Democratic Shakespeare

Can Shakespeare enable democratic inclusiveness? Scholar Jean E. Howard explores how collective efforts in knowledge-making—in the theater and the classroom—can help us develop “democratic practices that embrace the thoughts and talents of multitudes and that recover the joy of participating with others in generous, life-affirming humanistic inquiry.”

MY HOPE IS THAT SHAKESPEARE OVER THE NEXT 250 YEARS WILL BECOME AN EVER-STRONGER RESOURCE for thinking about and enacting democratic practices in the domains where his influence persists such as the theater, the classroom, the worlds of scholarship and creative expression. The politics of the current moment motivate this hope. In many states and in many institutions of higher learning, Shakespeare syllabi are being censored and research grants for Shakespeareans, along with an array of other humanists, are being severely curtailed. These actions are openly political attempts to suppress forms of knowledge-making that do not conform to such right-wing ideologies as white supremacy, heteronormativity, and a binary gender system. They take aim at cultural workers like Shakespeare directors, actors, editors, critics, and playwrights who actively expand our sense of who can lay claim to Shakespeare and the kinds of new knowledge that can be enabled by innovative engagement with his work. The attacks on Shakespeare and on contemporary humanistic endeavors more broadly are deadly serious and are destroying careers and institutions; they are also a recognition of the power of humanist work to slip the leash of authoritarian control and to give rise to exciting and joyful new ways to understand and inhabit the world. I hope that all those involved in Shakespeare and Shakespeare-adjacent enterprises will—rather than retreating into “safe” formalist approaches to their work—continue to explore the worldliness of Shakespeare and to incorporate ever more voices into inclusively democratic knowledge-making projects.

My aim in this short piece is not to mine Shakespeare’s plays for passages or ideas that support what I take to be democratic principles: the equality of all people, the participation of all in matters of governance, or the right of all to the free expression of their ideas. Rather, I will focus on the implications of the material practices through which we study, perform, watch, and rewrite Shakespeare. What practices implicitly counter autocratic ways of thinking and acting and enable democratic inclusiveness? By what collective efforts can “Shakespeare work” embody different, more life-affirming values?

Examples of what I call democratic Shakespeare practice already exist, of course, and we can call out and amplify such practices. For example, all over the United States community theater groups utilize local talent to conceive and mount Shakespeare productions year after year. They keep alive the belief that Shakespeare belongs to those who claim him and often energetically experiment with cuts and casting, music and dance, to appropriate the plays to suit the talents and needs of those who perform and those who attend. New York City’s Public Theater has long promulgated the position that Shakespeare belongs to everyone and has experimented, partly through their mobile Shakespeare productions, with ways to bring Shakespeare to new audiences, including those in prison and those who live in every borough of the sprawling city. Every summer thousands of New Yorkers line up to see free Shakespeare in Central Park. Recently, through their Public Works initiative, the Public Theater stages a different kind of outdoor production at the end of the summer season. In most of these productions a few professional actors join with 100 community members from all five boroughs to present a version of a Shakespeare play such as The Tempest or Pericles. These Public Works events are inclusive in a new way: they bring to the stage New Yorkers who aren’t theater “professionals,” but who have unique talents and life experiences to offer, melding their passions and vision with those of other citizen participants.

What do these examples suggest about what humanities advocacy might look like in the coming 250 years? For starters, it should include the demand for generous federal and state funding to make the arts, including theater, a public good affordable and available to everyone, following the lead of places and institutions that have been modeling creative ways to do just that.

Equally important are fellowships for playwrights and theater collectives making new theater pieces, some of which jump off from Shakespeare or other canonical dramatists. An energetic democratic practice of the last several decades can be seen in the rising tide of Shakespeare adaptations, rewritings, and spinoffs that deliberately aim at audiences seldom centered in prior productions and that use Shakespeare to address the histories and the creativity of those marginalized by mainstream culture. For examples, I can point to the work of the Borderlands Shakespeare Colectiva and to playwrights such as James Ijames who burst into prominence for his hilarious and complex play, Fat Ham, a probing appropriation of Hamlet that focuses on contemporary Black lives. Using Shakespeare, not as a master text, but rather as a resource that can be absorbed and often utterly remade by different communities, theater makers have ushered in an era of exciting new performances that speak to the lives and the culture of communities that mainstream Shakespeare has often ignored. Support for those creating this rich new body of work should be a public priority, one that sustains an inclusive view of who gets a say in how and for what ends Shakespeare is mobilized on stage and on the page.

The openness of performance to democratic inclusiveness should provoke envy in scholars and teachers who, themselves, may want to rethink their practices to promote a similar inclusiveness. For example, it is standard practice in many science disciplines for collaborative research groups, often including graduate students or postdocs, along with tenured professors, to co-publish articles and research findings. This convention honors the labor and promotes the careers of every member of the research team, regardless of rank or status; it is often a sign of the successful mentoring efforts of principle investigators, but also of the expansive talent of young researchers. While humanists, common wisdom avers, approach research and publication as a solitary endeavor, this common wisdom should be queried. People like me who have had the benefit of working with gifted graduate students, both as talented research assistants and as extraordinary seminar participants, know how much such students’ ideas become part of the woof and warp of one’s own thinking. Their contributions are often acknowledged, however, only in a line or two buried at the back of a finished book or article. It could be otherwise if they were formally invited to be writing collaborators. While co-edited humanities books are fairly common, co-authored books and articles are much rarer. It’s time for our profession to think more creatively and honestly about how we can chip away at the idea of solitary genius as the engine of discovery in the humanities. To paraphrase Elizabeth Warren, no one got to be a genius Shakespearean without the collective effort of prior scholars and without the often unrecognized labor of all those people, from librarians to scholarly peers to translators to students, who make seemingly autonomous scholarly creativity possible.

By contrast, humanities teaching has evolved, though often slowly, toward the decentering of the professor as the sole authoritative source of knowledge. While good teaching capitalizes on a teacher’s expertise and long experience with a subject, assignments and classroom activities should be invitations to acquire skills and frameworks that promote active agency in making knowledge, using the known to get to the unknown. This is a truism, yet a truism that gets buried behind teachers’ sense that there is so very much a student must know to engage Shakespeare intelligently. I plead as guilty as anyone at giving headroom to this implicit belief. Yet if at semester’s end a student is primarily skilled at re-saying what authorities have said, including the professor, this is a teacher-centered, not a student-centered, outcome geared to the reproduction rather than the renewal of knowledge. So maybe in the next 250 years we should try harder to work at two pedagogical projects: (1) framing approaches to Shakespeare’s texts that, while drawing on teacherly expertise, refuse to smother those texts in received knowledge, instead allowing students’ own values, social positionings, and readerly skills to query that received knowledge and create something new; (2) create assignments that don’t begin with Shakespeare up straight, but that pair his texts with rewritings, evocations, and appropriations, tracing a wealth of ways to own or disown Shakespeare, and inviting students to decide, as rigorous critics and free spirits, what uses of Shakespeare they most value and why.

In every aspect of Shakespeare engagement, I hope most of all for the development of democratic practices that embrace the thoughts and talents of multitudes and that recover the joy of participating with others in generous, life-affirming humanistic inquiry.

>> Explore more of our series in which Folger Director Dr. Farah Karim-Cooper asks American Shakespeareans what role Shakespeare will play in the next 250 years of the American story

About the author

Jean E. Howard is the George Delacorte Professor Emerita in the Humanities at Columbia University, a co-editor of The Norton Shakespeare, and author of several books on early modern theater.