For most of my life, the mainstream (i.e. white) culture has pushed Shakespeare in the academy, institution, and pop-culture as the paradigm of institutional power of letters in the Western world. Because of this, I was not encouraged to like him on my terms and like many black people I felt Shakespeare irrelevant to my experience because of how he'd been taught to me throughout my grade school life. I knew the story and the plots and famous quotes of R&J, Hamlet, and Macbeth, but I felt like none of it spoke to me the world I lived in and witnessed. I was still under the mis-teaching of the institutions that taught this (hat-tip to James Loewen).
It was when I got to university that things changed. In between and after classes I use to go to the library because it was quiet, had one of the best bathrooms at the school, and the nicest building. It was a rainy day so I decided (I can't remember why) to watch an adaption of Hamlet that was on YouTube (this was when you could still post movies there) starring Mel Gibson. It entertained me enough, but I realized it was an abridged adaptation. I tracked down the full adaptation by Kenneth Branagh and it knocked the hell outta me. From that point on I knew I would have to really get into Shakespeare on a totally different level and this marked my start.
I had to re-evaluate what I had read before and now look with new eyes on the rest. When I could read and watch these plays for myself, it changed everything. I heard the lyrics and saw the story of people living and dying like folks around my way. I understood that the humanity in Shakespeare and the humanity of the people I knew were not distant at all. The ability to show the great and mighty as regular-ass folks who worry and are as vulgar as we are is one of the great strengths of Shakespeare, but there is more...
His use of language and poetics is what really gets me. He can tell dirty jokes and contemplate all of existence in back to back lines. Shakespeare made iambic pentameter the default verse of the English language and literally invented words that we all use till this day. The influence on all of our favorite writers from him is absolute. He not only showed us he instructed us. I can go on (will probably have more to say on this), but let me turn it over to another convert to Shakespeare, James Baldwin:
"The greatest poet in the English language found his poetry where poetry is found: in the lives of the people. He could have done this only through love —by knowing, which is not the same thing as understanding, that whatever was happening to anyone was happening to him. It is said that his time was easier than ours, but I doubt it —no time can be easy if one is living through it.I think it is simply that he walked his streets and saw them, and tried not to lie about what he saw: his public streets and his private streets, which are always so mysteriously and inexorably connected; but he trusted that connection. And, though I, and many of us, have bitterly bewailed (and will again) the lot of an American writer —to be part of a people who have ears to hear and hear not, who have eyes to see and see not —I am sure that Shakespeare did the same. Only, he saw, as I think we must, that the people who produce the poet are not responsible to him: he is responsible to them.
That is why he is called a poet. And his responsibility, which is also his joy and his strength and his life, is to defeat all labels and complicate all battles by insisting on the human riddle, to bear witness, as long as breath is in him, to that mighty, unnameable, transfiguring force which lives in the soul of man, and to aspire to do his work so well that when the breath has left him, the people —all people! —who search in the rubble for a sign or a witness will be able to find him there."
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