Why We Still Read Shakespeare

Amanda Bailey, author of “Shakespeare on Consent,” on what the bard reveals about race, consent and power today.

By Jessica Weiss ’05

Why are we still studying Shakespeare? It’s a question University of Maryland English Professor Amanda Bailey has heard before—and one she believes students should be asking. In plays like “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “The Taming of the Shrew” and “Othello,” the dynamics of consent, gender and race are deeply troubling. But Bailey argues that these texts offer an opportunity—not to celebrate old hierarchies, but to interrogate them. Her 2023 book “Shakespeare on Consent” challenges readers to examine how power, race and desire have long been entangled, and how literature helps us make sense of the cultural legacies we still live with today. For Bailey, consent is never purely individual; it is shaped by systemic forces like race, power and social hierarchy.

On May 1, Bailey will be in conversation with Carissa Harris, associate professor of English at Temple University, and Urvashi Chakravarty, associate professor of English at the University of Toronto, both of whom have written about race, power and consent in the early modernperiod. Ahead of the virtual event, we spoke with Bailey about what Shakespeare can teach us now, why we must move beyond simplistic #MeToo narratives and how a centuries-old play like “Othello” still speaks to the urgent political conversations of today.

In your book, you argue that conversations about consent need to include questions of race and power. How does early modern literature—especially Shakespeare—help us see the long history behind these issues? 

Ultimately, Shakespeare’s work is a mirror not just of his time, but of our own. If we approach his work as a site of struggle, both in the early modern period and today, then his plays offer an occasion for asking a series of questions: Why did people think about race in certain ways in the past? How and why do certain ideas still resonate today? What do we want to change? How can studying and performing Shakespeare sharpen our sense of justice and advance the project of challenging, critiquing and reimagining the stories we tell about race and power in the future?

“Othello” is having a moment right now—tickets for the star-studded Broadway show have sold for upwards of $1,000. What do you make of the ongoing fascination with the story/play? And how does it fit into your argument about consent, race and retribution?

The enduring interest in “Othello” speaks to the ways consent, race and retribution remain fraught, unstable and contested terrain. Consent in “Othello” is not just about any one character’s will; it’s entangled with racial anxieties, gender expectations and political ambition. “Othello” is a play that confronts how sexual consent is always negotiated within power structures, rather than existing as a private choice. In “Shakespeare on Consent,” I write about the connection between the fetishization of white femininity and criminalization of Brown and Black men. There is an incredible moment at the beginning of “Othello” where Iago exploits his culture’s racist fantasies about Black male sexuality to convince Desdemona’s father that his daughter has been abducted and raped. This sends Desdemona’s father into a rage and moves him to go door to door in the middle of the night putting together an extra-legal posse of townsmen charged with hunting down and capturing Othello. I compare this moment in the play to the central trope of the endangered white woman that propels D.W. Griffith’s notoriously racist film “Birth of a Nation,” which depicts the origins of the KKK as born of the urgent need to protect the sexual integrity of white women.

Your book critiques some of the dominant narratives around #MeToo, especially the way they center whiteness and punitive justice. What do you hope people take away from this reframing?

I argue that if we treat justice as only punishing the villain, we risk reinforcing the same systems that made harm possible in the first place, particularly in regard to reinforcing the carceral logics that have historically harmed marginalized communities, particularly Black and Brown men. #MeToo narratives have centered whiteness and focused narrowly on punitive justice—that is, on identifying and punishing so-called bad actors rather than interrogating the broader systems that enable abuses of power. If we begin to think about consent not as a straightforward, easily proven “yes” or “no,” but as shaped by race, class, gender and institutional power, people can engage a more expansive, systemic understanding of harm and privilege. I would hope my reframing allows us to move beyond seeing consent violations purely through the lens of individual moral failings, and instead to think critically about the environments that enable and perpetuate harm.

We're in a moment of intense political debate around issues of race, gender and what gets taught in schools. How do you see your work—especially the arguments in “Shakespeare on Consent”—speaking to this current socio-political moment?

“Shakespeare on Consent” feels incredibly urgent in today’s political climate where debates about race, sexuality, gender and education are so charged. My argument speaks to current controversies around what and whose stories are told (or suppressed) in the classroom. Engagement with Shakespeare, and with literature in general, requires that we confront complexity, discomfort and collective responsibility. We can’t rely on easy answers, nor can we sanitize narratives or flatten history into a simplistic battle between heroes and villains. While some people are making appeals to “apolitical” versions of history and literature, literature always reflects broader social investments and forces us to consider uneven structures of power. Our job is to equip students to think critically about how cultural narratives are formed in an always imperfect world.