraham Lincoln essentially did in his personal and official life.”

Whitman was only one of many to note the affinity between these two iconic figures. Novelists, filmmakers, and playwrights have frequently shown...