A lot of us have been agitating. It’s time to institutionalize. We need a Center for Public Shakespeare.

It would fight day and night to make space for Shakespeare studies that belong to everyone. It would be fundamentally democratic: everyone has access; everyone belongs; differences are not just accepted but celebrated, deliberately pursued, and well-funded. The Center would exist to knock down walls and open up doors in Shakespeare studies, broadening the idea of who is in the field and who it’s for. That means that we are never done making space for new scholars, new perspectives, new meanings, and new manifestations.

The Center would connect Shakespeare studies to today’s most pressing questions. It would ask what conflicts are most alive in our world, what new truth can we glean, whom do we reserve empathy for, whom do we leave out, and whom can we turn to for scholarship that brings us closer to our humanity. The Center would be unafraid to ask big ethical questions about Shakespeare: unapologetic in celebrating his praiseworthy moments, unflinching in critiquing his shortcomings. We would not cower from the prospect that knowledge of Shakespeare and his cultural afterlives—including the parts we don’t like—can transform how we understand our world and lead our lives. The Center would be unapologetically activist, asking how knowledge of our literary past can transform our political futures.

It would be a big tent. A diversity of experiences and worldviews would be brought to bear on Shakespeare. The Center would interrogate the familiar and the unfamiliar in Shakespeare studies, the status quo and the unimaginable, and first glimpses of different perspectives. The Center would be radically inclusive and reflect—in the classroom, on the stage, and in administration—the city, the nation, and the world. It would be proudly accessible in all forms, including physical spaces accessible to people with disabilities.

It would bring thinkers together with performers to ask how to think through our twenty-first-century Shakespearean performances and how to perform our twenty-first-century Shakespeare scholarship. The Center would work across the disciplines to bring new scholarly perspectives to Shakespeare, and to ask how Shakespeare scholars can contribute to other disciplines, professions, and policies. It would blur the line between scholarly and creative writing. It would stage performances and adaptations built on knowledge derived from Shakespeare scholarship.

The Center would be mobile, local, digital, and global. It would centralize the decentering of Shakespeare. We would go from the kindergarten classroom to the retirement home asking how Shakespeare studies can deepen and enliven education. Our Mobile Unit would go into local neighborhoods, community centers, schools, veterans organizations, homeless shelters, and correctional facilities, but also into regions of the nation and world that don’t have access to big institutions of higher education. Our Digital Unit would be active on social media. On the model of the Public Theater, we could offer free Shakespeare studies in the park. Perhaps the Center could have regional hubs, Maybe colleges would cheer for their Public Shakespeare team the way they cheer for their football team. The Center would use the heightened mental activity of scholarship and the heightened emotional activity of performance to challenge us to bring more of ourselves to life.

An academic center that is of, by, and for all people isn’t merely a space for scholarship—it’s a living, breathing part of the community. Here Shakespeare creates conversations, inspires action, and explores pressing and complex issues. The Center would partner with communities to ask how Shakespeare studies can help build relationships and connections. It would build community by connecting people through Shakespeare studies and its adjacent scholarly fields.

The Center would coordinate and support the scholars revolutionizing Shakespeare studies by doing the work of Public Shakespeare. It would make space for scholars to connect, explore, and further develop their ideas and their resonance with society's issues, struggles, and futures. It would channel resources to the Shakespeare scholars whose work is most closely bound up with the biggest issues and ideas of our own day.