W.E.B. Du Bois would be proud of an ongoing effort to “translate” all 38 plays by William Shakespeare into an English intelligible to contemporary patrons of the stage.
“I sit with Shakespeare,” Du Bois wrote, “and he winces not.”
The great race man — a founder of the NAACP, the first African-American to receive a doctorate from Harvard (an honor not to him but the institution), and a public intellectual before that term had even been coined — claimed for himself the most exalted of high culture.
His earliest employment had included a stint, within a cohort of Black classicists, as a professor of Greek and Latin at Wilberforce University. In his magisterial 1903 collection, The Souls of Black Folk, he considered with subtlety not only what it means to be a problem (the “Negro Problem”) but also how it is possible to possess and reconcile a dual identity.
He proposed the rights, and, as significantly, the responsibilities of the “talented tenth” who would not settle for less than equality in every sphere and who would champion those whom they would lead. Among the giants he celebrated was Ira Aldridge, the African-American actor who was the first to achieve fame, claiming roles such as Othello otherwise portrayed by Whites in blackface.
Du Bois was like Shakespeare: he took in all the world offered. He assimilated experiences to himself, not vice versa.
A friend of mine, through his Hitz Family Foundation, has commissioned the Oregon Shakespeare Festival to make these works accessible to all audiences. The OSF, in turn, has hired a diverse range of interpreters, including people of color and women. The “Play On!” project, which staged readings of all 38 of the comedies, tragedies, histories and “problem plays” – even disputed titles such as Edward III, earlier this summer in New York City – deserves respect. They are embracing a tradition as living, not dead, to be engaged with instead of admired, available to all who would recite iambic pentameter.
