This essay investigates how Elizabeth Nunez's Prospero's Daughter (2006) and Terry McMillan's How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1996) engage with Shakespeare. By taking a middlebrow approach that emphasizes readers’ use of and pleasure in Shakespeare and that aims to cultivate an inclusive multiracial readership, Nunez and McMillan show that black readers can lay claim to a Shakespeare that they participate in (re)defining. While Nunez's novel frames Shakespeare's political uses within pleasurable genres of contemporary popular fiction, McMillan suggests that she and her readers can remake Shakespeare, the name of her heroine's love interest, into a figure associated with pleasure.