The novelists Elizabeth Nunez and Terry McMillan crossed paths in a 1984 workshop led by the black arts writer John Oliver Killens. At the workshop, Nunez recalled, Killens asserted that “writers of color have a responsibility to use their talents to change the negative ways in which people of color see themselves, and the negative ways in which they are portrayed by others.”Footnote ¹ His words resonated with Nunez through the years, driving the writing of Prospero's Daughter (2006), which imagines the story of Miranda and Caliban through their own eyes. At the time of the workshop, McMillan was also at work on her first novel. Twelve years later, she published How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1996), another Caribbean love story in which Shakespeare plays a part, in this case lending his name to the heroine's love interest. Both novels, I argue, fulfill Killens's charge by making Shakespeare an implement for the use and pleasure of a multiracial readership.

Aside from their participation in Killens's workshop, Nunez and McMillan would seem to have little in common. The fiction of West Indies-born Nunez has won literary prizes and garnered positive reviews. McMillan, on the other hand, is a blockbuster-publishing phenomenon for whom critical acclaim has proved elusive.Footnote ² Nunez has in fact expressed ambivalence about McMillan, characterizing her fiction as “commercial” rather than “literary,” and arguing that it painted black lives in glossy tones while paying too little attention to the hard realities of race: “When the only black books you have published are girlfriend/boyfriend books like we have today, who is going to inspire people? Who is going to show all of what it is to be black?”Footnote ³ For Nunez, there is a strict divide between her own brand of literary fiction, with its strong sense of race consciousness, and McMillan's popular fiction, with its unabashed embrace of the travails and privileges of upper-middle-class black women.Footnote ⁴

However, Nunez's critique of McMillan misses their shared investment in writing fiction that is middlebrow, in the sense that it is “above all intensely reader-oriented, dedicated to the pleasure and the usefulness of reading.”Footnote ⁵ Middlebrow is typically used as a term of opprobrium, but the category can allow us instead to conceptualize fiction that strives to reach an expansive audience by mediating between conventions of high and low culture and between the twin aims of education and enjoyment. While middlebrow literature has most often been understood as geared to the (white) middle classes, this essay focusses on how Nunez and McMillan use Shakespeare to translate socioeconomic heterogeneity into a racial integration that highlights black readers, following Timothy Aubry's suggestion that the middlebrow can work “across racial and cultural boundaries.”Footnote ⁶ I define Nunez's and McMillan's fiction as middlebrow in that it speaks to – and helps to define – a racially and culturally diverse reading public in which black people play a central part. Each of their novels points in its own way to what it might mean, and what obstacles have to be overcome, in order for readers to experience Shakespeare as both pleasurable and useful. And each explores how pleasure can be found in Shakespeare and what it is that Shakespeare might be useful for. Middlebrow literature has a reputation for risk aversion, but making Shakespeare serve the instrumental ends of black authors and readers deserves to be considered a daring act in an American literary culture that does not often grant them such forms of agency.

There is power in Nunez's and McMillan's middlebrow approach precisely because Shakespeare has often functioned for contemporary black Americans both as an icon of white supremacy and as a source of elusive cultural capital. To use and enjoy Shakespeare is, then, to assert control, even ownership, over a property that has at times betokened exclusion and powerlessness for these very readers. Nunez fulfills these aims by corralling familiar postcolonial interpretations of The Tempest into a novel that is politically purposeful, even didactic, and yet also borrows attributes of popular fiction. As middlebrow fiction has often sought to do, the novel wraps its edifying purpose in an accessible genre, rewriting Shakespeare's ending to produce the romantic comedic marriage of Miranda and Caliban. It is McMillan, however, who pursues the more startling method; in simultaneously evoking and shunning Shakespeare, Stella asserts readers’ right to make Shakespeare over in their own image of desire. Put starkly, Nunez makes Shakespeare's political uses pleasurable while McMillan demonstrates the politics of making Shakespeare pleasurable.

In Nunez's engagement with The Tempest, use in the sense of educational purpose is paramount. The novel works, first, to introduce readers to the West Indies’ colonial history and the interrelation of colonial and patriarchal structures of oppression; and second, to educate readers about how to encounter Shakespeare. Prospero's Daughter owes much of its concept of Shakespeare's use to Caribbean anticolonialist writers, including Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and, most influentially, George Lamming.Footnote ⁷ For these writers, Shakespeare's conventional purpose was to turn them into Calibans who were subjected to imperial British language without being suffered to become full subjects in possession of that language.Footnote ⁸ Lamming's writing is an exploding out of that prison, though he also prophesizes the continuing entanglement of Caliban and Prospero. Lamming is not only Caliban's descendant, but Prospero's, he says, “using his legacy of language – not to curse our meeting – but to push it further.”Footnote ⁹ Prospero's Daughter responds to Lamming's evocative sense of futurity by setting its story in Trinidad in the early 1960s on the eve of its independence from Britain and translating Caliban into the intellectual, searching Carlos Codrington, an aspiring poet born in Trinidad, the son of an Englishwoman raised in Algiers and an African Venezuelan father. Following Lamming, Nunez resists the stultifying effects of a traditional colonial education featuring Shakespeare but recuperates its value for colonized subjects. Crucially, though Carlos eventually rejects Peter Gardner (Prospero), he does not reject colonial education as a cornerstone of his identity.Footnote ¹⁰ In his expressions of appreciation, Carlos serves as a mouthpiece for Nunez, who has said, “I love classical music. I love John Keats. I love Shakespeare. I love it all.”Footnote ¹¹ Nunez differentiates Shakespeare from his colonial agent Peter Gardner; simultaneously, she places the emphasis on the reader's interpretation rather than on the authorial immanence of Shakespeare, just as in writing Prospero's Daughter she rebelled against the colonialist line on The Tempest fed to her from her earliest school days.Footnote ¹² In modelling her characters’ insubordinate mode of reading on her own, Nunez implies that her readers, too, have a right to own Shakespeare through their acts of interpretation.

An essential aspect of asserting ownership over Shakespeare, and thus unlocking his educational potential for the colonized or disenfranchised reader, is the admission of pleasure. Nunez locates pleasure in the recasting of Shakespeare's play according to contemporary conventions of domestic and romance fiction, a generic shaping that puts the novel within the mainstream of contemporary fiction and helps it find an entrée to a wider readership. The most important choice Nunez makes, in this respect, is elevating Virginia Gardner (Miranda) to a primary role, aligning with a number of novels that have retold Shakespeare's plays from the perspective of a female character. Nunez's Miranda is shaped by the trauma of sexual abuse at the hands of her father, evoking an incest trope which appears in domestic fiction as a manifestation of abusive patriarchal control.Footnote ¹³ Reading about domestic abuse may not sound pleasurable, but reading a narrative in which the victims emerge as triumphant survivors arguably is. Virginia mounts a successful rebellion against her father, stoked by the dawning recognition that she, Carlos, and the family's servant Ariana (Ariel) share a common identity as the victims of his reign of terror. Such generic formulas soften, though they do not diminish, the novel's feminist and colonialist critique, rendering it nonconfrontational and inclusive of readers across racial, cultural, and political spectrums.Footnote ¹⁴

The novel's conclusion, with its emphasis on an interracial and yet otherwise traditional marriage, seals the deal on Nunez's middlebrow commitments. Nunez's Carlos has earlier suffered a false rape charge of which he is undeniably innocent. He knowingly hurls Caliban's words at Gardner: “Thou didst prevent me; I had peopled else / This isle with Calibans.” But he immediately clarifies, “And yet what I meant to say to him was that I loved her. That one day I hoped to marry her, to have children with her” (216). This docile interpretation of Caliban's famous lines is affirmed by the final chapter, which finds the young lovers married and Virginia pregnant. The stress is on the humanist ideals embodied in Virginia and Carlos's union; looking forward to the birth of their child, Virginia muses, “It's in a brave new world we hope to raise him, a world courageous enough to face the truth: We love with the heart for what is within, not outside, of us” (308). This is not the ideology of young revolutionaries like Césaire's Caliban. Instead, Virginia and Carlos's interracial marriage becomes a way of linking sentiments about the universality of love to a healing of the traumas of colonial and racial subjugation. “‘Carlos is human and I am human,’ I said. Othello and Desdemona” (308). In its invocation of Shakespeare's famously troubled portrayal of interracial marriage, Prospero's Daughter gestures to its power to convert Shakespeare's tragic failure into its own romantic comedic success.

If Nunez's novel is middlebrow by virtue of expanding the audience for postcolonial engagements with Shakespeare, Terry McMillan's Stella goes middlebrow by remaking Shakespeare as an object of pleasure. The novel tells the story of a forty-something financial analyst and divorced mother who goes to Jamaica on vacation and falls in love with a twenty-year-old aspiring chef named Winston Shakespeare. Readers are invited along on Stella's intense journey, registered through McMillan's hallmark use of first-person stream of consciousness, as she wrestles with internal and external moralizing. Stella's struggle is presented as a form of moral self-education in which the goal is to embrace a more authentic sense of self. Enlisting self-realization as a form of moral improvement has become standard in what Timothy Aubry has called the model of “reading as therapy” so pervasive in contemporary fiction, and McMillan deftly deploys this vocabulary to interrogate the constraints operating on black women.Footnote ¹⁵ Within this context, Shakespeare functions at once as a negative emblem of what an educated, upper-middle-class black woman “should” respect and, in a more positive valence, what Stella learns that she can reinvent for herself.

McMillan's references to Shakespeare all relate to Winston Shakespeare and are so few that readers might wonder if they are just a punch line to a one-off joke. McMillan is playing around with the name, teasing readers with almost-but-not-quite Shakespeare. When Stella first meets Winston, she reflects on the unexpected juxtaposition of his last name with Jamaica:

Later, she calls him from the US: “I ask to speak to Winston Shakespeare and I'm thinking what a name what a man to have such a name and what a fool I am to be calling him” (197). When she books a ticket for Winston to visit her, the travel agent “chuckles at Shakespeare and says, Wow, so this is serious” (279). A heightened consciousness of the name is tangible even in the last lines of the book, as Stella impulsively accepts Winston's marriage proposal: “I just go ahead and drape my arms around this beautiful man named Winston Shakespeare and I say, ‘Okay!’” (368).

Despite the seeming evasion of the “real” Shakespeare, McMillan is nonetheless reminding readers of Shakespeare's important authorizing function for African American readers.Footnote ¹⁷ It seems important for Stella to establish in her characteristically breezy tone that Shakespeare is within her domain as an educated woman who has acquired cultural capital along with the material signifiers of her success. Belinda Edmondson has argued that one of the innovations of black middlebrow novels including Stella is that

Stella works as an inverted Tempest narrative in which a black woman travels to an enchanted island and finds herself transformed by the bond she forms with a Shakespeare who is not “Shakespeare.” Not only, then, does McMillan represent Stella as conversant with Shakespeare, but also as inhabiting the part of Prospero rather than Caliban, Ariel, or Miranda. If Prospero is conventionally read as a stand-in for his author, then Stella seizes the authorial role usually taken by a white man.

Women's pleasure is decidedly not part of The Tempest’s affective topography, but Stella's is foremost by the end – and, in a turn that is both ironic and fitting, she locates it in a man named Shakespeare. McMillan charts new territory in claiming her African American character's pleasure through a reimagined Shakespeare. Even or especially in the absence of direct allusion, Stella is a Tempest appropriation that shifts the postcolonial ground “by reconfiguring and superseding the fixed subject positions established both by the play itself and its appropriators.”Footnote ¹⁹ There is no precedent in Shakespeare or his Caribbean rewriters for McMillan's characters, and key to her success is her insistence on making use emerge from her characters’ – and by extension, her readers’ – pleasure.

In contrast to Nunez's direct adaptation of Shakespeare, McMillan strikes out on her own. But each author, albeit in distinct fashion, suggests that Shakespeare can be tailored to and for readers of color just as surely as to the white Americans who have often been assumed to be Shakespeare's target readers. Nunez and McMillan ultimately place the focus on readers, suggesting that they can claim Shakespeare as their own: an ally in modeling a multiracial readership and a canonical property that they can use and enjoy, even if, as in Stella, that paradoxically means setting aside the old to generate an altogether new Shakespeare.