Tupac, Shakespeare, Poetry and Theater: The Poet Behind the Rapper

“A Shakespearean actor, because you have to be the best to do Shakespeare.” That was what the young Tupac in Baltimore replied to his friend Darrin Keith Bastfield when asked what kind of actor he wanted to become. Bastfield then drew him in a ruffled collar and christened the picture “Shakurspeare.” The anecdote appears in Baltimore Magazine and fits poorly with the image of a pure street rapper. Instead, it fits a man who spoke about Romeo and Juliet in the Los Angeles Times in 1995 after his release from prison. Tupac’s sense of language and drama did not originate in the recording studio, but in acting class.

The First Stage Was in Harlem

At twelve, Tupac performed in Harlem with the 127th Street Repertory Ensemble. In that theater troupe, according to Wikipedia, he played the role of Travis in A Raisin in the Sun at the historic Apollo Theater. His mother Afeni Shakur had introduced him to political culture early on. Theater opened up a second world alongside it.

At the Baltimore Arts School: Ibsen, Shepard, and the Mouse King

In 1984, the family moved to Baltimore. Tupac applied to the Baltimore School for the Arts as an acting student; his friend Dana “Mouse” Smith helped him rehearse his audition scene. Donald Hicken, then head of the theater department, recalls his first impression: “The first thing that struck me was that he was extremely charismatic.”

For a movement exercise, Tupac chose Don McLean’s Vincent about Vincent van Gogh, a song about a misunderstood artist. In class, he studied Henrik Ibsen, Sam Shepard, and William Shakespeare. In Hicken’s impression, he was intellectually curious but not a good student; he spent his lunch breaks reading in the library. His classmate Jada Pinkett noted in the memorial book Tupac Remembered: “He loved Shakespeare.”

On stage, he acted in Shakespeare plays and, according to Wikipedia, took on the role of the Mouse King in the ballet The Nutcracker. Outside of school, he founded the group Born Busy with Smith, Bastfield, and Gerard Young, whose cassette tapes are considered his first recordings. At the same time, he wrote letters to his girlfriend Mary Baldrige; over 100 of them survive (see Complex on Jeff Pearlman’s biography).

In 1988, the family moved to Marin City on the West Coast. Hicken offered to look for a host family so he could finish school in Baltimore. Tupac declined: he did not want to leave his family alone.

“Romeo Was a Blood”: Shakespeare in the Language of the Street

In a 1995 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Tupac translated Shakespeare into his own world. Romeo and Juliet was “serious ghetto”: a Romeo from the Bloods falls in love with a Juliet from the Crips, both gangs stand in the way, and in the end both are dead, “for nothing.” He described Macbeth as the story of a woman who convinces a happy man to kill her husband; after that, the man begins to hallucinate like in a Scarface song.

In the conversation, Tupac also raved about Les Misérables and The Gospel at Colonus. The comparison was neither scholarly nor false: it shows how a theater student translated dramatic conflicts into the language of the street. Years later, the rapper Nas remarked: “I put Tupac beyond Shakespeare.”

Eight Lines on Concrete: The Poems from Marin City

In Marin City in 1989, Tupac met Leila Steinberg and took part in her writing circle; shortly thereafter, she became his manager. Dating from this period are the 72 poems collected and published on November 1, 1999, as The Rose That Grew from Concrete. According to Afeni Shakur’s foreword, they were written between 1989 and 1991. Even at age eleven, he is said to have written a booklet of poems and haikus, which was offered at Sotheby’s in 2022.

The themes of the collection range from love in Wife 4 Life to faith in God to political lines as in Can U C the Pride in the Panther. The title poem about the rose that grew from concrete spans just eight lines and bears the handwritten note “Autobiographical.”

Poetry and acting converged in film as well. In Poetic Justice (1993), Tupac played the postal worker Lucky alongside Janet Jackson, whose character recites poems by Maya Angelou. What Angelou personally thought of him is not documented.

From the Berkeley Campus to Harvard

As early as 1997, the University of California, Berkeley offered a student-run course on Tupac’s poetry and history. MTV asked mockingly at the time whether Tupac belonged in the canon of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Keats. In 2003, Harvard dedicated a symposium of its own to him.

The book is read in schools, and the comparison with Shakespeare has become commonplace in pop culture; it remains, however, a matter of taste. The image of the rose from concrete has long taken on a life of its own: singer Ashanti named her 2004 album Concrete Rose after the book.

Unpolished Verses and the School as a Sanctuary

Tupac’s poetry is in part unpolished, which the handwriting facsimiles in the book lay bare: crossings-out and shorthand characterize the manuscripts. Nikki Giovanni describes the author’s vulnerable side in the foreword. Jeff Pearlman’s biography places the school in Baltimore as a sanctuary for a boy who otherwise felt little sense of belonging (as noted by Kirkus).

How much of Tupac’s later stage presence stemmed from this training remains a matter of interpretation. What is documented is that he took the classes seriously.

The Folder with Leila Steinberg: How Loose Sheets Became a Book

How Tupac and Leila Steinberg met is recounted by Steinberg herself in two versions. In the introduction to the book, she is sitting in front of an elementary school in Marin City in the spring of 1989, reading a book by Winnie Mandela, when a young man behind her recites sentences from it by heart. She invited him to her class, and after a few weeks he made her his manager. In a 2011 XXL interview, she recounts the first meeting somewhat differently; the details are memory, not an official transcript.

Tupac gave her the loose sheets at the time for safekeeping; from her collection, the book later emerged (see Leila Steinberg). Beside each typed poem, the volume displays the handwritten original featuring Tupac’s typical shorthand like “u,” “2,” and “4.” It is divided into four sections, each named after one poem. The poet Nikki Giovanni contributed the foreword “Tupac, C U in Heaven.”

In November 2000, an album followed on which Mos Def, Q-Tip, Sonia Sanchez, and Afeni Shakur, among others, recite the poems; it reached No. 89 on the Billboard 200.

Further reading: Poems · The Rose That Grew from Concrete (book) · Poetic Justice · Born Busy