Magic, Royalty, and Inheritance: Teaching Wilson’s King Hedley II and Shakespeare’s Prince Hamlet Together

In 2005, I appeared at a conference titled “Situating August Wilson in the Canon and in the Curriculum,” convened at Howard University by Sandra Shannon. During the course of the proceedings, I counted at least six different occasions in which playwright August Wilson was compared to and equated with William Shakespeare. Elsewhere, others have made similar assertions. In his 2001 introduction to the published version of Jitney, director Marion McClinton declared: “August Wilson is the griot, our Homer, our Shakespeare” (8). That same year, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Linda Gravatt, and Viola Davis, in an interview with me at the Kennedy Center during previews for King Hedley II, noted that the degree of preparation, expertise required for the heightened language, and physical energy and commitment required for performing a Wilson role was equivalent to performing a Shakespearean character. As a lover of both Shakespeare and August Wilson I am intrigued by the comparison and the possibility of bringing the two playwrights together within the classroom.

Inspired by the words of McClinton, Henderson, Gravatt, Davis, and the many participants at the Howard conference, I developed a workshop at the 2006 Black Theatre Network conference in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in which participants were invited to use performance to draw connections between Hamlet’s famous soliloquy, “To be or not to be . . .” (3.1), and Wining Boy’s speech about standing on the train tracks of the Yellow Dog (1.2) in The Piano Lesson. The workshop, consisting of white and black students and teachers, proved gratifying for its ability to demonstrate how one play could become a lens through which to see and understand the other. It was particularly invigorating to watch participants grapple with the language of each playwright and, eventually, to become aware of the connections between two poet-dramatists seemingly separated by race and time. In the spring of 2007, I further tested these connections by offering an honors class titled “Playwriting with Shakespeare and August Wilson.” We read two plays by each playwright and attended live productions of their works. By studying both playwrights simultaneously, students had two models of how poetry can be the engine driving theatrical action, how three-dimensional characters are required to speak that language, and how a playwright worth his/her salt uses the theatrical idiom to explore humankind’s most pressing and important issues: love, honor, power, mortality, religion, politics, and history. Inspired by these great playwrights, the students rose to the occasion by creating their own poetic language, elevating their subject matter, intensifying the conflict, and exploring cultural identity. Most importantly, they gained insights into Shakespeare’s and Wilson’s unique ability to help audiences understand and appreciate the cultural contexts represented in their plays. With the foundations provided by these plays, black and white students were able to discuss issues of identity, racism, societal barriers, gender conflicts, and generational strife in ways that would have proven difficult had the plays not served as foundations, and had the characters not served as lenses.

In this essay, I offer a glimpse into my pedagogical approach, developed through the workshop and the playwriting class, by drawing attention to the similar ways in which William Shakespeare’s and August Wilson’s protagonists experience magic, royalty, and inheritance in their respective worlds. Shakespeare is thought to have been revising Hamlet in 1600;¹King Hedley II was under revision in 2000, four hundred years later—to the year! Shakespeare, of course, never read King Hedley II. In two separate interviews in Jackson Bryer and Mary Hartig’s edited collection Conversations with August Wilson, Wilson made it clear that he was not familiar with the majority of Shakespeare’s work:

I haven’t read Ibsen, Shaw, Shakespeare—except The Merchant of Venice in the ninth grade. The only Shakespeare I’ve ever seen was Othello.²

When I started writing plays in earnest in 1979, I had not read the body of western theatre that is Ibsen and Chekhov and Shaw and Shakespeare . . . but I thought, I do not want to go back...