Abstract
Black writers’ approaches to Shakespeare have never been monolithic. Two of the most memorable passages on Shakespeare in twentieth-century African American letters define the opposite ends of a very wide spectrum. In the paragraph that concludes chapter 6 of The Souls of Black Folk (1903), W. E. B. Du Bois declares: “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not.”1 Fifty years later, Du Bois’s mood of serene mutuality is sharply undercut by the angry sense of exclusion articulated in James Baldwin’s 1953 essay “Stranger in the Village”: “The most illiterate among them [white Europeans] is related, in a way that I am not, to Dante, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Aeschylus, Da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Racine; the cathedral at Chartres says something to them which it cannot say to me.”2
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every song he sings is written by Shakespeare and his mother-in-law.
“Shakespeare Say”
Fig Newtons and King Lear, bitter lemon as well for Othello, that desolate conspicuous soul. But Macbeth demanded dry bread, crumbs brushed from a lap as I staggered off the cushions contrite, having read far past my mother’s calling.
“In the Old Neighborhood”
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Notes
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Terri Hume Oliver (New York: Norton, 1999), 74.
James Baldwin, “Stranger in the Village,” Notesof a Native Son (New York: Dial, 1955), 148.
Rita Dove, Museum (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon UP, 1983)
June Jordan, “Poem about My Rights,” Passion: New Poems, 1977–1980 (Boston: Beacon, 1980).
James Baldwin, No Name in the Street (New York: Dial, 1972), 47–48.
Paul Laurence Dunbar, “Sympathy,” in Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Negro Poets, ed. Countee Cullen (New York: Harper, 1927), 8–9.
Anthony J. Berret is unconvincing when he argues in Mark Twain and Shakespeare (Lanham: UP of America, 1993)
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© 2007 Peter Erickson
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Erickson, P. (2007). Rita Dove’s Shakespeares. In: Citing Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-06009-9_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-06009-9_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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