Who Is Shakespeare For?
I Asked My Students to Take the Bard Off His Pedestal—It Let Us Reconsider His Place in Our World
“What do we do with Shakespeare?” “Who is Shakespeare for?” “What would it look like to reject Shakespeare?”
These were questions I put at the center of the Pop Culture Shakespeare class I taught in the summer of 2020, and which I’ll return to this fall. Four hundred and sixty years after the Bard’s birth (nearly to the day, we like to imagine), people have answered these questions many times over. But working with my students taught me that one powerful way to understand Shakespeare today is as a transmedia narrative—a …
