James Baldwin would have turned one hundred years old on August 2nd of this year. A prolific writer and activist, Baldwin’s work rings as true now as the day it was written. An NPR article commemorating Baldwin’s centennial describes his writing as “so affecting, so indelible, so good that it’s still worth reading today.” Despite his mastery of the language, Baldwin grappled with an uncomfortable relationship with the English word. In his 1964 essay “Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare”, Baldwin recounts, “I felt it so bitterly anomalous that a black man should be forced to deal with the English language at all—should be forced to assault the English language in order to be able to speak—I condemned [Shakespeare] as one of the authors and architects of my oppression.” Baldwin points to this condemnation, as well as a “sick envy” and a “loveless education,” to explain how he grew to hate Shakespeare.
As his essay title suggests, Baldwin’s perspective on Shakespeare changed once he was able to engage with him on his own terms. He describes a kind of awakening he experienced while watching a production of Julius Caesar, writing, “What I suddenly heard…was the voice of lonely, dedicated, deluded Cassius, whose life had never been real for me before—I suddenly seemed to know what this moment meant to him.” This anecdote is a familiar one for many Shakespeare enthusiasts who were initially jaded by their own “loveless education” or by Shakespeare’s association with concepts of cultural supremacy. It is not until a person meets Shakespeare on common ground, with all of their experiences and identities in tow, that they are able to truly appreciate him.
The year before Baldwin wrote his Shakespeare essay, he published “A Talk to Teachers” in which he urges American educators to cultivate the kind of critical thinking that prompts students to question society and ask how it may be improved. He also speaks to the maddening educational experience of the Black American child who is told that America represents a nearly flawless ideal while simultaneously learning that this country was never made for them. While the language and practices that kept children of color ostracized from their history and their curriculum may have been more explicit in Baldwin’s day, they are not gone. This marginalization persists in watered-down history lessons, in reading lists that offer only a singular worldview, and in the “loveless” teaching of Shakespeare.
Baldwin demands that the foundation of any good education be the fostering of critical consciousness. This thought is echoed in the work of modern educators like Gloria Ladson-Billings and Django Paris, both of whom created frameworks that seek to build deep cultural connections between students of all backgrounds and the curriculum they encounter. When it comes to Shakespeare, the journey from resistant to passionately engaged will be different for every student. As educators, we can help bridge that gap by sourcing culturally relevant voices and adaptations, allowing students the freedom to exercise linguistic creativity, and refusing to keep the Bard on his dusty pedestal.
While James Baldwin was initially repelled by Shakespeare, he came to realize that he had never truly been in relationship with him. “Perhaps the language was not my own,” he admits, “because I had never attempted to use it, had only learned to imitate it.” When we ask students to simply read and memorize words on a page, they are not ever in relationship with the language. But when we ask them to look for Shakespeare’s themes in their own lives, to rewrite his lines in the languages they speak at home, or to use his stories to talk about social issues that concern them—then, we are beginning to cultivate an authentic connection that might even grow into a love for Shakespeare.
In tribute to the great James Baldwin on his 100th birthday, we leave you with the conclusion of “Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare”:
“And [Shakespeare’s] responsibility, which is also his joy and his strength and his life, is to defeat all labels and complicate all battles by insisting on the human riddle, to bear witness, as long as breath is in him, to that mighty, unnameable, transfiguring force which lives in the soul of man, and to aspire to do his work so well that when the breath has left him, the people—all people!—who search in the rubble for a sign or a witness will be able to find him there.”
