In James Baldwin’s uncollected works, The Cross of Redemption, falling in between “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity” and “We Can Change the Country” on one side, and “The Uses of the Blues” on the other, is Baldwin’s “Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare.” Melvin’s Hinton’s fine recording of the essay brings alive Baldwin’s voice.

The Cross of Redemption: Baldwin’s Uncollected Writings, edited by Randall Kenan.

Baldwin (1924-1987), novelist, essayist, short-story writer, and philosopher-activist, is among the most erudite, accomplished, and prolifically controversial essayists and creative writers of the 20th century American literature, a gay, black, creative and civil rights activist at a time when prejudice against gayness was still enforced by public taboo and Jim Crow laws were still enforced with impunity by white mobs and Police Departments run by KKK “Grand Dragons.”

As reported in a the Poetry Foundation biography of Baldwin, his impassioned and poetic appeals uniquely “bore witness to the unhappy consequences of American racial strife. . . . His work “mirrored Black people’s aspirations, disappointments, and coping strategies in a hostile society.” Tri-Quarterly contributor Robert A. Bone finds that Baldwin’s publications “have had a stunning impact on our cultural life” because the author “… succeeded in transposing the entire discussion of American race relations to the interior plane; it is a major breakthrough for the American imagination.”

Baldwin’s “Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare”

“Why I stopped Hating Shakespeare,” it turns out, is not just about Baldwin’s relationship to “Shakespeare,” but also the English Bible and even the English language itself. Before Baldwin’s reconciliation to these influences – which took place, paradoxically, when he was living in France, speaking and conversing in French – his alienation from “Shakespeare” was profound and indistinguishable from his distrust of the English language: “My quarrel with the English language has been that the language reflected none of my experience.”

Then there was the matter of Shakespeare’s “anxiety of influence”: “Every writer in the English language,” Baldwin says — in example of his uncompromising honesty — “has at some point hated Shakespeare, has turned away from that monstrous accomplishment with a kind of sick envy.”

But Baldwin had other, more personal reasons than envy to hate Shakespeare, for he was was the ultimate dead white male writer: “I condemned him as a chauvinist. . . I condemned him as one of the authors and architects of my oppression.”

In truth, of course, literate African Americans had long turned to Shakespeare for inspiration, solace, and expressive language that could be marshaled against the barbarities of slavery and racism.

Fredrick Douglass and Shakespeare

In Chapter IV of his Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass,” when Douglass calls out the brutality of the overseer Mr. Austin Gore, he’s not only “quoting,” but repurposing, Shakespeare’s language: in Gore he saw that the “guiltiest perpetrator of one of the bloodiest and most foul murders goes unwhipped of Justice, and uncensured by the community in which he lives” (2001, Yale U., p. 26), echoing in one line both Hamlet’s “murder most foul” (1.5) and Lear’s

Tremble, thou wretch,
That hast within thee undivulged crimes
Unwhipp’d of Justice. (3.2)

Later Douglass quotes Hamlet’s expression that we sometimes had “rather bear those ills we had/Than fly to others, that we knew not of” as an explanation of those slaves who were reluctant to flee from their oppressors and chose instead to endure bondage (p. 62).

Baldwin in Exile

Among other virtues, Baldwin’s essay communicates the value of the radical perspective of exile, of distancing oneself from the assumptions and operating principles of a culture long enough to see both its resources and its failings.

Only from the Francophonic perspective of the American ex-pat in Paris, was Baldwin able to reflect from a necessary distance on these problematic aspects of his experience and reclaim his ownership of the English language.

The results of Baldwin’s inquest – a word which applies, it seems to me, to all of Baldwin’s uncompromisingly honest confrontations with reality in his essays – are dramatically recounted in “Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare.” 

Living in France, perhaps for the first time, Baldwin considered that his alienation from Shakespeare and from American English, “might be the fault of the language, but it might also be my fault. Perhaps the language was not my own because I had never attempted to use it, had only learned to imitate it. If this were so, then it might be made to bear the burden of my experience if I could find the stamina to challenge it, and me, to such a test.”

In support of the possibility of Baldwin’s reclaiming his ownership of the language and therefore his place in the English literary tradition, Baldwin identified two primary assets:

  1. “My black ancestors, who had evolved the sorrow songs, the blues and jazz,” and
  2. “Shakespeare, the last bawdy writer in the English language” (55)

What these two had in common, Baldwin suggests, were the sources of their authority: “candor, irony, density and beat.” If I were granted one wish to the late great Baldwin, it would be to hear him say more about how he discovered these elements in Shakespeare.

Mistaken Identity: Cinna the “Conspirator” and “Cinna the Poet”

But the essay does give us a few clues. One of Baldwin’s primary examples from Shakespeare is the ironic passage from Julius Caesar which foregrounds the problem of mistaken identity that results from two men having the same name.

Those familiar with the play will recall scene 3.3 in which the Roman mob, incensed by the assassination of the populist Caesar, and confusing “Cinna the Poet” with “Cinna the Conspirator,” tears “Cinna the poet” limb from limb merely on account of his sharing a name with a Senator who supported the assassins of Caesar.

As a poet-activist, Baldwin evidently understood the risks associated with being a public figure who was both a committed poet and a politically engaged critic of racist belief and policy.

This passage is also, of course, one of primary interest to those who believe the plays are actually written by Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, who see in it a mirror of the author’s precarious relationship with his own audience, his fear of being taken as the “conspirator” and not the “poet.”

Although the confusion of the two Cinnas is told in Shakespeare’s Roman sources, including Plutarch, Appian, and Cassius Dio, Shakespeare, like James Baldwin, was evidently fascinated by the problem of the confusion of names and the irony of how lethal such a mistake could be. Shakespeare admired Caesar’s generosity of spirit and hated the conspirators, but also feared a mob inspired by Caesar’s memory; they might confuse him for an aristocratic assassin.

It is the poet’s uncompromising commitment to higher truths — Baldwin writes, that makes the his (or her) vocation a dangerous and important one, capable of correcting the polite myths of the time:

That is why he is called a poet. And his responsibility, which is also his joy and his strength and his life, is to defeat all labels and complicate all battles by insisting on the human riddle, to bear witness, as long as breath is in him, to that mighty, unnameable, transfiguring force which lives in the soul of man, and to aspire to do his work so well that when the breath has left him, the people — all people! — who search in the rubble for a sign or a witness will be able to find him there.