What Shakespeare knew about us all along

Madeline Adamo | November 5, 2026

There’s a certain duality to admiring Shakespeare onstage while bristling (maybe) at the memory of studying his plays in high school in the classroom. For many, the latter conjures images of dense textbooks, indecipherable Elizabethan English and the dreaded iambic pentameter. If you were lucky, a teacher wheeled out a large TV cart at the end of the unit and put on Kenneth Branagh’s “Much Ado About Nothing,” and maybe something clicked.

UCLA English professor Robert Watson, however, wants to remind us that the Bard was in the business of entertaining people — not giving them homework. And more than 400 years later, Shakespeare’s plays still have a few surprises up their billowing chemise sleeves if we care to listen.

Watson, who will deliver UCLA’s 141st Faculty Research Lecture, is a scholar of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and Renaissance culture. He focuses on the intersections of literature, environmentalism and human behavior. An especially ripe test case for the latter is “Othello,” which Watson fell in love with during high school while playing a minor role in a production. The play remains his favorite of Shakespeare’s works as each return to the text reveals new possibilities, even after centuries of scholarly study.

On Friday, Nov. 13, Watson will present the lecture “Rethinking Shakespeare’s Othello: New Perspectives and Insights” at 2 p.m. in Schoenberg Hall. His examination will explore themes of race, masculinity, religious tensions and language within the play. Watson hopes to reveal the surprisingly contemporary anxieties within the text about identity and belonging, and whether love must be earned.

Ahead of the lecture, UCLA Newsroom spoke with Watson about his lifelong fascination with Shakespeare, the mirror that “Othello” holds up to human nature and why the Bard might be worth revisiting, even for those who found him intimidating in high school.

What inspired you to take a fresh look at “Othello,” and what do you think the lecture audience might be surprised to discover? 

I was in a high school production of “Othello” — just a minor role, but it meant I heard the play in rehearsal day after day, steadily falling further in love with it (and with Desdemona — thereby hangs a tale). It’s been my favorite ever since. What I’m hoping will surprise the lecture audience is how much there still is to discover in that play, despite centuries of study by great scholars. And how much of Shakespeare’s greatness resides in subtle little things rather than in big famous speeches.

Your lecture examines “Othello” through questions of masculinity, religion, race and language. Why do you think a play written more than four centuries ago can reveal things about the ways we understand identity and belonging today?

I don’t think the psychology of human individuals and human groups has changed radically over those centuries, despite the surface differences. People famously all see themselves in young Hamlet, get warned about shortsighted lust for power in “Macbeth,” recognize the tension between passion and prudence in “Romeo and Juliet,” and see the agonies of aging in “King Lear.”

“Othello” is a tragedy that performs a deep analysis of the dynamics of racist demagoguery, but also notices the subtler forms of racism, and how those affect the psychology and even the vocabulary of the victims. The play reminds people that love — from a deity or from other people — is an essential miracle, not something you have to perfectly deserve. It shows how a lack of self-belief can create both villains and victims. And how men’s anxiety about their masculinity can mislead them into tragic outcomes, for themselves and other people. The only piece of Shakespeare’s works we have in what’s believed to be his own handwriting is a compelling speech about protecting immigrants from xenophobic cruelty. Does any of that really seem outdated?

You’ve spent much of your career studying Shakespeare and Renaissance literature. What is it about Shakespeare’s tragedies that continues to fascinate you, and why do you think they still resonate with audiences today?

Those tragedies are the most capacious, cautionary, broadly sympathetic artworks I’ve ever encountered. And, when new social, cultural or political crises come along, people discover that Shakespeare had already explored them in ways that went unnoticed until the problem or the theory became prominent centuries later: Freudian psychoanalysis in “Hamlet,” existentialism and nihilism in “King Lear,” postcolonial studies in “The Tempest,” second-wave feminism in “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and critical race studies in “Titus Andronicus” and, of course, “Othello.”

What was your reaction when you were invited to deliver UCLA’s 141st Faculty Research Lecture? How have you approached developing and refining a lecture for this occasion?

Totally thrilled and immediately terrified. Since this is a research lecture, I wanted to find a topic or set of topics on which I’ve published some new observations and to touch on multiple subjects in hopes of interesting a wide range of the amazing scholars who’ll be in the audience. I’m hoping most attendees will at least have read the very brief synopsis of the most relevant parts of the plot of “Othello” offered in the invitation to the lecture, but I’ll try to provide enough evidence and explanation to convince them that my interpretations are valid and potentially important.

For people who find Shakespeare intimidating, whether because of the language or the sense that you need specialized knowledge to appreciate his work, what would you say to encourage them to give his writings another chance?

These aren’t massive or arcane works of art — if he wasn’t going to starve to death, Shakespeare had to give a wide range of people a reason to pay to watch them for a couple of hours. And for centuries, people of all kinds have continued to do that. Unfortunately, the plays are often brought to people and taught to people in dull and/or intimidating ways, as a kind of weird obligatory duty. Teachers and directors need to say, “Come on in, the water’s fine — and full of so many kinds of life and so many glittering half-buried treasures.” Then show people that they’ll actually think better, speak better, and understand themselves and each other better, for having engaged with Shakespeare’s works.