I have, admittedly, never vibed with Shakespeare. There’s only so much sexism, racism, homophobia, and/or ableism that I’m willing to tolerate (none) in texts that I’m meant to critically engage with.

So, when Shakespeare dominates the syllabi of English departments everywhere and becomes the first author you think of when I tell you I have a B.A. in English, I get a little grumpy. My undergraduate education in English, though, has forced me to every-now-and-then read the Bard. And I’ve come to slowly appreciate that process of reading his work a bit more, just probably not in the way professors and scholars may have wanted.

In the 1990s, (Queen of queer theory) Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick coined the terms “paranoid reading” and “reparative reading” as means of understanding the ways in which we might (re)conceptualize how we engage with texts. Paranoid readings are those which approach a text from a kind of hostile location. That is, a paranoid reading starts by seeing and assuming the problems in the text before even really reading it. A reparative reading, on the other hand, refuses to anticipate problems in a text. Rather, reparative readings leave open new possibilities for a piece of work and are ever-prepared to be surprised by complex, nuanced interpretations of what we’re reading.  

A paranoid reader might approach a play like Othello with the notion that Shakespeare’s racism informs the ways he has subjected Othello to tragedy and harm. This reading limits our possibilities for interpretation, though. If Shakespeare’s “race play” becomes nothing but a means by which to read through his racism, then it appears as if those committed to work like anti-racism would see no point in engaging with the work at all. But clearly Shakespeare’s plays and other writings have had great impact on the English-speaking world, so it seems necessary that anti-racists do find a way to interact with him.

Reparative readings provide that mechanism. A reparative reading of Othello might do the work to find the moments in the play where Othello exerts some kind of refusal of or resistance to the racism that structures the play. A reparative reading would find those perhaps small but ever-important moments when Othello exercises some kind of agency that may interpretatively exist outside the reach of Shakespeare’s leaning on racialized/racist tropes. And a reparative reading would not necessarily see these moments as redemptive for Shakespeare; rather, it would see the way Othello can operate in a multifaceted manner, moving beyond the impulse to binarize the text as “problematic and useless” or “monumental and visionary.”

I think Sedgwick would characterize my reading of Othello as paranoid. I think the play tragedizes the life and joy of a Black man while playing into tropes of Black male aggression and hypersexuality. And to me, Othello’s operation as a tragedy is meaningless. That is, the tragedy has no interpretive power other than literally (and literarily) being tragic. This is how I approach Othello every time I read it. I anticipate the racism, I anticipate the tragedy, and I become increasingly frustrated reading from one line to the next. This is, I suppose, a paranoid reading of Shakespeare’s “race play.”

But in my paranoia, I’d like to suggest an alternate approach to reading Shakespeare’s plays: rebellion. Yes, let’s all revert back to our angsty-teen selves, embrace our seemingly limitless ability to shit on the figure(s) of authority, and renegotiate the means by which we are made to read Shakespeare. Let’s write our mini manifestos of critique and charge into the task of reading the Bard with them. And then let’s reimagine what Shakespeare’s worlds would’ve looked like had we been in charge. 

I’ll lead by example. One of my primary concerns with Shakespeare’s deployment of race in his plays is that it enables tropifying and stereotyping of his characters. Indeed, Othello leans on these tropes in order to orchestrate and effectively narrate its tragedy. Race becomes a means by which Shakespeare denies his characters agency. I’d like to give this agency back to them.

So, when Othello rushes into the bedchamber in the final scene of Othello, crying out to the “chaste stars” just before strangling Desdemona, I want to read him calling Shakespeare out for forcing him to engage in tragedy. I read the stars here, then, as not literally stars in the sky but a reference to his “star,” Desdemona, whom he also refers to as the sun later in the scene. Thus, when Othello calls out to the stars he is calling out to Desdemona herself, and his description of the stars as “chaste” reveals his knowing that she has not actually committed adultery. Despite Shakespeare setting Othello up to engage in a terrible act of violence and tragedy because he believes Desdemona engaged in infidelity, I choose to read Othello as knowing that the reason for this tragic end is illusory. I choose to read his first lines in the final scene of Othello as a radical act of agency against the person who wrote them. I choose a rebellious reading.

Take another example, that of Aaron in Titus Andronicus. Aaron is yet another Black man that Shakespeare (con)figures as a violent, predatory character, arguably even moreso than Othello. Shakespeare particularly positions Aaron as a threat against the innocent, white woman in the text, Lavinia. Indeed, Aaron orchestrates and directs the (great deal of) physical and sexual violence that Lavinia endures in Titus. And he expresses no regret for these actions. Part of Aaron’s last lines in the play explicitly describe this very absence of regret, when he declares “I am no baby, I, that with base prayers / I should repent the evils I have done.” He knew what he was doing and would do it again if he had the opportunity. 

 Aaron, then, is meant to be read as (perhaps one of) the evil character(s) of Titus. And while we definitely should be suspect of his methods, I want to be critical of why he chose to engage with the violence he enables. If we return to his last lines, we see that he importantly asks “why should wrath be mute and fury dumb?” Aaron refuses to silence his own wrath and fury, both descriptions of rage that can be characterized as righteous or evil. Wrath is a feeling of intense resentment and fury is a kind of frenzied rage, and while Aaron’s actions can be interpreted as motivated by a kind of heightened rage, so could the actions of those of the play’s titular character, Titus. Titus, after all, kills two of his own children in his own kind of rage at different points in the play. And while there are important differences in the kinds of violence practiced by Aaron and Titus, it seems unfair to judge Aaron’s evils harsher than Titus’s. A rebellious reading of Titus Andronicus asks why Shakespeare leaves us to pity Titus and condemn Aaron. A rebellious reading refuses to lean into the trope of threatening Black male violence on innocent, white womanhood that Shakespeare engages with in Titus. And a rebellious reading envisions a Titus in which race has not been instrumentalized as a means to define who becomes redeemable and whom is deferred to death.

Perhaps these readings are, in some ways, engaged in Sedwick’s reparative project. But I’m not interested in repairing Shakespeare, no matter how important of a figure he is in English literature. My rebellious readings accept Shakespeare for his flaws—his reliance on racist tropes of Black manhood, for instance—and work to read beyond them instead of strictly reading around them. This is why I’ve come to appreciate reading Shakespeare: it’s provided me with an opportunity to refute him, to read his works against him in ways that expand their ability to mean something without his name attached. 

And these rebellious readings can mean a lot to us as readers. That is, rebellion is a means by which we can enact our own kind of agency through interpretation of the text. I can better confront the tensions of racism and sexism in Othello through a rebellious reading that suggests alternative narratives and endings void of these harmful tropes were possible. And when we read such hopeful possibilities against the harms of what we have in front of us, we can argue that a better future should have existed for a character like Othello, and Aaron, and Desdemona, and Lavinia. These possible, alternate futures are what guide rebellious reading in the first place. And the hope they present us with make rebellious readings all the more capable of providing better futures—and interpretations—for today.