Twenty years after Flanagan’s appearance, the chairman of a subcommittee of the House Un-American Activities Committee asked Joe Papp, the New York producer whose legacy would include the Public Theater and Shakespeare in the Park, if his Shakespearean productions included Communist propaganda. When Papp responded that “the plays speak for themselves,” a member of the committee staff, perhaps anxious to prevent a replay of Starnes’s humiliation, asserted that “there is no suggestion here by this chairman or anyone else that Shakespeare was a Communist. That is ludicrous and absurd. That is the Commie line.”