Minstrelsy, Jazz, Rap

Shakespeare, African American Music, and Cultural Legitimation

Authors

Douglas Lanier University of New Hampshire

Abstract

Even though, it must be conceded at the start, Shakespeare has made no more than marginal appearances in blues, jazz, R&B, and hip-hop, the potential for their conjunction has had a particular symbolic resonance. Sketching out the history of that conjunction — my purpose here — offers us one way of understanding African American music's pursuit of artistic status and cultural respectability, and in particular a means for reevaluating the hybridizing of Shakespeare and jazz. My argument here will be that mid-century jazz adaptations of Shakespeare serve as an ambivalent middle-term between Shakespearean minstrelsy of the nineteenth century, where the relationship between Shakespeare and African American music was first codified, and contemporary hip-hop, where musicians have reclaimed Shakespeare as a minor yet symbolically significant point of reference for African American music.

Author Biography

Douglas Lanier, University of New Hampshire

Douglas Lanier is Associate Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire. He has published widely on Shakespeare on film and in popular culture, as well as articles on Shakespeare, Jonson, Milton, the Jacobean masque, and literary pedagogy. His book, Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture, was published in 2002 in the Oxford University Press Shakespeare Topics series. In addition to his continuing work on Shakespeare and popular culture, he is currently working on a book-length study of cultural stratification in early modern British drama.