“I know what you’re thinkin’”: Hip Hop, Shakespeare, and Audience Expectations

“Good story/tellers borrow/But great/ones steal” (2). So begins the Q Brothers’ Othello: The Remix (2012), which was commissioned for and debuted as the US entry and “only self-proclaimed [Shakespearean] adaptation in the 2012 Globe to Globe Festival” (Della Gatta 78). The production subsequently toured internationally in the UK, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, and Abu Dhabi, then ran twice at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater (CST), which co-produced the “ad-rap-tation,” and again off Broadway, where it was presented by John Leguizamo. This modernized, 90-minute reinvention transforms Othello into an on-the-rise rapper destroyed by Iago, now a jealous member of his crew. From its sparse, graffitied set and limited props to its pulsating 4/4 hip hop beat to the four jumpsuit-wearing men who bound upon the stage, the production signals its untraditional approach by invoking classic elements of hip hop culture: “graffiti writing, deejaying, break dancing, [and] rap music” all at once (Pough vi). Upon first consideration, the Q Brothers—who wrote the script, composed the music, and directed the performance—appear to emulate the confident posturing often central to hip hop through the logic of their opening lines. Because they do not mention Shakespeare throughout the “Oh Snap Intro,” their opening song focuses on them as storytellers, highlighting the ways that they have taken the narrative from Shakespeare’s Othello but transformed it by updating context, changing language, excising characters, and most obviously, by adding a hip hop framework. Put succinctly, they have borrowed, or perhaps stolen, from the Bard. Indeed, the argument advanced by “Good story/tellers borrow/But great/ones steal” rests on the logic of degree so that the greater the intensity of the derivation, the more authorial weight garnered (Q Brothers 2). Thus, in stressing the Q Brothers stealing from someone as famous as Shakespeare, Othello: The Remix’s opening echoes the bravado often associated with hip hop as it introduces the appropriation to theatregoers.

Yet as the first song slips into the second, their juxtaposition exposes anxiety over the imaginative hip hop approach taken in order to retell Shakespeare. The articulation of this apprehension reveals the audience to which the Q Brothers envision speaking: an audience concerned with the treatment of Shakespeare but unconcerned with the treatment of hip hop, and along with it, issues of race.