Each new semester at Spelman College, I return again to the question, what does it mean to teach Shakespeare at a historically black women's college, a college that rightly emphasizes the experiences, history, and literatures of the African diaspora and black America. More, what does it mean to require English majors to take a Shakespeare course at such a school? My Spelman students, like many college English majors, sometimes approach Shakespeare with reluctance. When I ask them why they are in my class, they grumble, “It's required.” When I ask them whether they like Shakespeare, they hesitate to answer, certain that their white female professor does not actually want to know. Once they get going, however, the list of what they do not like about Shakespeare is long. Like many college students they are intimidated by the language, but that is not their only resistance to Shakespeare. The Shakespeare that they know from high school only wrote to and about white men. Between him and them lie barriers of time and place, gender and race.

Still, when I ask my students why they believe Spelman's English major requires Shakespeare, they are quick to answer. They are sure of Shakespeare's place in the canon, and his influence on literary history, and for some – perhaps most – that is enough. As the course progresses, the business of actually discussing, analyzing, and critiquing Shakespeare's texts quickly pushes aside the larger questions of why Shakespeare in this time and place. At least, it does for the students. I find that my doubts linger. Certainly, I value Shakespeare, and my job is secure in part because my department does too, but I am uncomfortable with the way the requirement seems to privilege a particular kind of great-books-style literary history. After all, in today's academy, it is conservative to insist on Shakespeare, and Spelman's requirement is a particularly restrictive version of that insistence. In The Unkindest Cut: Shakespeare in Exile 2015, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a group with financial ties to right-wing donors and a commitment to a very traditional (and white) idea of the liberal arts, reveals how few such requirements remain at top colleges and universities.Footnote ¹ Of the top twenty-five national universities (as ranked in the U.S. News and World Report), only Harvard and Berkeley explicitly require Shakespeare, and of the top twenty-five liberal-arts colleges, only Wellesley and the US Naval Academy do so. Of the four, the Naval Academy's most closely resembles ours, insisting that all majors take one particular Shakespeare course designed to introduce students to “a representative sample of Shakespeare's tragedies, comedies, and histories.”Footnote ² By requiring a survey, we demand a broad exposure to Shakespeare and affirm his importance and value within the literary canon.

The ACTA report, in line with the politics of the organization, sees the decline of Shakespeare requirements as a loss, as “the unkindest cut.” The report exclaims, “a degree in English without serious study of Shakespeare is like a major in Greek Literature without the serious study of Homer.”Footnote ³ Decrying the proliferation of popular-culture courses, theory courses, and courses interested in race, gender, sexuality, and class, the report ends with a call to action, demanding that alumni and donors “take an active interest in whether their alma maters have strong requirements in English and other key subjects” and give money to further “outstanding programs and projects that introduce students to subjects that standard curricula do not adequately cover.”Footnote ⁴ We can make America great again, the report seems to suggest, by “restoring Shakespeare to his rightful place on the required reading list,” hinting that such a restoration project should begin with but not be limited to the English major.Footnote ⁵ The glorification of Shakespeare in this report, as Ayanna Thompson points out, aligns the Shakespeare requirement with a kind of imperialist agenda, even as it claims to offer something universal and valuable to contemporary students.Footnote ⁶

The agenda behind the ACTA report is not my own. Nor is it the agenda of our department, or of Spelman College. Why, then, do we have a Shakespeare requirement? I have spent time imagining alternative requirements such as those employed by other institutions – requiring, for example, that students take more courses before 1800 or 1900, as a way of allowing choice while insisting on breadth. Yet such a move would do little to alleviate my concerns about the requirement. Indeed, it might have little impact on what students actually take, as institutions who have replaced a Shakespeare requirement with a period requirement report that most students still choose a Shakespeare course. Instead I have tried to make the Shakespeare requirement more relevant to my students, first infusing it with discussions about race, gender, and sexuality, and more recently by proposing a change to the Shakespeare requirement from the single historical survey described above to a more flexible requirement that could be fulfilled by any Shakespeare course, including courses that place Shakespeare in conversation with other texts outside the early modern period.

Yet it has taken me a long time to be ready to propose such a change to the major because of my sense that the conversation at Spelman needs to be different than the conversation that has been had at other institutions. Since I began teaching at Spelman, I have been sure that something different is at stake with teaching Shakespeare on a historically black campus, something caught up in the specific histories of such places and the larger history of race in America, but I have been unable to articulate what that difference might be. Now, though, I want to offer two possibilities.

The first I locate in the existence of this report and others like it. As long as any institutional regimes of note believe that an English degree without Shakespeare is, to quote again from the ACTA report, “tantamount to fraud,”Footnote ⁷ I would hazard that our department will and should insist on maintaining the requirement. After all, in our still too racist and sexist country, our majors deserve our best efforts to protect the perceived merit of their degrees. Whether the study of Shakespeare actually adds value to the major then becomes almost beside the point. Such an answer, ugly in its pragmatism, is not, however, where I would like to stop. Instead, with the writings of Adrienne Herndon, an actress who taught elocution and directed Shakespeare performances at Atlanta University around the turn of the twentieth century, and W. E. B. Du Bois, who more famously was a professor and activist in the same time and place, as my guide, I would like to put forward a second possibility, studying and performing Shakespeare at an HBCU has been and can continue to be a powerful political act.Footnote ⁸

In 1906, Adrienne Herndon's essay “Shakespeare at Atlanta University” appeared in the Voice of the Negro. In that piece, she details her work with Atlanta University students and their performance of Shakespeare plays. Her purpose in documenting their activities appears multifold – it is a way of uplifting the institution, which she describes as “growing in merit and popularity”; of celebrating her students’ performances; and of justifying her own efforts.Footnote ⁹ Yet her piece goes beyond those ends, providing a justification for Shakespeare and Shakespearean performance in the particular contexts of a black university and community. Herndon suggests that reading and performing Shakespeare can be powerful politics by challenging claims of white superiority and cultural ownership over Shakespeare and fostering communities that operate outside white control.

Much of Herndon's essay strikes the familiar chords of Shakespeare's exceptionalism and universal appeal. She claims him as “the greatest of all dramatists,” suggests that he holds “a mirror up to nature,” and extols him for being “simple, lucid, dramatic” and “chronicling for the ages the passions and soul-strivings of his own age.”Footnote ¹⁰ Echoing Jonson, Herndon declares that Shakespeare “wrote not only for his time and race, but for all times and for all peoples.”Footnote ¹¹ Yet as familiar as these claims seem to be, Herndon's agenda is not (simply) to elevate Shakespeare, but rather to secure his work for black students, actors, and communities.

While such a goal might seem to be a kind of self-imposed cultural imperialism or to belong to a politics of respectability, Herndon pushes beyond such possibilities, suggesting that with Shakespeare it might be possible to form an alternative theatrical community, one that would not simply echo white practices, but exceed them. Herndon replaces an imperialist universality with an ideal of commonality that depends on authentic suffering:

Here suffering and a desire to overcome that suffering become a vehicle for dramatic performance and the basis through which the truest connection to Shakespeare can be made. The “sympathetic touch” and “insight” necessary to fully appreciate Shakespeare serve as a kind of “birth-right” for black Americans, forged in the pain of segregation and discrimination, and upend the traditional association of a “universal” Shakespeare with whiteness.

For Herndon, discrimination and racism within the theatrical community also perversely ensure that black actors perform Shakespeare better than their white counterparts, as those same actors, “denied the conventional training of more highly cultured races,” are able to approach Shakespeare “unmarred” by the practices of the mainstream theater and of white America more broadly, “whose very culture spells suppression.”Footnote ¹³ Thus they can bring to Shakespeare a deep emotional connection, “infinite expression,” and a naturalness that promises to “produce in the future some of the world's greatest dramatic artists.”Footnote ¹⁴ To insist that Shakespeare belongs at Atlanta University is to insist that the black experience in America creates a possibility for theatrical greatness, even, or perhaps especially, as it also produces pain.

That theatrical greatness is a boon to the black community as a whole. Herndon explains, “the colored people of this Southland need wholesome artistic enlightenment. Since they are debarred from the white theaters, they should have theaters of their own.”Footnote ¹⁵ She imagines, in true Shakespearean fashion, traveling troops of players that could rotate through black theaters and “each in turn fill a week's engagement, thus keeping the people supplied with wholesome entertainments throughout the dramatic season.”Footnote ¹⁶ Her students’ performances at Atlanta University are a first step in filling that need. The 1909 Bulletin of Atlanta University reports on Herndon's efforts, and specifically her production of Everyman, explaining that the performance of that play, like the performances of Shakespeare's plays, “is in the nature of Atlanta University extension work, by means of which we bring to the people without the walls of the University the education advantage of witnessing a good dramatic performance.”Footnote ¹⁷ Breaking down barriers between the university and the surrounding community becomes a way to produce better Shakespeare, fulfill a community need for greater access to the arts, and demonstrate the superior potential of black theater. Even as her piece and practice rest on a deep admiration for Shakespeare and a belief in the enlightening power of his plays, her decision to produce Shakespeare can also be read as a political act, intent on forming alternative communities, artistic practices, and productions that would challenge and exceed their white counterparts and operate outside those institutions.

Adrienne Herndon's essay on the place of Shakespeare performance at Atlanta University reminds me of W. E. B. Du Bois's Souls of Black Folk (1903). Adamant that black colleges should do more than simply provide vocational training, he offers up a humanist vision of education, that rests on the power of the individual:

Here, education, and particularly college education, should cultivate “a freedom for expansion and self-development” and allow for the flourishing of souls that might lead worlds: “the rich and bitter depth of their experience, the unknown treasures of their inner life, the strange rendings of nature they have seen, may give the world new points of view and make their loving, living, and doing precious to all human hearts.”Footnote ¹⁹ Like Herndon, Du Bois suggests that suffering provides black people with a deeper well of experience. At the same time, where Herndon advocates that black artists use that experience to transform black communities, Du Bois tends toward incorporation – suggesting that black lives might become “precious to all human hearts” and prove a boon to white society while transforming it from within.

In the last moments of this chapter, Du Bois turns to literature to bring his point home:

Starting with Shakespeare, Du Bois insists on his ability to meet the “greats” as equals, and summon them at will. He presents a vision of liberal-arts education as a place where minds meet across time, unconcerned with differences in skin tone or background, and a place where a black man can meet a white one with “no scorn nor condescension.” His writing here – poetic and evocative – performs his claim, demonstrating his mastery of the literary traditions he invokes together with the place of black art.

Du Bois's ends are, of course, also political. When he concludes the chapter, asking, “Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine, and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?”Footnote ²¹ his questions remind us that access to Shakespeare, to literature, to literacy, has not always been afforded black Americans. To sit with Shakespeare was a way of moving “across the color line,” of insisting on equality, and claiming power over traditionally white materials and traditions.

While Herndon and Du Bois see Shakespeare's value to black America and black politics differently, their insistence on access, ownership, and transformation of literary “greats” is a powerful move our students can still make. While none of this means that Spelman's Shakespeare requirement should persist in exactly its present state, it might still be a place for political action, especially if we reimagine what a Shakespeare course might do, beyond introducing students to Shakespeare. To realize the potential of Shakespeare in black spaces it might be useful to teach Shakespeare in ways that explore his engagement with questions of race, ethnicity and otherness, or his concern with justice. Even more, it might behoove us to invite students to think about how Shakespeare has mattered to American culture generally, and black America specifically. What might be gained if I taught my students about Adrienne Herndon and the history of Shakespearean performance at Atlanta University and at HBCUs more broadly? If I asked them to consider Martin Luther King's invocations of Shakespeare in so many of his speeches? Or to read W. E. B. Du Bois's thoughts on race and education? How might reading James Baldwin's essay “Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare” provide them with a different perspective from which to view our endeavors?Footnote ²² How might emphasizing performance and community engagement allow my students to see Shakespeare not as an academic exercise, but as a tool they can use to create change and which they can imbue with their own political energies?Footnote ²³ That is the type of Shakespeare that I would like to see at Spelman, and one I believe my students could get behind. In fact, that is a Shakespeare I would like to see taught at institutions of other kinds as well. By making visible a broader history of Shakespeare in America, one that includes the history of Shakespeare in black America, all students might begin to see how Shakespeare can be an instrument of transformation.