Good morrow (or day, or eve), dear reader. If Shakespeare and I were in a Facebook relationship, it would read: “’tis complicated.” I feel incredibly privileged for the opportunity to process that relationship in this piece, and I hope that fellow lovers of Shakespeare, particularly those who work with youth, will be inspired to reflect on their own relationship with the bard. I also hope that fellow educators will think about the ways in which units that center Shakespeare can be harmful to students, because only then can we be mindful about not perpetuating that harm. We owe that to our kiddos.

In retrospect, I should have known from a very young age that I would become a teacher. I mean, what other fifth grader was opting to visit younger grade levels during recess and help former teachers with grading and other classroom duties? Well, my childhood best friend was alongside me skipping recess; she also became a teacher, though, so the point remains.

I have heard it said that elementary-school teachers love children whereas high-school teachers love their content areas. As a high-school English language arts (ELA) teacher, I can confirm that I came to the profession via a love of literature, fostered in part by the sense of pride I felt when Shakespeare became a part of my literary repertoire. When I started college, though, it was with the aim of becoming a cosmetic surgeon; I saw my bookwormish tendencies as a hobby, not a career prospect. After all, I was a first-generation Latina with the luxury of attending college. The least that I could do was become a doctor to thank my mom for the sacrifices that she made to ultimately allow me the luxury of the prolonged adolescence that accompanies college enrollment, even as she had had to grow up too soon in order to start working.

My dreams of medical school and beyond lasted until about two semesters into my collegiate journey. I was enrolled in a full slate of science classes, dreading most every minute of them, and, for the first time in my life, not excelling in school. I was miserable, and as I wrote to my scholarship provider in an effort to continue to secure funding after being put on probation for my less-than-stellar performance, I yearned to read a novel. That was why I decided to switch my major to English. Perhaps because the responsibility to my family was still in the back of my mind, or perhaps because I was just already a trained capitalist, I had the foresight to think that my new major would also need to be a gateway into some form of gainful employment. I decided that a major in English education was the way to go. “I could be a teacher,” I thought, remembering the many close relationships forged with my own high-school teachers. As I switched majors, I felt the sting of the first educational defeat in my life. Looking back, though, my memories of school made me feel silly for not realizing earlier that a career as an educator was in my future. What other seventh grader spends their spring break finishing several novels? The answer is, of course, a future teacher.

At the center of many of my fondest memories of my time as an adolescent student was an unlikely figure: William Shakespeare. English classes were always where I thrived and felt most comfortable, even when being pushed and challenged. I have a very vivid memory of my freshman-year English class where we were tasked with reading Romeo and Juliet (R&J), as ninth graders around the country are surely doing even now and will be doing for the foreseeable future. Now, at the Catholic school I attended, a substantial amount of homework was the norm, and so it was not uncommon for ELA teachers to assign significant chunks of texts for homework and plan their lessons taking it for granted that the majority of students would have read the assignment in its entirety or at least consulted a hard copy of the yellow and black Cliff’s Notes that my students would consider an ancient relic. During the R&J unit it was not uncommon for me and my peers to complain amongst one another at the length and incomprehensibility of the reading assignments, though we would never dare complain to the teacher. I vividly remember, however, during one night’s assignment, being able to read the text. As if by magic, I was somehow looking at Shakespeare’s words on the page and my brain was actually making sense of them. “Holy shit, I’m a genius,” I thought to myself, beaming with pride that I—a Brown girl whose mother only attended school through the eighth grade—was reading and understanding the words of the Bard himself.

I would experience a parallel encounter my senior year when my AP Literature class read and also attended a production of The Taming of the Shrew. This time it was not only the comprehension of the plot that I was getting, but Shakespeare’s double entendres were also now something my mind could pick up on. Of course, that also came with some amount of embarrassment when, for example, Ms. Greenberg laughed and laughed as I was scandalized by an interaction between Petruchio and Katherine in Act Two, scene one, of Taming. In one of their signature back-and-forths, she called him a joint stool. “Haha, stool,” I thought. “She’s calling him a piece of ____.” Petruchio then replies that since he is a stool, Katherine should sit on him. I quickly realized how Shakespeare, via Petruchio, was able to make the play on words and turn Katherine’s insult into quite the saucy proposition. Even as I realized this, though, and was at once impressed by the genius in the writing and scandalized by Petruchio’s remark, I looked up to see my teacher looking at my red face and laughing—I knew that she knew that I knew they were talking about sex and that made it all the more scandalous. Looking back, I can see that this moment of comprehension is symbolic in that it allowed me into conversations that I previously did not have access to. Literally. I could now talk about another layer in the conversation between the characters, not that I wanted to do that with my teacher. But deeper than that, reading Shakespeare granted me access to conversations with other theater-goers and readers of Shakespeare—access that not everyone in my family had been granted since immigrating to the US.

These fond memories of hanging out with literature and feeling smart became even more important for me to look back on after the hellish failure where I had to confront the fact that medical school was not my postsecondary destination. And so, despite my failure at my intended major, it was with confidence, then, that I approached my first semester as a newly declared English education major taking English 313: The Major Works of Shakespeare. I cannot directly remember the demographics of the class, though I do know that although my alma mater, The University of Illinois at Chicago, is now a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI), at the time, it was not uncommon for me to be one of a very few Latiné students in my English classes. Reading one Shakespearean play per week, with the first half of the play being discussed in the Tuesday seminar and the latter half in Thursday’s class, was the highlight of my week. The professor had key scenes cued up, sometimes on a VHS copy of the play, and we would discuss how the text of the performance could be read differently than the text of the script on the page. At the time, this seemed quite progressive to me—I felt very sophisticated as I offered insights as to how one director was making choices so that the audience would read the character or situation a certain way, which was entirely different from the way that I had read it as I laid in my dorm room.

This experience of analyzing one cast’s performance of a scene as a different text from the script was the experience with Shakespeare that I had in mind when I was entrusted with students of my own. And so, at twenty-two years old, I found myself fully responsible for what a group of three ninth graders in a self-contained English class would experience when reading R&J, a part of the curriculum that the school had adopted for freshmen that year. These three students each had individualized education plans that identified them as benefitting from smaller class sizes and other accommodations due to diagnosed learning disabilities, which is why the class was so small. Armed with the desire to have my three male students, two of who were Latiné, feel the same empowerment I had felt when reading R&J, I tried to imitate my professor’s technique of using movie scenes to compare and contrast our understanding of what we had read. We watched Baz Luhrmann’s (1996) and Franco Zeffirelli’s (1968) scenes alongside chunks of text, but my boys were not impressed. The problem, it seemed, was that we could not compare or contrast because we were not quite sure of what we were reading. No problem; I downloaded a dramatized audiobook of the play and assured my students that in Shakespeare’s time, people would say they were going to “hear” a play, and so listening to the audio as we read was not only helpful but actually more appropriate than simply reading it by ourselves. Still, they were not impressed. I finally made the decision that we were not going to read the play in its entirety, and instead we watched what we could read along with and stopped and did close readings of the scenes that were excluded from our movie productions, and we would debate whether the director made the right decision in cutting the scene. When the rest of the freshmen in the school moved on to the next book, so did we. I skipped the multiple-choice comprehension test with my students and in lieu of the essays the rest of the freshmen were assigned, we wrote argument paragraphs to Luhrmann convincing him to include the omitted scene that we felt most added to the overall experience of the play. I never assigned any reading outside of class time. I don’t know if these were the right decisions, but they felt like what was best for my kiddos at the time.

If I am being honest, I know that my students had not felt the empowerment in comprehending Shakespeare that I had experienced at their age. That lack of comprehension actually impeded my ability to effectively use the medium of film in the ways I intended to. Still, I know I gave three young men who had been classified as not being ready for a general education ELA classroom setting a chance to make their opinions known in terms of what part of a text was important. They got to advise a director and let him know, “Hey, you made a mistake here, you should not have taken out this scene. And here’s why . . . .” Too often, especially when reading canonical works, we hold the authors and works themselves on pedestals, which can unintentionally diminish our students. Especially as a Latina, I would have never felt comfortable speaking against the choices of a white male director, let alone the pinnacle of British literature, Shakespeare himself. I wonder now, though, is that because I was never so much as presented the chance? As a teacher, I will make sure that my students do not wonder the same.

The next time I taught Shakespeare, it was to a group of students in a general-education classroom in a different school. I now had thirty junior-level students and the complete autonomy to teach what I wanted. I chose Othello. Remembering how comprehension had been a struggle for the students in my self-contained class, I decided to be proactive and tried to provide my juniors with all of the resources that they might need. Despite never having done so before, with the help of tutorial videos, I taught myself how to create a website with multiple tabs that students could click on, one for each act. I was determined to do a better job with Othello than I had done with R&J, and so I knew I needed new and better resources. I was hoping that this website would be just that for my kiddos, and so the fact that I had no idea how to create a website couldn’t stop me; I needed my kids to succeed, so learning how to put together a website was the least I could do. Under the tab for each act, students had links to the full text of the play (forgotten books can’t stop us!), the No Fear Shakespeare plain-English translation of the play (difficult text can’t stop us!), a free dramatized audio reading of the play (a preference towards auditory learning can’t stop us!), and, when available, a link to the Spark Notes video summary of the act (limited time and/or a preference towards visual learning can’t stop us!). I also found a sock-puppet version of Othello that a teacher had uploaded to YouTube and that was a bonus link on the very last tab.

Surely with all of these resources, comprehension would be guaranteed, and I could do some of the “progressive” work that my college professor had done. I wanted my mostly Latiné students to feel as sophisticated as I had felt in my Shakespeare seminar class because they’re brilliant—one of my favorite ways to collectively describe my students—and have sophisticated thoughts. I want them to know that before starting college so that they have the academic confidence to make their voices heard in their own seminar classes. I also copied/pasted specific scenes into the body of the webpage to signal to students that those were significant and would be our focus for the following class period. I tried to stress to students that they were not expected to comprehend one-hundred percent of what they read. Close readings of significant scenes allowed us to zoom in on key moments of the play and deepen our comprehension of what we had already read so that we could move into also analyzing the text.

We covered one act per week. On Mondays I assigned our scenes, we read in groups, and I assigned whatever we didn’t get to in class as homework. On Tuesdays we started with clarifying questions and then moved on to our close readings. On Wednesdays I assigned the rest of the scenes in the act, and Thursdays were a repeat of Tuesday with the new material. On Fridays we watched scenes and worked in groups towards our summative projects. Our overall takeaways seemed to be that Iago was a snake (fair) and Desdemona was annoying (also fair). Generally, the experience was better than my first run with R&J, but I don’t know that students were being empowered. I also don’t know what it would have looked like if they were. I wanted them to feel proud because they were engaging with a difficult text and expanding their intellectual skills as they did so. I never made this explicit to them, and I never asked them about their experiences throughout the unit though. A Shakespearean quote about missed opportunities would certainly be appropriate to sum up my first experience teaching Othello.

Although I wasn’t thrilled with my unit, I did see some improvement, and, most importantly, I had ideas for the next time I tackled Shakespeare. Yet again, I was at a different school teaching a different grade level, and my course team partner taught Macbeth to both our general-education and AP, senior-level students. Since I was new to the school, I wanted to follow my colleague’s lead because he knew the students better and had many more years of teaching experience, and it was my first time teaching AP Literature. If I am being honest, we had a lot less fun in the AP class. Students were given the text while we still worked on the previous unit, told when to have it read in its entirety, and then spent about three weeks discussing and writing essays. The College Board test that serves as the culmination of AP classes has an open-ended question every year where students are given a general prompt and can use any extended text they have read to answer the question, provided the text is “of literary merit.” Shakespeare certainly checks this box! I had the students write more essays during the Macbeth unit than any previous unit because, as I proclaimed to them, “Shakespeare is universal. If you blank on the day of the test, just know that you will be able to use Macbeth for 99.9% of open-ended prompts you will see.” And so, using several retired prompts from previous tests, students wrote about Macbeth in terms of symbolism, in terms of villainy, in terms of tragic heroes, etc. Although my brilliant students wrote wonderful essays, it felt like a “drill and kill” approach that would fall under “teaching to the test.” College Board essay prompts are certainly thought-provoking and invite criticality, but, in preparing students to write timed essays so that they can be granted college credit, we run out of time to do things like write letters to directors.

In the classes where students would not be taking the College Board test, we read the play act-by-act while always connecting back to the central question of “Who is to blame?” Specifically, we were asking who is to blame for King Duncan’s murder, but also, more generally it was understood that we were wondering who was to blame for, you know, everyone dying as is the tendency in Shakespearean tragedies. To that end, students kept graphic organizers as they gathered evidence to support the guilt of either Macbeth himself, his lovely wife, or the three witches as a collective entity. Again, I tried to have students complete the vast majority of reading in the classroom and in a collaborative setting, as I had done with Othello. This was in stark contrast to assigning my AP students the entire play to read on their own, even as we were still discussing our previous novel during our class time together.

Thanks to the fact that Macbeth is Shakespeare’s most widely produced play, we were able to not only compare and contrast productions of Macbeth to our own readings but also to one another. My brilliant students were able to articulate the differences in the screenwriters’ purpose across Shakespeare’s script and in directors’ directorial choices for the different texts. The unit culminated in several rounds of Socratic Smackdown, where students were assigned a defendant and in small groups of three to six defended their own character while also blaming the other two possible guilty parties. At the end of each eight- to ten-minute round, we would anonymously vote for who “won,” and points would be accumulated until we had a team of winning students and a guilty party. In one class period, the bell rang, signaling the end of class before the round was technically over, but the students kept debating. Every English teacher knows the satisfaction of this rare occurrence, where not only are students not packing up their belongings before the bell rings but are actually choosing to continue to engage with the text.

I’d like to think that every time I have presented Shakespeare to a new group of students, I have done a slightly better job. I would credit professional development with equipping me with more and more tools to be able to do so. Most notably, in my fifth year teaching I took part in The Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s Bard Core: Reading into the Curriculum Professional Development (PD) Program. Ten years later, I still consider this to be among the most, if not the most, influential PD in terms of actually impacting my practice. Bard Core emphasizes “reading as doing” and encourages teachers to allow their students to play with Shakespearean plays and all the other texts that they teach. In addition to helping teachers get Shakespeare’s words into students’ mouths and bodies, Bard Core also empowered me to empower my students to exhibit ownership of texts. For example, early on in the PD we were introduced to cutting scenes, a technique that directors are surely familiar with but that none of the teachers in my cohort had ever attempted. We discussed how cuts could be used strategically to convey different messaging within the same scenes and how students could act as “directors” to play with the scripts and see how different themes can be highlighted and foregrounded given different “directorial choices.” This is in line with Gholdy Muhammad’s (2020) Historically Responsive Literacy Framework, particularly the domain of criticality— “reading print texts and contexts with an understanding of how power, anti-oppression, and equity operates throughout society” (p. 116).

Importantly, Muhammad (2020) adds that through criticality, students are able to “question both the world and the texts within it to better understand the truth in history, power, and equity” (p. 117). In this small introductory excerpt to the idea of criticality in the classroom, Muhammad summarizes what I had not been able to articulate and thus could only generalize into the word empowering. I always had in my mind the fact that I wanted to empower students, but when Muhammad visited my school and spoke to our faculty, she made the bold claim that students do not need us to empower them; they already have the power within them. In thinking about this profound statement and re-reading her definition of criticality, I realize that giving my students authentic opportunities to build their criticality is what I had been after all along. My college professor soliciting different readings of different Shakespearean scenes, then, was certainly progressive compared to the teaching I was used to being on the receiving end of. I realize now, though, after having the opportunity to read Gloria Ladson-Billings, Django Paris, Gholdy Muhammad, etc., that mimicking my professor’s teaching method fell short for me because, although it provided students an opportunity to close-read and make sense of difficult texts, I was providing the opportunity to critique but not necessarily the opportunity for criticality. I was focusing on the texts but forgetting about the world.

Of course, I can articulate these connections and reflections now by virtue of having successfully completed a doctorate, a privilege not afforded to everyone. I came to my doctoral program with a desire to explore literature pedagogies around canonical literature. To be honest, it was my hope that my studies would allow me to make the claim that teaching canonical literature should not be a thing of the past. Before starting the program, I did not have the vocabulary or knowledge to say that I was interested in the means by which canonical literature, particularly Shakespearean texts, can be taught in ways that are Culturally Relevant (Ladson-Billings, 1995), Culturally Sustaining (Paris, 2012; Paris & Alim, 2014), and Historically Responsive (Muhammad, 2020). Learning more about these different pedagogies as a veteran teacher and scholar has shifted my focus from what I teach, and the content of my courses, to who I teach, the brilliant students in front of me whom I am lucky to serve.

Some may critique my passion for canonical literature and Shakespeare as not only outdated but as potentially harmful. I am at a point in my career, in my life, where I am giving much more consideration to that critique than I did before I started graduate school. I am looking back on all of my positive literacy experiences with a lens of interrogation. Among other questions I have for myself, I am wondering if the empowerment I felt at my accomplishment of reading Shakespeare was actually pride in my ability to assimilate. This question is a difficult one for me to ask myself, as I attribute those moments as essential to my decision to become a teacher and even to my decision to pursue a doctorate. All the more reason, though, to continue interrogating even if I am confronted with an equally difficult answer.

In my desire to find answers, I was recently afforded the opportunity to talk with Ruben Espinosa^[1] at Arizona State University, and I was excited to ask a fellow Latiné scholar a question I have been grappling with: “Why Shakespeare, why now, why with Black and Brown students?” We agreed that it is a good question, an important question, and one that does not have a simple answer. We also agreed the answer may very well be that some teachers should get rid of Shakespeare, certainly if their teaching of this canonical author is perpetuating harm. Espinosa offered a perspective I had not considered, however, as he explained his view that Shakespeare is simply his vehicle, a platform he uses to do his intersectional work where race and identity are centered. For precisely the reasons that some argue that it is time to get rid of Shakespeare in favor of centering authors of color—the claims at “universality,” the pedestal he has been put on as the epitome of British literature, etc.—could also be seen as reasons to keep his texts in the curriculum. The platform is already there, it has already been created, and it already has the eyes and ears of people, including people in power.

In reflecting on this perspective, my mind wanders to the current controversy surrounding “Critical Race Theory being taught in schools,” which I am putting in quotes because even the phrasing of the claim does not make sense to me, despite the very fervent arguments I have seen misinformed citizens making on the news and on social media. Though I feel quite lucky to be teaching in Chicago under the very mighty Chicago Teacher’s Union (CTU), I think of my colleagues in other states who do not have that privilege. I think of how the fervent stakeholders I see on TV would not bat an eye at seeing Othello listed on a syllabus—because Shakespeare already has that accepted platform. Indeed, Amrita Dhar (2024), who has written on the complexity of being a woman of color and a scholar of Shakespeare acknowledges that “the discipline of English literature, and certainly my subdiscipline in premodern English literature, has a white supremacy problem” given that people might use Shakespeare’s status as evidence of the superiority of white authors, for example (p. 31). Even so, she uses Shakespearean texts to have difficult conversations about race and privilege(s), and I know that I can try to do the same in my own classroom in Chicago. It is worth noting that I know that my membership in the CTU allows me to feel secure and that unions help teachers to be treated as professionals. I am grateful that I know that I am contractually guaranteed the autonomy to make the choices I know are best for my students, even as I know that many of my counterparts across the country are not afforded that same professional autonomy.

Still, Espinosa, in the first chapter of his book Shakespeare on the Shades of Racism (2021), details many of the ways in which he has approached Othello with students in a manner that I would characterize as being Culturally Sustaining. Although there is no set checklist for what it takes to be Culturally Relevant or Culturally Sustaining, one reason I consider his work to fall under the Culturally Sustaining umbrella is that he speaks of bringing Othello into conversation with more contemporary texts such as Keith Hamilton Cobb’s American Moor and Toni Morrison’s Desdemona. He also draws parallels between parts of history that are decentered or even erased in whitewashed curriculums, such as the heinous lynching of Mary Turner. In reading this chapter I was not only stunned at my own ignorance, but I felt empowered to take Espinosa’s lead and to allow myself to think of Othello as a vehicle where the fact that I am reading a Shakespearean play is not the ultimate achievement, but rather I could seek to use the play as a means by which students and I can interrogate the Black experience in the United States, for example. Though I am proud of some of the critical work I was doing with my students that I described before, I don’t think I fully centered my students’ identities in my unit planning. Muhammad’s framework invited me to do so, and Espinosa’s text gave me ideas and inspirations for how I could build upon the work I had already started, all under the safety of a unit on my syllabus that lists a Shakespearean play as the anchor text.

David Stovall is another scholar that I have had the privilege of chatting with, though not about Shakespeare directly. An article he co-wrote with Lamar L. Johnson, Johnnie Jackson, and David Talioferro Baszile states that  “Eurocentric violence in classrooms” and warns, “If we cease to do nothing, then our dutiful Black lives may continue being passable for death under the book, the ballot, and the bullet” (Johnson et al.,  2017, p. 64). I do not take these words lightly and think they should be read and re-read. Some teachers and some schools need to “fire” the canon because teaching these classical works will make it too easy to fall into the traditional literacy instruction that we know can be harmful. In my stubbornness and in my desire to interrogate questions that are very personal to me, I will continue to seek out best practices and improve my craft so that every time my students interact with Shakespeare and other classical texts, they will have the opportunity to feel the same pride that I felt as a Latiné student successfully struggling with complex literature. I will strive to do so in a way so that many years from now, they do not have reason to give pause and wonder at the root of that empowerment as I have done. As James Baldwin (2010) tells us in “Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare,” “The people who produce the poet are not responsible to him: he is responsible to them” (p. 69). As a Brown teacher who loves Shakespeare, I am making it my responsibility, then, to ensure that my students never feel a responsibility to learn Shakespeare, but rather that they know this legendary figure is responsible to them and that they have a right to critique and interrogate his works. If I cannot manage to do that in my classroom, then I will have no choice but to invoke Juliet’s sweet sorrow and bid Shakespeare adieu.

References

Baldwin, J. (2010). Why I stopped hating Shakespeare. In R. Kenan (Ed.), The cross of redemption: Uncollected writings (pp. 65–69). Vintage Books.

Dhar, A. (2024). On Shakespeare, anticolonial pedagogy, and being just. In M. Greenberg & E. Williamson (Eds.), Situating Shakespeare pedagogy in higher education: Social justice and institutional contexts (pp. 23–43). Edinburgh University Press.

Espinosa, R. (2021). Shakespeare on the shades of racism. Routledge.

Johnson, L., Jackson, J., Stovall, D., & Baszile, D. T. (2017). “Loving Blackness to death”: (Re)Imagining ELA classrooms in a time of racial chaos. English Journal, 106(4), 60–66. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26359464

Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal, 32(3), 465–491.

Muhammad, G. (2020). Cultivating genius: An equity framework for culturally and historically responsive literacy. Scholastic.

Paris, D. (2012). Culturally sustaining pedagogy: A needed change in stance, terminology, and practice. Educational Researcher, 41(3), 93–97. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X12441244

Paris, D., & Alim, H. S. (2014). What are we seeking to sustain through culturally sustaining pedagogy? A loving critique forward. Harvard Educational Review, 84(1), 85–100. https://doi.org/10.17763/haer. 84.1. 982l873k2ht16m77