1. Introduction
[1.1] I am an antifan. To say I like Shakespeare would be inaccurate. I tolerate him. I am, sometimes, entertained by him. And, in moments such as this, I enjoy the mental puzzle of thinking about him. But if quarantined to a deserted island filled with amateur fan fiction, philosophical texts, sudoku puzzles, and Shakespeare, most likely his would be the last texts I open. I find more textual enjoyment from the fan fiction, equally intriguing ideas in the philosophy, and a more satisfying sense of completion from a solved sudoku. What's fascinating about this statement is that for years, like so many before me, I presumed I was alone in my feelings. As a white woman who primarily attended and now works in a rural university, I was blind to the ways white supremacist, patriarchal approaches to Shakespeare were precisely what I hated about Shakespeare. It wasn't until Kim Hall's plenary presentation at the 2019 Shakespeare Association of America conference, "I Can't Love You the Way You Want Me To: Archival Blackness," that I became aware of how white my Shakespearean education had been and how racist the exclusion of scholarship like Hall's in classrooms run by older, white scholars—people who insisted their approach was neutral, rigorous, and, therefore, more academic—was. And yet, despite the power and energy that filled the room of that long-ago SAA plenary session, the larger world of Shakespeare studies continues to assert patriarchal whiteness as neutral and anything else as niche.
[1.2] With the growing attention to race studies in Shakespeare through movements such as RaceB4Race and social media hashtags, more conversations about and attention to a body of scholarship that goes beyond Harold Bloom and Stephen Greenblatt have proliferated. As Margo Hendricks states, "The blind spots that British historians have for the long-standing work of literary scholars (especially those in the United States) on early modern Black peoples in Britain is especially infuriating when they suddenly claim archival discoveries" (2021, 377). These blind spots and claims of discovery promote reading practices in Shakespeare studies that perpetuate what Ebony Elizabeth Thomas labels an "imagination gap" (2019, 5). This imagination gap theorizes how, for people of color, "Even the very act of dreaming of worlds-that-never-were can be challenging when the known world does not provide many liberating spaces" (2). In both Shakespeare studies and fandom, such imagination gaps can result in readers who do not question their instincts. Thomas uses the term "the dark fantastic" to identify the "role that racial difference plays in our fantastically storied imaginations" (7) and explores how the "dominant social formation" shapes mythmaking and leads to control of imagination itself (17). As Thomas concludes, "We never notice that monsters, fantastic beasts, and various Dark Others are silenced because we have never been taught the language that they speak" (23). While Shakespeare is not traditionally considered an author of the fantastic, the supernatural elements of many of his plays, combined with the myth of Shakespeare that has been created and refined through capitalist literary economics, nonetheless makes Thomas's theory of the dark fantastic applicable both to Shakespeare's plays and, more importantly, to Shakespearean scholarship.
[1.3] Hendricks identifies one example of such silencing in her interlude on Maria, an African woman kidnapped, raped, and abandoned by Frances Drake. Hendricks points out that "What goes untold in all the written accounts of Drake's abduction and subsequent rape of Maria is the prehistory of her separation from her family, community, and homeland" (2021, 376). The similarity in focus between Thomas and Hendricks is one of many indications that twenty-first century Shakespeare has become intertwined with fandom and is arguably now a place where literary figures—historical and fictional—can be considered and imagined, reconsidered and reimagined. And yet, with all the reworkings of Shakespeare—reworked in fandom, reworked in popular culture, even reworked in academia until the mentifacts preserved through the text are more easily accessed—how often is the prehistory of Shakespeare questioned? How often do adaptations of Shakespeare make the myth of Shakespeare differently? Enter Ron Wimberly's Prince of Cats.
2. Prince of Cats
[2.1] John Jennings describes Ron Wimberly's Prince of Cats as not "just a mishmash of things [Wimberly] digs. Yes it's Romeo and Juliet meets Kurosawa meets The Warriors meets 'Planet Rock.' However, what makes Prince of Cats innovative is the fact that it acts as a reified index of what Hip Hop culture would manifest itself as visually" (2020, 3). Wimberly remakes Shakespeare in such a way that the reader cannot ignore the subject position of the characters themselves and the ways our seemingly insignificant individuality nonetheless defines the circumstances of our plurality: "Tybalt is meant to die. That's the script. However, when the script is flipped, a black Tybalt is even more cursed and doomed. Or is he?" (Jennings 2020, 3). Hendricks states a "bidirectional gaze is one that looks inward even as it looks outward" (2021, 368), and Wimberly's graphic novel brings to the forefront the positional subjectivity of his characters.
[2.2] Shakespeare often operates within geek properties—including comics and various modalities of the fantastic—"metonymically," as Brandon Christopher lays out, creating an association "first with a particular kind of literary respectability that runs contrary to common conceptions of comics and, then, through repetition, with a particular type of comics authorship" (2017, 152). However, unlike the use of Shakespeare in properties such as Star Trek or Batman, Wimberly doesn't borrow the world of Romeo and Juliet in order to establish an "authorial lineage" of his text (Christopher 2017, 152) but remakes white Shakespeare by building a visual hip-hop story that is what Alfred Martin, Jr. names "must-see blackness," which "describes black fans' 'civic duty' to see blackness in all of its forms" (2019, 741). Martin's "must-see blackness" intersects with his categories of "economic consumption" and "pedagogical fitness" and "illuminates black fans' attentiveness to the machinations of the culture industries" (741). Wimberly's pages, visual in a way Shakespearean text is not, centers his story on the Dark Other. As Thomas argues, "when the fantastic is transmediated from page to screen, conventions become that much more amplified...It is one thing to read and imagine a character who is the site of difference; it is quite another to see that character on the small or large screen" (2019, 31). Wimberly's opening scene establishes nighttime, and thus darkness, as integral to his setting. The opening panels have black borders and gutters between the panels. Tybalt's darkness is contrasted against a Romeo drawn with light—even white—skin, and it is Romeo who becomes the antagonist of Wimberly's text. The function of violence in Tybalt's character is thus complicated from the beginning as Wimberly presents the Dark Other as a skilled fighter and a leader in a world where violence doesn't appear to be optional.
[2.3] In Wimberly's text, Roslyn, here drawn as a woman of color, is the other main player; both Roslyn and Tybalt's characters are marginalized and forgotten within the text of Romeo and Juliet, which ends on the famous words "For never was a story of more woe / Than this of Juliet and her Romeo" (5.3.309–10). Within Shakespeare, Roslyn is a noncharacter, an object of misogynistic discourse between Romeo and Mercutio, and Tybalt is slain by Romeo at the beginning of Act 3. In choosing to center his text on Tybalt, Wimberly's remake of Shakespeare doesn't simply ask the reader to consider Shakespeare as a tool of marginalization but forces a renegotiation of Romeo and Juliet by imagining a different story within the spaces of the original text. Thomas states that as "readers and viewers begin to claim interpretive agency, they not only imagine themselves into stories but also reimagine the very stories themselves" (2019, 154), and Wimberly's own words support an understanding of his authorship in such a reimagination. In a brief autobiographical afterword, Wimberly writes that "a strong NY wind stripped me of my youth" in the winter of 2005. He then goes on to say, "Shortly after I asked myself why it had never before seemed strange to me that the children of Shakespeare's Verona were so reckless with their lives; I decided to write Prince of Cats" (2020, 141). Wimberly masterfully sums up the socioeconomic violence inflicted through systemic racism when he remembers "Reagan's eighties" as "Mental institutions were bankrupt. Crack was in; DC was the murder capital of the nation. The white stone of the Washington Monument was visible from nearly every ghetto in the capital" (141). Within these circumstances, why not be reckless with a life? To live in such a culture is, arguably, a reckless act where moments of happiness and meaning must be carved from the struggles and violence of systemic oppression. Thomas asks, "If monsters and people of color inhabit the same place in our stories, what would it be like to read monster theory from the monster's perspective?" (2019, 20). By situating the violence in a gang war fought through the landscape of an urban US city and presenting a young black man—a character who excels at violence and revels in it—as the protagonist, Prince of Cats offers an answer. Tybalt may not be a hero, but Wimberly's graphic novel highlights that life does not have value in relation to a white supremacist imagination of heroism.
[2.4] Matthieu Chapman states, "Afro-pessimism is a field of black critical theory that counters typical academic engagements that privilege the analysis of political economy" and argues that the "discourse of political economy...often deploys an argumentative slippage that reads all types of suffering and oppression as analogous across racial, political, ethnic, and class lines...Afro-pessimism operates at a higher domain of abstraction to articulate what exists within the world, as well as the psychic network of desire, anxiety, and revulsion that informs and scaffolds the psyche's construction of value in that world" (2020, 8). Wimberly's Tybalt is ultimately destroyed by his pride, but Chapman's afro-pessimism pushes a reader grappling with this character to consider the why beyond Tybalt's youth or easily dismissed machismo. For example, in Act 4 of Wimberly's text, Tybalt successfully defeats six Montagues and, after being saved by, tended to, and then engaging in sexual intercourse with Roslyn, tells her, "I'll bear not Montague coals, nor suffer their brazen intimidations to alter the paths I follow on my streets. I bear Capulet's brand, we know no fear." To which Roslyn replies, "Rapier's tongue you'd rather brave than suffer Pride's wound that heals and leaves no scar but mem'ry? You're fucking crazy, Tybalt, verily" (2020, 80). It is Tybalt's struggle and death which drive Prince of Cats, but the core meaning of youth recklessly risking, murdering, and reaffirming life within a system that limits their choices and opportunities remains a primary meaning. How is the sin of pride refigured within a setting that dehumanizes the people who fight for it? A reading of class but not race "does little to dismantle white supremacy as settler colonialism's hegemonic impulse" (Hendricks 2021, 369), and Wimberly's choices keep intersectionality at the forefront of his text. Chapman's afro-pessimism, by contrast, "looks beyond political economy and analyzes libidinal economy" (2020, 8). Political economy, according to Chapman, "describes the exchanges that occur within the world" while "libidinal economy is the network of psychic impulses that makes the things exchanged repulsive or desirable" (8). As Chapman sums up, "Political economy is the 'what' of civil society, while libidinal economy is the 'why' and the 'how'" (8). It is not enough to dismiss Tybalt's relationship to pride as nothing "but mem'ry." Why he cannot bear Montague coals is indelible to how he asserts his humanity.
[2.5] A reading of pride—especially as that term has historically been theorized primarily from a white perspective—fails to consider why Tybalt would see compromise with the Montagues as repulsive or his insistence on walking the streets in a dangerously brazen manner as desirable. Chapman argues that "the relationship between blackness and the Slave is a result of the rupture between blackness and the human that occurred in the Middle Passage" and concludes that the "antiblack libidinal economy whose desires undergird the formation of American civil society exists in a direct continuum with the libidinal economy that structured Early Modern English civil society" (2020, 10–11). Tybalt is not merely representing the recklessness of youth or the failure of a young man performing masculinity to destroy himself rather than "suffer Pride's wound that heals and leaves no scar but mem'ry" (80); he is demanding the reader engage with his prehistory. Readings of Shakespeare that fail to interrogate white supremacy presume an understanding of Tybalt's positional subjectivity that fails to recognize how "blackness occupies a unique position as the unthought absence through which the world thinks and articulates human presence" (8–9). His pride is not his ego (or, at least, not only) but his insistence on being seen. Pride is his insistence on being human.
[2.6] As Chapman explains, "Blackness is subject to gratuitous violence, and the gratuitous violence inflicted on black flesh for centuries has created a rupture between the black and the human" (2020, 9). Ultimately, as Chapman concludes, "A libidinal economy predicated on black absence cannot reconcile this absence with notions of human presence and thus cannot produce a civil society that recognizes and incorporates black people as subjects" (9). In the case of Tybalt, to compromise with the Montagues—characters generally drawn with significantly lighter skin tones than the Capulets in Wimberly's text—is to embrace his own absence. The violence of pride's wound, therefore, may only affect memory, but it is within that memory—not only Tybalt's individual memory but also societal memory—that humanity is constructed and perpetuated. Any critical interpretation of Wimberly's text must be intersectional because a Marxist "grammar of suffering" based on "exploitation and alienation" cannot "account for the suffering of all people" (Chapman 2020, 9). Concurrently, a reading of Tybalt's goals in Wimberly's text—primarily reputation and stature achieved through physical violence—cannot account for the necessity of that violence by applying white supremacist theories of pride. Tybalt's refusal to change does lead to his death, but it is also his refusal to "communicate with the colonizer" by "relinquish[ing his] own voice and ways over knowing" in order to "engage the colonizer on the colonizer's grounds with the colonizer's discourse" (Chapman 2020, 14). Though not explicitly articulated as such, Tybalt's character seems to demand an answer to the question: What is so civil about this society? Why must the Capulets be civil when such civility only serves the Montagues?
[2.7] While scholarship like that of Hendricks, Hall, MacDonald, and others has worked tirelessly to open up the meanings and value of Shakespeare in the decades preceding internet fandom, texts such as Prince of Cats go one step forward and reimagine Shakespeare in dialectic relationship with the critical race scholarship of fandom itself. Wimberly's graphic novel is what Thomas identifies as a "critical race counterstory" and an example of the Dark Other, which Thomas states "elicits both fear and desire" and "ultimately repositions the Dark Other as the spectacle that creates hesitation and elicits violence anew. Hence the first four phases of this cycle repeat, spawning sequels, spinoffs, and authorial success" (2019, 23, 28). White Shakespeare and white fandom dismiss Romeo and Juliet as a play about emotional teenagers and dated societal feuds, but Wimberly shows there is nothing dated about societal violence; there is only a willful misreading of young men who are reckless with their lives. The chaos of fandom has historically celebrated the various meanings of texts that are compelling to some but never satisfactory to all, but as fandom and fan studies have proliferated in the twenty-first century, critical race scholars and the fans who analyze and/or discuss race continue to face professional and/or social censure in some cases for identifying this cycle of violence. The silencing of this work within the academy hides behind periodization and arguments against the study of race as "an imposition of a modern sensibility, a political agenda" (Hendricks 2021, 367) but, as Thomas states, "This is why taking a supposedly 'neutral' or 'objective' approach to theorizing the dark fantastic is problematic; the default position is to allow those who are used to seeing themselves as heroic and desired the power and privilege of naming, defining, and delimiting the entire world and everything that is in it. We never notice that monsters, fantastic beasts, and various Dark Others are silenced because we have never been taught the language that they speak. Critical race counter-storytelling provides both translation and amplification for these subsumed narratives" (2019, 22–23). However, still too often to challenge the absolute perfection of a fandom's (or academia's) favorite text, character, or author is to proclaim your enmity and be labeled the antifan.
[2.8] The conversations around the term antifan reveal a desire in fandom (and I hope in Shakespeare studies) to continue engaging with "race as a trope" and a refusal on the part of fans, just as Hendricks has pointed out in regards to Shakespeareans, to "dissect the white academic subjectivity they occupy—a position that serves as an uncontested normativity" (2021, 369). If the contribution of fandom to academia is a deconstructing of academic hierarchies, then such deconstruction must include not only the work we produce but the imaginations and instincts that set us on our path. To be an antifan is to deconstruct the self with the text. To be an antifan of Shakespeare is to question labeling of certain reading practices, literary theories, and methodologies as "neutral" while others—attention to race and sexism for example—are required to incorporate "opposing perspectives" in order to ensure their rigor (Hendricks 2021, 372). By prioritizing Tybalt in his text, Wimberly asks readers of both Shakespeare and himself to wrestle with tragedy when the tragic flaw is not a single characteristic within a single character but the flaw of civil society itself.
3. Antifan
[3.1] Derek Johnson states that "fan interpretation is constantly shifting, never unified or maintaining the same valences over time" and that "by reinforcing certain textual contingencies as desirable, fan consensus reproduces tastes predisposed to those particular interpretations" (2007, 291). I posit that academia has operated similarly to fandoms in this way. A certain homogeny among Shakespeareans may be the inevitable result of sharing an education; however, too often that homogeny reinforces the patriarchal, white-supremacist lens defined through capitalist companies such as Sparknotes and their No Fear Shakespeare series. This reinforcement of patriarchal white supremacy would seem to contradict Johnson's earlier point regarding the constant shifting of fan interpretation, but not if we examine Shakespearean scholarship through the theories which shape it. So-called neutral approaches are prioritized—close reading, New Criticism, and New Historicism, to name but a few—which appear to be constantly shifting while simultaneously reproducing interpretations predisposed to reinforcing the power structures currently in place. By contrast, the supposed political approaches—the scholarly discourses of race, colonialism, gender, and other overtly political academic work—are often treated as antifan. An antifan approach forces debate and defense of tastes by creating the possibility of recognizing our predisposition of interpretations, and while an antifan approach is not necessarily built from a hatred or dislike of Shakespeare—a common accusation lobbed at the antifan—our understanding of neutrality as perpetuated through academia nonetheless positions scholars working from political positions as antifans.
[3.2] In discussing the ethical complexities of fandom and creators who have proven themselves to be bigots, the author Stitch states, "What do we owe each other? In fandom, people generally don't like to admit that we have any responsibility to our fellow fans because responsibility is limiting, stifling. But we do have a bare-minimum responsibility to support marginalized people in fandom and to not support bigotry or bigots. You don't have to answer for any random person out there, but being aware of what you're consuming and from whom shouldn't be too much to ask" (2022a). Stitch's words echo those of Arthur Little from barely a year prior. Little reminds his reader that "it has been scholars of color who have most insistently and persistently argued for the importance of studying Shakespeare in a racialized context, especially given the prominence afforded to Shakespeare in Western literature and thought" (2021, 140). Little also anticipates disingenuous critique—the same critique Stitch is referencing when she states, "You don't have to answer for any random person out there"—and goes on to state, "We get further with racial critique when we understand it less as a category associated with ethnic particularities and more as discursive relations playing out through the hegemonically overdetermined and highly ritualized marking of bodies" (151). So commonplace is the labeling of Critical Race Studies as antifan that the same arguments against this ethics of reading appear in academia as within fandoms.
[3.3] The ethics of reading outlined above considers subject position and intersections between individuals and the power structures that surround us. "Is Shakespeare white property?" Little questions after asking his reader "to witness the experience of many Shakespeare scholars of colour (especially if they're doing critical race work) who, despite almost invisible numbers, find themselves too often being caricatured as 'to manie' (too many)" (2021, 147). Antifans are often classified as antagonistic and their interpretations dismissed as a "momentary aberration within a unified consensus" (Johnson 2007, 286). They who control the standardized tests control the universe, and it is the answers to those tests that construct the appearance of consensus. What good is an ethics of reading if it fails all capitalist assessment of Shakespearean value?
[3.4] Building from Little's powerful question, "Is Shakespeare white property?" the usefulness of an antifandom approach to Shakespeare comes into sharp relief. The antifan approach repositions Shakespeare as more than a dead white guy canonized and enshrined by stodgy patriarchal academics and reconfigures Shakespeare's value as a cultural artifact—a value that must be definable should his position as a curricula necessity persist—and preserves a space for the love and engagement of fandom around Shakespeare. It simply demands that a Shakespearean fandom value a plurality of meanings cultivated from his texts while acknowledging the necessity of antifandom to continuously demand that plurality. One way to ensure the perpetuation of this plurality, to build it into Shakespeare curriculum, is to classify Shakespeare as multicultural.
4. Multicultural Shakespeare
[4.1] What would it mean to taxonomize Shakespeare as multicultural? Intentionally framing Shakespeare within the discourse of multiculturalism runs the risk of enshrining white supremacy but also requires that we read, teach, and make meaning from Shakespeare with a plural viewpoint. For example, Hendricks argues for revisiting origin stories, stating, "Origin stories matter because citation is not the same as foregrounding [scholars of color's] scholarship" (2021, 377). The continued meaning of white, Western cultures as the center and default around which the so-called multi cultures revolve perpetuates an origin story of whiteness. Explicitly labeling Shakespeare as multicultural because of his imperialist and colonial history explicitly labels whiteness as multicultural. Shakespeare ceases to be a gravimetric center and, instead, becomes one more mass which exerts a pull on everything around it while being pulled in turn.
[4.2] One example of the intersectional work that has shaped Shakespeare studies is Ania Loomba and Melissa Sanchez's important work Rethinking Feminism in Early Modern Studies. In their introduction, they ask, "Why feminism? Why now?" Loomba and Sanchez posit their work "demonstrates how studies of early modern literature, history, and culture can contribute to a rethinking of feminist aims" and "shows why studies of race, sexuality...are essential parts of, not mere adjuncts or additions to, any feminist endeavor" (2016, 1). And yet, despite the clear necessity of understanding the intersectional history of Shakespeare, Loomba and Sanchez remind their readers that "some of the smartest and most innovative feminist early modernists found it hard to survive within the academy, to get jobs and tenure" (1). Is there a meaningful difference between behavior within the academy that devalues and is actively hostile to these methodologies and the claim by white supremacist fans that racebending, genderbending, and new entries within beloved franchises is a ploy to pander to woke audiences? (Jenkins 2018; Stitch 2022b).
[4.3] Kiernan Ryan also asks the question "why does Shakespeare matter?" Unfortunately, Ryan eventually resorts to essentialism, but he does begin his discussion by acknowledging the stereotypical explanation of Shakespeare's universality doesn't hold up: "The contention that The Taming of the Shrew, The Merchant of Venice, or any other play by Shakespeare has the capacity to appeal to people in all times and places, whatever their nationality, race, gender, language, creed or sexual orientation, because it reflects a universal experience that everyone can identify with or relate to, doesn't stand up to scrutiny for a moment. For millions of people in all parts of the world, Shakespeare holds no appeal whatsoever and for a host of obvious reasons, but it's certainly not because they haven't yet discovered that his drama distils the essence of humanity, and thus holds a mirror up to the lives of everyone everywhere" (2015, xi). However, Ryan reads the persistent popularity of Shakespeare—especially in contrast to other Early Modern dramatists—as proof of Shakespeare's "expanding appeal over the last four centuries to the most disparate cultures across the globe" (5) and dismisses historicized counterarguments like those of Hendricks, Little, Loomba, and Sanchez because a "detailed recreation of the culture that cradled Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists can't begin to explain why Shakespeare's plays have bewitched the world" (4). Nowhere does Ryan consider the possibility that Shakespeare is everywhere because Shakespeare is Shakespeare.
[4.4] Stephen Hawking discusses the "anthropic principle," which he paraphrases to mean "we see the universe the way it is because we exist" (1988, 128). We are not pursuing the causes of our sight, our intellect, and our cognition—we are not working backward from the study of humanity as an effect. Rather, what we see, what we can see, is the effect from the cause that is humanity. It is the insistence that something objective or natural drives cause and effect that obscures the anthropic principle; once obscured, the function of Shakespeare in a multicultural world is labeled niche or optional while, even more destructively, whiteness as an origin story moves outside of criticism into an unimpeachable realm of Platonic Truth. The white perspective is the mathematic perspective, the logical perspective, the rigorous perspective. The anthropic principle of whiteness explains why critics like Ryan continue to insist white supremacy cannot "explain why Shakespeare's plays have bewitched the world" (2015, 4). Henry Jenkins states that "fans engage closely with texts because they are fascinated; they continue to rework them because they are frustrated with some aspect of the original" (2018, 383). Additionally, fans "engage with texts on terms not of their own choosing" (383). Many people from many places—whether as a student, consumer, fan, or all of the above—are presented Shakespeare on terms not of their own choosing. They are taught, cajoled, even pressured to learn how to read Shakespeare in ways that are not true for other early modern playwrights. This is the dialectical myth of Shakespeare—as an author, Shakespeare has become a fantasy, The Bard, and many of the fantastic elements in his texts are highlighted and emphasized in order to engage modern audiences. As with other myths of power, arguments over Shakespeare are arguments about "who possesses it, who is entitled to it, and who deploys it towards what ends, and on whose behalf" (386). Shakespeare's multiculturalism is one more negotiated point whether within the Shakespearean fandom or Shakespeare studies. Jenkins explains, "Struggles over how race operates in fantastical genres are essential when you consider how important these stories are for younger audiences still mapping their place in the social order" (386). By contrast, Ryan (2015) argues that "detailed recreation of the culture that cradled Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists can't begin to explain why Shakespeare's plays have bewitched the world" because Ryan has removed (or is blind to) the anthropic factors of that culture. Ryan has forgotten the fans.
[4.5] In response to the anthropic principle, Hawking proposes a "boundless universe" where "the boundary conditions of the universe is that it has no boundary" (1988, 141) and states "a scientific theory is just a mathematical model we make to describe our observations...So it is meaningless to ask: which is real, 'real' or 'imaginary' time? It is simply a matter of which is the more useful description" (144). The nature of the numbers is meaningless because both answers make meaning within the system of signification—all that matters, therefore, is which makes the most useful meaning. These competing truths of Shakespeare—his position as a material imperial text within a history of colonialism and early modern philosophy, and his universality understood as "a capacity for communication, for creating and addressing a community of minds united in a common cause" (Ryan 2015, 13)—both make meaning. It is meaningless to ask which is the neutral Shakespeare and which is the political. It is simply a matter of which is the more useful description and, given the current state of political affairs, education, and global conflict, a multicultural Shakespeare seems a far more useful description in modern curricula than The Bard.
[4.6] Ryan does not dispute the accepted history of Shakespeare but does argue that the explanation of "Shakespeare's enduring supremacy and global reach" as an effect of "his drama's efficacy as a covert instrument of ideological indoctrination and cultural imperialism" is an argument that "patently won't wash" (2015, 6). Furthermore, Ryan maintains that such an argument "posits in the peoples of the world a capacity for sustained self-delusion on an implausible scale" but is more obviously false because "it can't credibly explain why such a wealth of creative and critical energy has been invested by so many different cultures for so long in the works of Shakespeare rather than in the works of any other author of any era" (6). Multiple explanations credibly explain Ryan's points. The first, stated by Thomas, is that as "readers and viewers begin to claim interpretive agency, they not only imagine themselves into stories but also reimagine the very stories themselves" (2019, 154). Thomas's explication of the consequences within popular culture of this process aligns with Sanchez and Loomba's arguments about Shakespeare studies: "This imaginative restorying work is often viewed as transgressive, as authors fight for the official word, cultural pundits trivialize readers' efforts, and the general public positions authors as 'under attack' by wayward readers" (154). Shakespeareans working within Critical Race studies, Feminist studies, Queer theory, and others have been and continue to be chastised, denigrated, and attacked for their refusal to respect the real Shakespeare. These attacks are exacerbated by capitalist-driven professional goals, which Hendricks explains: "Race, in all its permutations, didn't become a 'presence' for many scholars of pre and early modern cultures until it became professional profitable" (2021, 378). To be a Shakespearean is to get a job—a serious, academic job—and the only way to keep that job is through creative and critical energy. We should not confuse the drives of professionalism via capitalism with work such as Hendricks's, which is "strategic, intersectional, and political" (379). For some, the perpetuation of Shakespeare is about profit; for others, it is about learning to see "the sovereignty stripped from those bodies by settler colonialism" (379).
[4.7] The phrasing of Ryan's argument engages in a discourse that perpetuates Shakespeare's universality by classifying methodologies that pay attention to subject position as ridiculous and overly emotional. Ania Loomba states that "Shakespeare's plays have been an extraordinarily powerful medium between generations and cultures, a conduit for transmitting and shaping ideas about colonialism and race" (2002, 5). It is more than disingenuous to claim Loomba's argument—or any of the other accomplished scholars from the fields of Critical Race and Postcolonial studies—as declaring Shakespeare a "covert instrument of ideological indoctrination and cultural imperialism" (Ryan 2015, 6). Such statements align Shakespearean scholarship of race and colonialism not only with antifans but also with notions of toxic fans.
[4.8] Toxic fans, according to Melenia Arouh, are characterized by their "intense and aggressive participation" that strikes the "general audience as disproportionate and unwarranted" (2020, 68). Ryan's framing of Shakespeare's universality bifurcates Shakespearean criticism into clamoring antifan historicists who reject "a conception of Shakespeare that has for too long been ideologically complicit...in perpetuating social, sexual, and racial injustice" and contrasts them against "most students, teachers and lovers of Shakespeare across the globe" who value Shakespeare for "his timeless truths of the universal condition" (2015, x). This move is similar to what Jenkins identifies with fans and antifans: "Fandom studies often fluctuates between two poles—the fan as all-consuming and the fan as all-resisting," and this divides "the field into two diametrically opposed poles, rather than imagining diverse fan activities occupying the space between" (2018, 384). While, generally speaking, Ryan's argument is well written, this reading of the debate around Shakespeare's universalism feels like an all-too-common pattern repeating itself once again. According to Ryan, there must be a reason—one identifiable, qualifiable reason—that Shakespeare is still so popular. And that reason, because Shakespeare has and continues to be popular around the globe and through multiple centuries, must transcend specific cultural, artistic, and scholarly moments. It must, in other words, be universal. A natural law. But Ryan's argument of universality fails to consider what Hannah Arendt identifies as plurality, writing, "Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live" (1958, 8). Yes, humans en masse engage with, rework, recreate, critique, and enjoy Shakespeare. But the claim of any text as unique, powerful, and special in and of itself must fall back on "the assumption that the same central human preoccupation must prevail in all activities of men, since without one comprehensive principle no order could be established" (17). The comprehensive principle of Shakespeare, the method by which we prove his value and ensure his texts deserve to be studied (funded) and taught (hired), remains, for many, his universality. So, let's cry havoc! And let loose the antifans.
[4.9] Arendt is not discussing the human preoccupation with Shakespeare, but her philosophy breaks down any positivistic approach to understanding human behavior and affect. "The problem of human nature," Arendt writes, "seems unanswerable in both its individual psychological sense and its general philosophical sense...nothing entitles us to assume that man has a nature, an essence in the same sense as other things. In other words, if we have a nature or essence, then surely only a god could know and define it" (1958, 10). If, as Ryan contends, Shakespeare is universal because his plays "are dramatized from the perspective of 'common humanity'—from the anticipated future perspective of a genuinely universal human community no longer crippled by division and domination" (2015, 11), then humans (1) share a common humanity and (2) see and value the same future perspective.
[4.10] Ryan makes the same mistake here as the political philosophers critiqued by Arendt. Margaret Canovan writes that these philosophers "had been writing about politics in a way that systematically ignored the most salient political features of human beings—that they are plural, that each of them is capable of new perspectives and new actions, and that they will not fit a tidy, predictable model" (1998, xii). Any creator of fan works or participant of fan culture would agree—the only thing common about our humanity is, perhaps, our differences, and if it were possible to see and value the same future perspective, fandom would be marked by significantly fewer shipping wars. Ultimately any conversation regarding the universality of Shakespeare is meaningless if for no other reason than there can be no uniform theory with which we might assess and agree upon the answer. There is irony that the conversation persists at all—wasn't the theory of everything one of the most hotly debated quests of physics? And yet, much of the popular culture surrounding and arising from Shakespeare remains built on an idea of the Transcendent Bard.
[4.11] This antifan approach to the value of Shakespeare and his place in curricula feels dangerous to my livelihood as I am arguing there is no inherent, essential reason for Shakespeareans. We are not studying the laws of the universe that enable the development of quantum computers or indoor plumbing. We are, often, studying the plurality of humanity and the ways that language constructs a reality within which we all live. But attempting to argue a text does anything that is not materialized through the reader and thus has objective value in the capitalist sense requires a vocabulary and conceptual framework often labeled jargon by the public and dependent on crushing the "political capacities" of human beings (Canovan 1998, xii). As Arendt says, "Because human existence is conditioned experience, it would be impossible without things, and things would be a heap of unrelated articles, a non-world, if they were not the conditioners of human existence" (1958, 9). No text, no construct, no meaning may be universal because meaning is created through the dialectical process of human and thing, and we are not all conditioned in the same ways.
[4.12] Like so many scholars before me, I believe it is a subject-based theory of meaning-making that is more useful than a quest for commonality within a specific, and thus limited, series of significations. I do not mean a subject-based approach that essentializes the validity of the individual; rather I would like to see an embrace of meaning-making as "the experience of sharing a common human world with others who look at it from different perspectives" and that enables us to "see reality in the round and to develop a shared common sense. Without it, we are each driven back on our own subjective experience, in which only our feelings, wants, and desires have reality" (Canovan 1998, xiii). This is the work of Feminist studies that Loomba and Sanchez discuss when they state, "Within the field of historical and literary inquiry, questions of racial, cultural, and global difference have often successfully transformed the dominant view of gender, at least theoretically" (2016, 4). By pursuing these questions that arise from subjective involvement with the text, we see reality beyond the patriarchal, white-supremacist default. By assuming the stance of an antifan to Shakespeare, we insist on a shared common sense that does not create knowledge from the subjective experience of straight, white, wealthy, educated men who deigned their feelings, wants and desires were the truth and objective proof of reality.
[4.13] My position as an antifan is not a hatred of Shakespeare or intended as a mockery. It is, as I see it, a simple statement of truth: there is no human, and thus no product of a human, that is essentially immortal. Why does Shakespeare matter? Why is Shakespeare everywhere? Because the people deciding what knowledge is most important have continuously decided Shakespeare counts. Because these institutions and the people who inhabit them decided Shakespeare counted, literary economies continued to produce goods reifying the importance of Shakespeare. Because literary economies produced goods which reified the importance of Shakespeare, participants of literary economies—fans, scholars, and popular culture—consume those goods as proof they understand the importance of Shakespeare. Luckily, Shakespeare's stories tend to be multifaceted with complex characters and remain entertaining enough so that, as each new generation comes in contact with Shakespeare, they see their entertainment as proof that Shakespeare counts.
[4.14] Shakespeare is everywhere because Shakespeare is Shakespeare.
[4.15] A multicultural Shakespeare is not a trend, an approach, or a lens; it chips away at the pedestal Shakespeare has inhabited for so many centuries and reinforces his dialectical relationship with other texts. It also offers a roadmap for fandoms who must wrestle with ethical quandaries of production, consumption, and interaction with texts that are beloved but problematic. The economic reality of capitalism ensures some amount of capitalist gain makes its way back to any author forcing an activity we conceptualize as for fun—fandom—to grapple with the ways individual choices support living, bigoted authors and the ensuing political, social, and economic power those authors gain in exchange for their labor. "What would it mean," Stitch (2022a) asks, "to introduce Harry Potter to a new generation as a series that has flaws? To present it as a series that's not an untouchable, perfect memory, but a work that—like most things in life—has its good and bad parts and warrants discussion of each?" Whether the text is Harry Potter or Romeo and Juliet, acknowledging the good and bad parts and asking ourselves "how we consume content by someone who has expressed bigoted ideas" (Stitch 2022a) requires more of our meaning-making than simple enjoyment, easy dismissal, or academically approved understanding. Applying vocabulary and methodologies to Shakespeare, such as Johnson's "Fan-tagonism," remains a struggle because it is not the language of academia. However, it is not that fandom is not the language of seriousness but that, in some instances, fandom is the language the academy has not decided matters. But the language of fandom, and the interpretive practices that define it, are what keep stories alive. The search for universal truth, on the other hand, destroys them.
[4.16] Arguing for a universal Shakespeare is a failure to consider what we "owe each other," as Stitch writes (2022a). An antifan approach, by contrast, forces debate and defense of tastes, creating the possibility of recognizing our predisposition of interpretations. Is Wimberly's text so easily dismissed as teenagers who "threw their lives away over an overdramatic adolescent crush" (Almengor 2020)? And if not, might the antifan dismissal of Shakespeare's tragedy lead to a discovery of Wimberly's Prince of Cats as an interpretation that restores the dramatic complexity necessary for catharsis? It is the remaking and reimagining of Shakespeare's texts that justify his continued study and ensures his meaning in modern society because Shakespeare doesn't do much of anything anymore. Texts don't make meaning on their own.
[4.17] A multicultural Shakespeare exists in discursive relationship to the world and texts around it; it is a fandom that requires the negotiation of meaning through dialogue and debate rather than the acceptance of meaning as dictated by a history of universalism. There are many things Shakespeare does well, perhaps even better than his contemporaries. His plots are generally engaging, and his characters are complex and can be read (and read into) from a variety of perspectives. His dialogue is occasionally brilliant, and his language, while increasingly archaic to modern readers, can nonetheless be understood fairly easily within the context of the stage, the screen, or the graphic adaptation. There are many qualities that justify being a fan of Shakespeare, but there are just as many qualities that justify being an antifan as well. If Shakespearean scholars cannot justify our study of Shakespeare without falling back on notions of universality and inherent worth, if we cannot embrace, even celebrate, the engagement of fans and antifans alike, perhaps we're not protecting our discipline—perhaps we are killing it.
[4.18] Two fan approaches, both alike in dignity
In fair Online, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where fan blood makes acafan hands unclean.