Reading C.L.R. James Reading Shakespeare

Abstract

Among the black anti-colonialist writers and activists of his, or any, generation, Cyril Lionel Robert James (Port of Spain, Trinidad 1901 – London, United Kingdom 1989) is no doubt among those who entertained the most sustained and intimate relationship with the European, and especially British, literary and cultural tradition. One needs only to think, with respect to this, about James's lifelong engagement with Shakespeare. Not only did he write and lecture extensively on the latter, including for the BBC and Channel 4,1 but one of the two books that he had planned to write in the last decades of his life, and which he did not live to complete, was a study of the English dramatist (the other one was his autobiography; see Grimshaw 15). In the absence of this book – which James had intriguingly conceived as a study of Shakespeare and Abraham Lincoln (see Taylor 374) – a discussion of C.L.R. James's readings of Shakespeare must rely on a small number of essays and lectures anthologised in the C.L.R. James Reader and the three selections of James's writings published by Allison & Busby between 1977 and 1984 (and now unfortunately out of print), as well as the references scattered in works on other topics. This paper, however, is not such a discussion.2 Instead, I will mainly look at the way in which James used Shakespeare to question the distinction between high and low culture and the politics
implied by this construction. James's reading of Shakespeare is particularly interesting in this
context, because it inflects the received notion of Shakespeare's universality by situating his
work historically, at a moment that precedes the separation and hierarchisation of literature and the popular arts operated by bourgeois aesthetics. It also offers an important opportunity for a comparative examination of some of the protocols of postcolonial criticism of Shakespeare and its varied genealogies.

Shakespeare in Southern Africa Vol. 18 2006: pp. 11-20