Reconciling With Shakespeare in the Classroom: A Meditation from a Teacher-to-Be

by Shauna Park

Two men stand in the center of the stage. They are both tired of the culture they must align themselves to, of speaking in a language that really only serves to restrict them. The pleasant, well-tempered guises they must wear help curb the fear of their supposedly monstrous bodies, a form that promises violence if they permit their emotions to emerge. Their audience, not just the crowd of white judges encircling them on stage but the hundreds of eyes watching the actors struggle to reconcile with the burden of their role.

Keith Hamilton Cobb’s play, American Moor, is both a response to the legacy of Othello in theater and a meditation on black futures within literary history.

Cobb parallels his protagonist’s (and his own) intolerance against the senseless reproduction of racial trauma on stage to Othello’s gradual resistance to the gaslighting and false tolerance of his community.

The Actor’s slow progression from internalizing the Director’s arrogant behavior to his final outburst against expectations for him to conform to an exaggerated narrative of blackness provides a new layer to the conflict of Othello, providing new questions about the work that we may have not considered before. Where does Othello seize the narrative as his—an authority granted to him by being the titular character of the play—and what does he do with it? What lines present him as a man of ambition and intellect, but also a man that places too much faith in the people he trusts?

Oftentimes, this privilege of being a character only belongs to a limited group. Caliban, Aaron, and Shylock are compacted into bite-size interpretations we share with students. Othello is not remembered as a military hero, scholar, and lover, but as a victim of Iago’s scheme to undermine him. And sometimes, it’s difficult to question these readings without another text to reinforce these ideas. No wonder young students—including myself in high school—felt no attachment to Shakespeare or any of the “classics”—there was never a window to an alternative perspective, one that sets the conflicts of the work into a setting I could relate to.

Why are public schools afraid to use contemporary resources in connection with stories from centuries past?

Why do we expect students who have no connection to Shakespeare—and likely don’t want to read Shakespeare—to suddenly attach themselves to plays that deal with racial trauma, abuse, and privilege? And most importantly, why do we ignore the holes these characters create in the mold they must adhere to, their deep understanding of the world around them, and the emotions they feel?

Recycling the past, including “definitive” readings of a play does harm the character, but more importantly, the student.

To teach Shakespeare’s characters as products of a tragedy is a disservice to students who have not had the privilege to experience Shakespeare like some of their peers. Neglecting the restorative, perhaps rebellious, analyses of older works only seeks to regurgitate the same restrictive readings that continue to influence modern higher education. If we continue to structure our secondary education classes like an archive rather than a classroom, then we will only perpetuate the same gatekeeping that occurs in the theater as Cobb documents. We devalue our actors, who often must reconcile with their feelings towards these emotionally loaded roles, our writers, who are taught to believe they cannot contribute to literary history because of their identity, and to our students, who cannot resonate with these works because they were never given the opportunity or tools to study a work in constructive, but reparative ways.

Othello’s final monologue is not just a plea to Lodovico and Gratiano—it is a plea to his present and future audience. It’s a speech we can certainly teach through explanations, but to prevent the eliminating the heart of Othello’s words, we must teach empathy, which contemporary writers sacrifice themselves to reconcile with. Contemporary works provide us a bridge between the past and the present, creating valuable connections that can both critique Shakespeare’s faults but also provide new avenues for discussion.