The Public Shakespeare essays my first-year college students have published come from a writing course called Why Shakespeare?, which takes their minds seriously enough to ask them to be generators, not just consumers, of knowledge. After grappling in our course with Shakespeare’s prominence in modern life, our final meeting is a Public Shakespeare workshop. Students turn their 10-page heavily footnoted research projects about Shakespeare’s modern manifestations into short public-facing essays written with fire and joy. Published essays include:

• “‘Surreptitious Insurrection’: Shakespeare and the Aesthetics of Revolt in Post-Civil War Nigeria”
• “What Shakespeare Can Tell Us About School Shootings”
• “Disney Meets Shakespeare”
• “The Bard and Bollywood”
• “Learning to Hate Shakespeare”
• “The Outcast State: Shakespeare’s Unlikely Connection to Black Subjectivity”
• “How Shakespeare Helps Us Challenge the Far-Right in Europe”
• “An Unexpected Concertmaster: How Shakespeare Influenced the Romantic Era”
• “Shakespeare on Helicopter Parenting”
• “Black Lives Matter in the Public Theater’s Much Ado About Nothing”
• “Shakespeare Travesties, the Philosophical and the Popular”
• “#BlackGirlMagic in Morrison’s Desdemona”

These essays grow from an inclusive classroom that helps students realize they have knowledge and perspectives—including diverse cultural backgrounds and languages—that the literary studies establishment doesn’t yet have and desperately needs. Public Shakespeare fights for those students (often first-gen) who don't come from privilege but have talent, potential, and put in the work.

Developed from my June 2019 article for Public Seminar, this chapter covers the nuts-and-bolts of writing Public Shakespeare essays, especially with students. There are practical directions. Embrace the absurd; mix high culture and low; foreground the comical. Give the cool, quirky, crazy evidence. Keep quotation to a minimum. Make sentences snappy and short. It’s OK to write in the first person. Rain down fire if needed. Make it jokey. Use metaphors, analogies, and other creative gestures. “Peg” your piece to something newsy: an upcoming event, an anniversary, some recent headline, a current controversy.

There are also pedagogical and theoretical considerations. I argue that public writing shouldn’t replace academic writing. The strength of these essays flows from the traditional research papers they’re based on. But public writing is an important change to the mode of articulating scholarship—a skill—rarely addressed explicitly in the humanities. Public writing illustrates what some scholars scoff at (why?): our work has what social scientists call “policy implications,” and opens avenues to what human beings call “happiness.”