The Story

Our Why Shakespeare? course asks how Shakespeare surfaces in modern life—throughout time, around the world, across the academic disciplines, in new artistic forms from painting and music to film and social media, from colonizers and NAZIs to civil rights movements and prison theater, and in light of identity categories such as gender, race, sexuality, class, religion, disability, and the intersections among them. Students bring a lot of themselves to this course—their pasts and their passions—exploring topics that matter to them personally.

Several have presented their Why Shakespeare? papers at the Annual New England Undergraduate Shakespeare Conference. In 2017, Xavier Gonzalez started with some statistics showing that Shakespeare was less popular than his contemporaries in the 1640s and -50s. He argued that the English Civil War of those decades created a desire for order and stability, which led Shakespeare to be relatively unpopular in England, because he was seen as a poet of disorder. That same year, Niko Paladino argued that Shakespeare’s legal plays—like The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure—show what happens when we recognize that our notionally objective systems of law are run by imperfect human beings, which is also a point of focus in the movement known as critical legal studies. (Not coincidently, Xavier is now getting his PhD in statistics, and Niko is in law school.)

Building from this pre-history, our Public Shakespeare assignment started by chance. It was Thanksgiving 2018. Due to a quirk in the calendar, we ended up with three class sessions after Thanksgiving break, instead of our usual two. So we had a room full of students with highly polished, heavily footnoted research papers, and 75 minutes on our hands. We challenged ourselves to write the most epic in-class essays of all time—to turn our month-long, very academic research projects on Shakespeare’s modern manifestations 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 a similar dynamic can be seen in Shakespeare’s Othello, its modern adaptations, and school shootings in America: violence stems from toxic masculinity coming into contact with other factors like racism and mental illness.

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 wanted five more essays. In “Learning to Hate Shakespeare,” Jordan Mubako looked at African syllabi 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 pointed out 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 Sekhon, 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.”

Spring 2021 marks the final semester of our Why Shakespeare? course. Our hope is that teachers and students around the world are able to carry on our approach—which takes students’ minds seriously enough to ask them to be creators, not just consumers, of knowledge.

The Assignment

All are welcome to use or adapt our Public Shakespeare assignment as they like.

Objectives: This assignment is designed to expose students to public writing, its differences from academic (peer-reviewed) writing, and some strategies for doing it.

Readings: Three essays of your choice (see directions below).

Assignment: Write a short essay (900-1200 words) delivering your argument for your research project to a public audience. Then submit that essay for consideration in a relevant venue.

Instructions:

Part I (Before Class)

1. Identify three possible venues for your essay from the list at the end of this assignment.

2. Read one recent essay of your choice from each venue.

3. As you’re reading all these essays, make a list of the writing features and strategies in public writing that are similar to and different from academic writing. Your points don’t need to be fancy or extensive: it’s just a way for you to familiarize yourself with the conventions of public writing, and to prepare to do it yourself.

Part II (During Class)

1. Select 3-5 bits of key evidence from your research project. These may be amazing statistics, great quotations, bizarre facts, unknown texts, etc.

2. Think about how you’ll craft your writing style in this piece, which will be different than the style adopted in formal academic writing.

3. Think about what the structure of your piece will be. Make a basic outline.

4. Write your essay. (When you’re done, you’ll be exchanging essays with a partner, so please write legibly on a new sheet of paper or, if you prefer, on a laptop or some other device you can hand to your partner.)

5. Exchange essays with a partner. Read your partner’s essay, making notes toward workshopping the essay (which we’ll be doing next).

6. Workshop your essays with your partner.

Part III (After Class)

1. Revise your essay based on your conversation with your partner in workshop, and your further thoughts on the piece.

2. Select a suitable venue. See the attached list, but also think about the venues you like, including those local to your school or your hometown. Also, think about your particular essay: there may be a public magazine or website specific to that topic that seems most fitting (e.g. India Times, Sci Fi Monthly). Click around on the various sites you’re considering; see what sorts of things they publish; and figure out what’s the best fit. You’ll need to navigate on the site to find information on how to submit your work (check for a “Contact Us” or “Submissions” link).

3. Submit your essay for consideration. Below is a template for a cover letter. Modify it as needed based on your personality and style.

Cover Letter Template

Dear Editors,

I’d like to see if you're interested in considering an essay I’ve written titled “[Title]” (attached). The argument is that [snappy one-sentence thesis statement].

The essay grows out of a course I’m taking at ____________, called ____________. Our professor has asked us to re-fashion our research projects into public-facing essays, and I thought you might be interested in the results.

Thanks for your consideration.

Regards,

[Your Name]

Note: sometimes publishers ask for a “pitch” rather than the full essay. If that’s the case, create your pitch by using your intro plus a three-sentence overview of what you cover in the rest of the essay.

Possible Venues