The Relief of Shakespeare: Much Ado About (Ir)relevance

This chapter puns on the shared etymological roots of the words relevance, relief, and revelation to argue that Shakespeare can provide an outlet during our political era by being irrelevant, irreverent, and revelatory. It suggests that Shakespeare can offer a physical space, such as a classroom or a theater, for the holistic discussion of ideas and the words we use to describe them; a temporal place distant from ours; and a helpfully unfamiliar language in which to rethink often difficult contemporary conversations that imagine this process as what Paul Gilroy has termed “a politics of transfiguration.” Taking Gilroy’s concept as its theoretical focus, this chapter examines how contingent and dynamic the work of Shakespearean relevance-making can be. First it contextualizes the teaching of Shakespeare within highly politicized debates in the United States about its relevance. Next the chapter extends an argument made by Iyengar and Lesley Feracho (2019) that majority-Black Shakespeare production can participate in race-conscious world-building, precisely the “politics of transfiguration,” despite the historical injustices enacted in the name of Shakespeare. Finally, I give an account of teaching Much Ado About Nothing and director Kenny Leon’s 2019 adaptation of the play for the Public Theater, before concluding that we can glimpse the “politics of transfiguration” not only within majority-Black or majority-minority theatrical productions but also within the performative spaces of protest, rally, and spoken word and within collective viewings and discussion in college classrooms.