Topical Shakespeare and the Urgency of Ambiguity

One way to make the Shakespeare classroom a site for social engagement and action, rather than one overly invested in historicizing or aestheticizing Renaissance literature, is letting students themselves decide what Shakespeare’s plays can offer them. Taking his inspiration from James Baldwin, Adhaar Desai describes enlisting Shakespeare as a “witness” to the full scope of human experience through exercises that reframe close reading a “risky, collaborative, and urgent exercise.” Through a process of experimental free association he calls “riffing,” he entices students to trust their instincts and the text’s volatile ambiguities. Experimental, collaborative, and empowering, its goal is to give students, not Shakespeare, authority in the classroom.