1. Introduction
[1.1] For the love of Shakespeare…I mean, for the love of God, what's love got to do with it? I wonder, especially now, because I am not interested in loving Shakespeare anymore. I mean that. And so, I have a confession: I used to lie on Shakespeare—my connection with him, that is. I used to lie about it with my whole heart. But, like Beyoncé tells us in Lemonade, "I ain't sorry" (note 1). I'm not sorry because Shakespeare is, and will remain, the last white man I lied on, lied to, because I can no longer lie to myself. And since I am giving it to you raw, vulnerable, and as honestly as I can, I must make yet another confession, the seeds of which were planted in my past confusion, so deeply. I confess, I love(d) Shakespeare as much as The Tempest's Caliban loved Prospero's colonial violence. Dare I say, then, that unhealed me loved Shakespeare? Tired-but-not-tired-enough me loved Shakespeare. Then, I got tired of loving someone—or the idea of someone—who would never unconditionally love me Black, could never love me back, because of the conditions of his early modern English world, because of the conditions of our modern globally anti-Black world. As such, I want to take seriously Rebecca Wanzo's question: "If we privilege African Americans in the story we tell about fans in the United States, [or Black folks in general], how might that change our understanding of what a fan is, our understanding of how they are producers as well as consumers, or the role identity can play in the importance of identifying as a fan?" (Wanzo 2015, ¶ 1.6) What changes if one centers the Black perspective, if one shifts the optic so whiteness is neither the "default" nor the "neutral in fandom spaces" (Pande 2020, ¶ 2.8)?
[1.2] Unlike anti-Black racism and misogynoir, Shakespeare is very much dead. But his words, the master language he used to create his beautifully complicated art, live on, unlike my love for him. You see, once upon a time, I loved Shakespeare. A willing "prisoner held fettered in amorous chains," I was (Titus Andronicus, 2.1.15). I loved that white man, until I was ready to confront—and then did confront because I had to—the reality of what white supremacy and anti-Black violence of all kinds have done to me, to my ancestors, and to you, too. And by "you," I mean everybody; as I've argued elsewhere, "anti-Blackness is a reaction to a self-created, racially-oriented impostor syndrome that prompts white people [and others] to overcompensate, sometimes through racist violence, for perceived or felt inadequacy" (Brown 2021). I loved Shakespeare until I had that necessary, powerful revelation, which occupied the mortal territory I inherited from my Black mother and father when I was born, and thus eventually killed my love for Shakespeare in such an intellectually beautiful way. It was a process, the results of which may lead some readers to think they can clearly read me as a "fandom killjoy" (Pande 2019, ¶ 6–7). Yet, I implore you: read on, please, for clarity.
[1.3] Said plainly, I likely loved Shakespeare as much as any victim of or willing participant in "the dominator imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchal" structure would or could (hooks 2015, xi). Why would they not? That is, until they "realise how deeply whiteness [is] structured into media fandom spaces" (Pande 2019, ¶ 13). That is, until they are awakened not only in the often misused and (mis)appropriated "woke" sense but awakened to the understanding of the conditions that conditioned their unconditional love for a stranger whom not even their grandmother's grandfather could have known (Romano 2020). A bit strange, right? The connection has always been unstable. Thus, I loved Shakespeare until I realized that love, much like hate, is a strong word and therefore the wrong word for our connection. For love, in my humble opinion, should be reserved only for when love is truth. And so, I do not love Shakespeare—I can't. Yet, I do not hate him. I can't do that either.
[1.4] For some people, though, "brawling love" or "loving hate" defines their connection to Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet 1.1.176). James Baldwin was not one of those people. He did not succumb to the oxymoronic tension that hinders some folks in finding clarity through distance from Shakespeare—or from any artist for that matter, for we must remember it's possible for "love [to] obstruct good knowledge production" (Wanzo 2015, ¶ 4.1). In his provocative 1964 essay "Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare," which this article explicates in part, Baldwin works through a race-conscious thought process that leads him instead to a conclusion about love: not his love for Shakespeare but, rather, Shakespeare's love for articulating and revealing through his art what he discovered to be true about the human existence, about the human condition (1964; Demeter 2023).
[1.5] Despite admitting his past "hatred" for Shakespeare, Baldwin does not apologize for it or claim to love Shakespeare now (1964, ¶ 1). Baldwin ain't sorry, either. He doesn't have to be, for he is Baldwin much like Shakespeare is Shakespeare—great. He seems to have discovered there are necessary limits to the power he permits Shakespeare to have over and in his Black life as he engages in what we can think of as "critical race counterstorytelling" by, among other things, "challeng[ing] normative reality" and "purposefully attempt[ing] to disrupt liberal ideology" (Thomas 2019, 10). As the title makes clear, Baldwin only notes that he stopped hating Shakespeare, perhaps doing so with the knowledge that love is not, nor needs to be, the opposite of hate. One can appreciate, respect, admire, and critique without needing to define one's positionality within a given fandom, as it were, thus removing the penchant for defensiveness derived from emotion (Pande 2019, ¶ 15). One can even, potentially, achieve a level of objectivity that is likely impossible when one is tethered by love to a person or, worse, to the idea of a person, rather than by love for said person's craft: the work—the only tangible remnants of Shakespeare we can access today.
[1.6] Toward the conclusion, Baldwin writes: "The greatest poet in the English language found his poetry where poetry is found: in the lives of the people. He could have done this only through love—by knowing, which is not the same thing as understanding, that whatever was happening to anyone was happening to him" (1964, ¶ 11). Shakespeare's awareness of the dynamic world around him, which he knew was so much bigger than him and England, enabled him to create art through which life experience(s) epitomized artistic achievement at a level that, according to Baldwin, "no one would be able to match, much less surpass" (1964, ¶ 2). I suppose that is the ultimate compliment Baldwin could have paid Shakespeare while simultaneously working through so much personally, including the seemingly widespread fear of England's greatest dramatist that has inevitably made some people "victims of that loveless education which causes so many schoolboys to detest Shakespeare" (1964, ¶ 2). Once upon a time, I was one of those schoolboys, too, avoiding and even loathing the "great white poet" whom I was taught to revere and fear (Demeter 2023). That's not the Shakespeare I now know, the one I "sit with," the one who, to quote W. E. B. Du Bois, "winces not" at me (2011, 60).
[1.7] In other words, people's responses to Shakespeare, fearful or otherwise, are not all his fault, for Shakespeare did not canonize himself. That was the work of other (white) folks. From Baldwin's "anti-English days [during which he] condemned [Shakespeare] as a chauvinist" and "as one of the authors of [his] oppression," he eventually found it within himself to appreciate Shakespeare. Baldwin took some distance from his original responses to the English author, responses that initially caused Baldwin to misread Shakespeare's "great vast gallery of people" as "unspeakably oppress[ing him]" (1964, ¶ 1). They never were. In short, Baldwin has moved past his original "misreading" (to borrow Ian Smith's term) of Shakespeare's "great vast gallery of people […] unspeakably oppress[ing]" him by taking some distance from those initial responses (1964, ¶ 1; Smith 2022).
[1.8] Despite acknowledging a significant shift in his mindset as it pertains to Shakespeare, Baldwin's essay is not rooted in Shakespearean fandom or "standom" (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/standom). Rather, he arrives at a place where he is unafraid of Shakespeare's greatness or his whiteness. With a mature awareness of Shakespeare's artistic abilities, and the imperfections, one can speak from a place of informed understanding about the work. Being an honest reader of Shakespeare means one does not solely articulate reductive critiques that double as deficient appraisals of what is undeniably a rich body of work. Fan or not, it is undeniable Shakespeare left behind the diamonds of his cavernous, creative mind for us to mine.
[1.9] Thus unfettered, James Baldwin freed himself to step away from a self-deprecating past where he "was resenting" what he defined as Shakespeare's "assault on [his] simplicity" (1964, ¶ 2). He became a more honest reader of Shakespeare. That is one of my main takeaways from "Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare." Baldwin's raw revelations articulated about language, authority, and power lead him to an understanding of his responsibility to be an honest reader, to be one whose integrity leads him to take emotions like "sick envy" and fear out of it (1964, ¶ 1). Unfettered from past resentment, Baldwin created space that allowed him to become awakened through Shakespeare's language like many others have been or could be awakened. Drawing an astute connection between blues, jazz, and "Shakespeare's bawdiness," Baldwin found that his "relationship […] to the language of Shakespeare revealed itself as nothing less than my relationship to myself and my past" (1964, ¶ 10).
[1.10] "Under this light," Baldwin adds, "this revelation, both myself and my past began slowly to open, perhaps the way a flower opens in the morning, but more probably the way an atrophied muscle begins to function, or frozen fingers to thaw" (1964, ¶ 10). This moment of Shakespearean enlightenment, and the painful process Baldwin went through to get there, is a beautiful thing. I find it particularly comforting that a literary giant, a literary genius like Baldwin had to wrestle not with Shakespeare but with himself to develop a connection with Shakespeare rooted not in love, hatred, fandom, or standom but in truth, in the complexities of the power that resides in "the language of Shakespeare," as he calls it. It is not the man who inspires and moves Baldwin. It is "the work" (note 2).
[1.11] For me, what is striking about Baldwin's revelation is the beauty of his figurative language. I am in awe of his revelation's applicability beyond his own experience, so that it matters for us. Just as "the language of Shakespeare" was left behind for people to become awakened, so, too, was the language of Baldwin, for he also "[did] his work so well that when the breath left him, the people—all people!—who search in the rubble for a sign or a witness [would] be able to find him there" (1964, ¶ 12). In the conclusion to my own book, Shakespeare's White Others, I thank Baldwin for bequeathing an essay about Shakespeare that awakened something in me, for it is through the rubble that I found the signs enabling my authentic connection to Shakespeare, finally. I found my connection with him in the ruins of my former unhealed self who accepted without reservation the notion that I must either love or hate Shakespeare, as if no other options exist. I now know better.
[1.12] Moving away from a distorted Shakespearean vision that could very well be a byproduct of love, hatred, fandom, or standom, there is something else people will find in ruins: in the rubble left behind by anti-Black racism and misogynoir, there you will find the "Black Cleopatras" (Brown 2019) of the world, who too often get forgotten or left out because of the "dual assault" that comes from people's allegiance to sexism, misogyny and anti-Black racism (note 3). I can never leave out my mother, sister, aunts, or grandmothers—the Black Cleopatras, so to speak (note 4). You shouldn't either. Therefore, it was inevitable that you, dear reader, would find the Black woman—who "in fandom [has] always been underrepresented"—in all her glorious aura, guiding me with the light she is so that through Baldwin, and on the bridge of Shakespeare's back, I'd find my way out of, over, the ruins (Stitch 2023, ¶ 10) (note 5). I hope that everyone who is trapped by systemic and institutional oppression will find their way out of the rubble so their view of Shakespeare becomes unobstructed, thus allowing into the frame what continues to remain unseen for so many, even though she, the Black woman, is always right there.
[1.13] If you didn't notice I began this essay with the Black woman, if she was invisible to your reading process rather than indispensable, I am not surprised. Dismayed, yes, but not surprised. I do recommend you start over, though, because without recognizing the Black woman, you miss(ed) the point entirely, like many readers and viewers of Much Ado About Nothing miss the invisible Black woman the furious Leonato conjures up when he accuses his white daughter Hero of being a whore on her wedding day (Brown 2023, 5–7). If you did not hear in your mind Black women's voices, if you did not hear Tina Turner reverberating throughout space and time belting "what's love got to do with it," or Beyoncé passionately refusing to be sorry for her reactive choices, I won't hold it against you (Brown and Little Jr. 2021).
[1.14] Shakespeare—a synecdochic representation of racial whiteness—can have that effect on people, especially those who are, perhaps unconsciously, enamored with him and his whiteness (which are inseparable) and who are thus unable to create enough distance from the man that would allow them objectively to engage the work. Such distance would allow them to engage seriously the literature authored by a white man who gave a Black man, Othello of Venice, and a Black woman, Cleopatra of Egypt, the desire, the means, and the ability to kill themselves, many years after letting Aaron "the Moor" survive long enough in Titus Andronicus for white people to want to, and feel a burning need to, "hang him" and, "by his side," his beloved newborn Black son, reduced by his captors to "his fruit of bastardy" (5.1.47–48). In that play, they wanted to murder Black innocence—and today, too, sadly. Those were all Shakespeare's authorial and authoritative choices, and while that can be challenging for folks to reckon with, everyone should.
[1.15] When I think of those authorial and authoritative choices, it becomes clear(er) to me why I am neither a Shakespeare fan nor a stan. Black me can't be, can he? I no longer love Shakespeare because I learned, finally, the costs of doling out my love without discretion, especially when I cannot be so sure that "white dominance" won't hurt me, or the people I love, in some way (Rankine 2019, ¶ 15). And I love my fellow man, all people. Unfortunately, you know, loving all people means that, for me, it hurts to read Othello sometimes—especially when I am not prepared for the conditions of Othello's Venice to strike me like they do, like they can, like they have, but not like Shakespeare authorizes Black Othello to strike white Desdemona. God, does it hurt.
[1.16] Does that happen for you, too, the hurt? Or is it all safe, stewing in Iago's and the Venetians' "white rage" and "know-your-place aggression" from the first dramatic act to the last? (Anderson 2017; Mitchell 2018). If I'm being honest, it can even hurt to teach Othello sometimes, but I do it because I love the synergistic relationship between my research and teaching. I willingly engage Shakespeare and the tragedy he created around my ancestor not because I find sadomasochistic, racist sexual "race play" (Trott 2017; Brown 2024) titillating but because I am woke enough to embrace what I call "productive discomfort" in the classroom and woke enough to know that canceling Othello or Shakespeare could and should never be the goal (Brown 2022, 56; Hall 2016; Smith 2016).
[1.17] Real talk, canceling Shakespeare and his work was never even part of the conversation for those of us born into the very bottom of the racial hierarchy that forced us to truly understand what it means to "stay woke" or "be woke." I wish to reclaim, and hope we can one day reclaim, that meaning from its enforced (re)definition that was diluted by some non-Black folks', and sadly even some uppity Black folks', deluded, dangerous desires to dismantle the gates that once kept ideas sacred and protected within the Black community so they could be safely passed down. Instead, those unprotected ideas are now passed up because they have been robbed of their true meaning, because their value does not make sense or make enough cents within the dominator imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchal structure. Know this, though: it behooves us all to understand that there's always an agenda of some kind, one to which we must pay attention if our collective survival matters to us at all—if folks believe there is even a collective to protect and (pre)serve.
[1.18] When it comes to Shakespeare and love or Shakespeare and hate, when it comes to Shakespeare fandom or standom, none of those positionalities define the lifeline that keeps alive my undying Shakespeare connection. I am not an anti(fan). For reasons I and others have articulated, neither Shakespearean hate nor love works for me. Shakespeare is not my "property" to love or hate; as Arthur Little Jr. reminds us by way of Cheryl I. Harris, Shakespeare is more so thought of as "white property," so some people think (2016) (note 6). Indifference and dismissal do not work for me either, though. So, here is my final confession rooted in discernment: I like Shakespeare.
[1.19] I like Shakespeare, as in the work. I like Shakespeare, the critical field that nourishes my vocation as a professor and literary critic. I like Shakespeare, as in his language that gets put into action on the stage. But love, that "secondhand emotion," has nothing to do with it (Turner 1984). And hate? That neither. Both words are too strong in either direction for my connection to Shakespeare, my connection to the work, in relation to which I must work to resist manufacturing arguments based on "affective interests [that then] shape reading practices" (Fazel and Geddes 2022, 77). What adequately and honestly defines my Shakespeare connection, to quote Turner once more, is and will forever be "only logical" (1984).
[1.20] Thus, I conclude here with some serious logic from literary giant, literary genius Toni Morrison's provocative play Desdemona, words spoken by Morrison's Othello to his wife, words I imagine now being uttered to me, and maybe to you too, by the man: "'It's clear now. You never loved me. You fancied the idea of me' and, until this moment, allowed white dominance to whitewash your perception, to condition you to treat me like I am some God" (Morrison and Traoré 2012, 50). To that I say, it is like, not love. It must be. For my honesty, for these vulnerable confessions, realizations, and revelations, still, I ain't sorry, for all who are (un)healed should know, "If you can't love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else? Can I get an amen?" (https://twitter.com/RuPaulsDragRace/status/298626899360505856?lang=en).
2. Acknowledgements
[2.1] I thank Kavita Mudan Finn and Johnathan Pope for inviting me to contribute to this special issue. I thank Arthur L. Little Jr. for affording me space in his Los Angeles, California, home to write this piece. And I thank Melissa Shields Jenkins for offering generative feedback on a portion of this essay.