Public Shakespeare on Shakespeare for All
By Jeffrey R. Wilson
Let’s get our world into the hands of our students as quickly as possible. That’s my takeaway from three years of watching first-year college students storm their ideas out of the classroom, into the world through a project we call Public Shakespeare—including five new essays appearing on Shakespeare for All.
It started by chance. It was Thanksgiving 2018. Due to a quirk in the calendar, our Why Shakespeare? course at Harvard University—which grapples with the playwright’s modern afterlives—ended up with three class sessions after Thanksgiving break, instead of our usual two. So we had a room full of students who had highly polished, heavily footnoted research papers, and 75 minutes on our hands. I challenged them to write the most epic in-class essays of all time—to take their month-long, highly academic research projects on Shakespeare’s modern manifestations and turn them into short essays written with fire and joy for a general audience.
A week later, our first Public Shakespeare essay was published. Writing for Public Seminar, the New School’s journal of ideas, politics, and culture, Iman Lavery argued that Shakespeare’s Othello, its modern adaptations, and school shootings in America all display a similar dynamic: violence stemming from toxic masculinity coming into contact with other factors like mental illness and racism.
The next semester, Alex Grayson wrote on Shakespeare and Disney for her hometown newspaper, The Northern Kentucky Tribune. She pointed out that the Disneyfication of the Romeo and Juliet plotline, where young people desire a forbidden romance—Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid, Aladdin—has morphed into the more recent examples of teenage rebellion against overbearing parents outside the context of romantic relationships—Brave, Moana, Frozen. Four days later, Philip LaPorte wrote on Shakespeare and Indian cinema in The Spectator USA. He showed that, in the context of traditions of endogamy, the push toward marriage for love in Indian adaptations of Romeo and Juliet appeals to younger progressives, while the presumed safety of Shakespeare insulates that message from the censorship of the more conservative-minded establishment in India.
That summer, Public Seminar asked our students for five more essays. In “Learning to Hate Shakespeare,” Jordan Mubako looked at syllabi and Examination Council guidelines from several countries in Africa and asked, “What are the implications of being engaged with Shakespeare at the expense of what could otherwise be regarded as a black or African authenticity?” Seven Richmond argued that “Shakespeare’s poetry, rather than his drama, is why he matters to black culture.” Mercedes Sapuppo suggested that Shakespeare can be used to challenge the Far Right in Europe because his highly canonical plays show that “migration has always been central to European society.” Max Serrano-Wu showed how “Shakespeare helped usher in new approaches to classical music and contributed to the revamping of classical music beyond what Mozart and Beethoven ever imagined.” And Luke Williams argued that Shakespeare’s Coriolanus is all about helicopter parenting, something American teenagers know a little bit about.
Flash forward to Summer 2020. Amidst protests against racist police abuse of force in the US, five students collaborate on an essay for Literary Hub called “Black Lives Matter in the Public Theater’s Much Ado About Nothing.” Writing during a time when the coronavirus pandemic was turning their world upside down, Arsh Dhillon, Phillip Michalak, Bernadette Looney, Sonia Kangaju, and Charles Onesti considered an all-Black cast in New York City’s Central Park doing Shakespeare’s romantic comedy under a Stacey Abrams 2020 banner. In their words:
Black theater is one of America’s most powerful resources for thinking about our nation’s social problems. We hope that, just as the Public made new meanings of this old play, our voices can signal newer, younger, better ways of thinking about Shakespeare that help us uncover truth, gain empathy, and take responsibility for racism.
Two months later, Marissa Joseph wrote “#BlackGirlMagic in Morrison’s Desdemona” for The Sundial, becoming the first undergraduate to publish in this vanguard journal, whose tagline is “Premodern Pasts, Inclusive Futures.” Centering Morrison over Shakespeare, she argued that “#BlackGirlMagic finds its roots in Morrison’s magical realism, which through the supernatural literally and physically demonstrates the complexity and illustriousness of the black feminine experience.”
This past summer, the Folger Library’s Shakespeare and Beyond published Andrew Van Camp’s essay on Shakespearean adaptations dressed up to appear ridiculous: “Something Rotten, the hit 2015 Broadway musical, is just one of the latest incarnations of a tradition of ‘Shakespeare travesty’ dating back more than 200 years.” And now five new Public Shakespeare essays are appearing on Shakespeare for All:
Nancy Lin on Shakespeare in climate activism
Maggie Chiffer on Shakespearean actors in the Marvel Cinematic Universe
Alexandra Kassinis on the Globe to Globe Hamlet in Refugee Camps
Will Nickols on Shakespeare in prison theater
These essays take different guises. Sometimes they create new knowledge where previously there was none, with students looking at emergent phenomena that scholars have yet to address. Sometimes the essays translate academic knowledge into language that actual human beings can understand: scholarship for people in the zip codes that we grew up in. Always they connect a rigorous scholarly exploration with what scholarship often forgets: the big questions and problems—often ethical, political, theological, and existential—that draw us to literature in the first place.
Whether it’s climate justice, mass incarceration, or immigration policy, these essays bring an analytical orientation to political challenges. That means that before we try to fix these problems, we seek to understand them in their full complexity—and that’s where Shakespeare can help. The Shakespearean intervention connects our of-the-moment issues up with longer histories and larger theories from the past. At the same time, as an expert at mixing tragedy and comedy, Shakespeare points to the value of joy, escape, and imaginations of the futures we hope to build amidst the onslaught of the social challenges we face.
Our Public Shakespeare project has transformative potential, not only for the lives and minds of the student writers and their readers, but also for the field of Shakespeare studies. Right now, much more than young people need the genius of Shakespeare, Shakespeare studies needs the next generation of thought—which often centers questions of social justice and especially identity. Our Public Shakespeare essays grow from an inclusive classroom that helps students realize that they have knowledge and perspectives—including diverse cultural backgrounds and languages—that many schools, workplaces, and scholarly fields don’t yet have and desperately need.
Several of our Public Shakespeareans recently had an opportunity to revisit their essays for a featurette put together by the Harvard College Writing Program. Spring 2021 will mark the final semester of the Why Shakespeare? course at Harvard. Our hope is that Shakespearean teachers and students around the world are able to carry on our approach: taking students’ minds seriously enough to ask them to be creators, not just consumers, of knowledge.
The variety in these acts of Public Shakespeare—some celebrating the transformative, community-building capacities of Shakespeare’s art, some critiquing the harmful things done in his plays and in his name—brings us to reckon with the meaning of “Shakespeare for all.” If we are really and truly sincere when we say “Shakespeare for all,” that means we must hold space for those who speak back to Shakespeare, even for those who want to burn him down. “Shakespeare for all” means “Shakespeare to all.” The point is not that the world would be a better place if we’d all just read a little more Shakespeare. The point of “Shakespeare for all” is that Shakespeare belongs to everyone. Different historically, socially, and emotionally attuned perspectives are valuable to our knowledge of Shakespeare, even when—especially when—they are skeptical of the cultural project to make Shakespeare great again. Shakespeare won’t save us, but thinking about, with, through, alongside, and against Shakespeare and his cultural afterlives prepares us to encounter the complexity of the world we face—and must interpret—every day.
Jeffrey R. Wilson is a faculty member in the Writing Program at Harvard University, where he teaches the Why Shakespeare? section of the university’s first-year writing course. He is the author of two books, Shakespeare and Trump and Shakespeare and Game of Thrones. On Twitter @DrJeffreyWilson.