I saw them in my visage

Romeo: What lady’s that which doth enrich the hand
Of yonder knight?
Servingman: I know not, sir.
Romeo: O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!
It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night
Like a rich jewel in an Ethiope’s ear –
Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear.

Romeo and Juliet, I.v.

How should​ present-day readers and theatre-goers respond when Romeo, enjoying his first enraptured glimpse of Juliet at the Capulets’ ball, fleetingly registers the contrast between her torchlit beauty and the surrounding darkness by imagining a jewel sparkling in the earlobe of a nameless African? For the scholars in this important group of critical studies, his aside serves principally as evidence of an emergent racialised system visible throughout Elizabethan culture. Night is conventionally regarded as ugly; Juliet the white girl is beautiful; the point of the remark is the incongruity of seeing someone so radiant against this sunless background. We should infer that Romeo considers the random Ethiope innately repulsive, unworthy of the bright jewel in his or her ear.

This may not be the way the image has always worked in practice, however, given that Romeo and Juliet is a play in which dark night is the time of love, garish day the time of destructive violence. Juliet will soon be begging the fiery-footed steeds of the sun to gallop apace and bring in cloudy night, and the unwelcome daybreak after the lovers’ sole night together finds them desperate to mistake the diurnal song of the lark for the nocturnal voice of the nightingale. In the multipolar, multivocal world of Shakespeare’s drama and poetry, binary oppositions rarely go uncomplicated, and he devotes a sonnet, 127, to the further destabilising of any easy notion that fair = white = day = beautiful while dark = black = night = ugly. According to the sonnet, that view is an error, either of outmoded fashion or of inadequate candour: ‘In the old age black was not counted fair,/Or if it were, it bore not beauty’s name;/But now is black beauty’s successive heir.’ Even if we do decide that Shakespeare, writing words for an Italian youth in 1595, assumed that Romeo would have considered all Ethiopians unattractive, does that oblige Romeo’s present-day theatrical impersonators to play him that way, or his present-day readers and spectators tacitly to agree? Whatever traces Shakespeare’s scripts bear of early modern ideas about race, their pliability in the hands of new interpreters under new circumstances has meant that they have rarely functioned solely as vehicles for the reproduction of the Elizabethan attitudes their characters articulate.

I admit that when I first read Romeo and Juliet I found Romeo’s image pleasingly glamorous rather than potentially offensive: the bejewelled Ethiope, whether male or female, seemed to be offering an alternative style of beauty with which Juliet’s, and the night’s, might excitingly be juxtaposed. But that was a long time ago, in the England of the 1970s, when, despite Enoch Powell and the National Front, racism seemed a hangover from a defunct imperial and pre-Holocaust past. All we needed to do to eradicate it for ever, we thought, was stage more Rock against Racism events. Shakespeare, who did not occupy a cherished place in the hearts of skinheads or NF agitators, didn’t seem central to the issue. If anything, his willingness to write the role of Othello, which despite Burbage’s original blackface performances would be used to emancipatory ends by the likes of the 19th-century actor Ira Aldridge, made him seem an ally.

The burgeoning of critical race studies has greatly complicated this view. Shakespeare’s canon is now to be read as a literary counterpart to England’s first ventures into the slave trade, its characters’ every reference to colour and ethnicity understood as part of the making of a white supremacist hegemony; and Shakespeare’s persistent presence in anglophone culture since then – especially in contexts where his works have been hailed as universally relevant and truthful, exempt from any compromising association with white privilege – is to be seen as one means by which that hegemony has been ratified and maintained. The range, vividness and significance of this work are well represented in Arthur Little’s collection White People in Shakespeare, a book whose ideas have only been sharpened by the fact that there are legislators in many American states who would like academics to be fired for holding them.

The ‘white people’ of the title are in the first instance Shakespeare’s white characters, such as fair Juliet of fair Verona, a city so obsessively white, in Kyle Grady’s essay ‘Envy Pale of Hew’, that its intraracial feud barely manages to be tragic. As he sees it, the importation of interethnic strife in adaptations such as West Side Story finally gives the play’s implied others a fair share in the drama. Antonio in The Merchant of Venice is presented in Ian Smith’s virtuoso essay ‘Antonio’s White Penis’ as a man dangerously paralleled not only with Shylock but with the black Prince of Morocco, and engaged in a tricky category-trading negotiation to remain within the entitled bracket of whiteness alongside Bassanio while still embodying homosexual desire. Little’s white people also include the present-day white interpreters addressed in Margo Hendricks’s impassioned ‘I Saw Them in My Visage’ and represented in this collection by, among others, Jean Howard, whose ‘The White Shakespearean and Daily Practice’ provides a useful reflection on the pragmatic measures literature professors can adopt in the hope of avoiding the institutionalised reaffirmation of an invisibly and normatively white Shakespeare.

Hendricks complains that her white colleagues have reproduced and even celebrated the research of black colleagues ‘while at the same time dismissing the black or dark-skinned bodies that gave rise to that scholarship’, producing work in which ‘the black body becomes a shifting literary signifier (a metaphor, if you will) rather than a historical subject’ and race ‘functions ornamentally in service to academic publication and career trajectories’. David Sterling Brown’s essay on Shakespeare’s near obsession with white women’s white hands doesn’t bring in his own lived experience, but his monograph Shakespeare’s White Others – in which Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, Antony and Cleopatra and Othello are used as case studies depicting crises in whiteness – is framed by an eloquent account of his formative experience of racial profiling at the hands of the American police in the late 1990s. It is striking how closely his story resonates with John Kani’s account of being arrested after a rehearsal of Othello in apartheid Johannesburg in 1987 and interrogated about his onstage relationship with Joanna Weinberg’s Desdemona.

If there is an intellectual faultline in Little’s collection, it is between those who view Shakespeare’s works as important to understand because they have been and remain oppressive, and those – here, primarily theatre practitioners such as Peter Sellars, Anchuli Felicia King and Keith Hamilton Cobb – who still find enabling possibilities in their performance. (Sellars has a fascinating exchange with Ayanna Thompson in which they discuss the paradoxical advantages enjoyed by performances of Shakespeare’s plays in prisons over those in commercial theatres: for one thing, in jail you automatically get representatively diverse casting, if single-sexed.) Little’s contributors, academics and theatre-makers alike, seem to have an exaggerated sense that Shakespeare as institutionalised in America is not just symptomatic of the country’s racial politics but the key to them, whether as a cause or, less frequently, as part of a potential cure. In his introduction, Little admits that ‘quite likely very few’ of the rioters who stormed the Capitol on 6 January 2021 ‘thought of Shakespeare or theatre’, but insists that ‘resonances of a white Shakespeare haunted the insurrection,’ not just because the Capitol is near the Folger Shakespeare Library, but because the building is an architectural homage to republican Rome, rather than a specimen of generic megalomaniac neoclassicism, and thus is ‘very much indebted to England’s Shakespeare’. The whole event, he concludes, was a specimen of ‘white people’s Shakespearean theatre on a grand scale’.

This is an instance of guilt by unproven association. It is true that Julius Caesar has been more frequently quoted in US political contexts than many other plays (notoriously, in connection with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, as discussed here in Katherine Gillen’s essay ‘White Freedom, White Property and White Tears’), but to suggest, as Little does, that the US has ‘ventriloquised Julius Caesar, as though it were America’s white anthem or constitution’, is an overstatement. (It might have been worth acknowledging how differently Julius Caesar has played outside the US, notably among liberationists in Africa – whether performed by Apollo Milton Obote, translated into Swahili by Julius Nyerere, or read on Robben Island by Nelson Mandela.) Perhaps this is the assertion of a Shakespearean scholar over-anxious to demonstrate that his subject still matters outside the seminar room, even at the cost of ceding Shakespeare’s cultural capital to the extreme right. But the KKK and their MAGA fellow-travellers would have gone on the rampage even if Shakespeare’s Antony had neither buried Caesar nor praised him.

As for the inextricable connection between Shakespeare and the American ruling class towards which Little’s subtitle gestures in its promise of essays on ‘Race, Culture and the Elite’, this may have gone for ever. When Little and I were PhD students at Harvard in the 1980s, the undergraduate lecture course on Shakespeare available as an elective to all students, for which we both ran discussion classes and graded essays, was recruiting cohorts of about three hundred. Since then, any sense that an Ivy League education ought to include such a thing has faded: that Shakespeare course now plays to audiences of more like thirty, and I doubt whether any of the governing class that has just taken over Capitol Hill by more constitutional means than those of 6 January is planning to spend time at the Folger.

Despite a title that seems intended to provoke right-wing culture warriors, Farah Karim-Cooper’s Great White Bard is in fact a general readers’ guide to the insights critical race studies have brought to Shakespeare, concentrating on his depiction of non-white characters. An introduction on the contingent process of Shakespeare’s canonisation in the era of the slave trade, which landed him with that awful ethno-nationalist soubriquet ‘the Bard’, is followed by chapters on Aaron, Cleopatra, Shylock and Caliban, and then one on the whiteness of the comic heroines.

Both the accessibility and the nuanced critical standpoint of Karim-Cooper’s work have been shaped by her two decades as head of education at Shakespeare’s Globe, a position that put her at a rare interface between Shakespeare studies as practised in Anglo-American universities, the teaching of Shakespeare as the only author mentioned by name in England’s national curriculum, and the day-to-day work of a theatre company whose venue dramatises a fraught and charged encounter between rival versions of past and present. Architecturally, Shakespeare’s Globe belongs to a tradition of Tudorbethan pastiche most obviously affiliated to white cultural conservatism. In Britain, the desire to perform Shakespeare’s plays in some approximation of their original staging, first stated by William Poel in the 1890s, emerged as part of an Arts and Crafts yearning for a pre-industrial, hyper-English England. The earliest attempt to build a conjectural replica of the Globe – a half-size version by Edwin Lutyens – formed part of the nostalgic Shakespeare’s England exhibition mounted at Earl’s Court in 1912.

In the US such fairground reconstructions served to bolster a sense of America’s Wasp cultural inheritance and its anglophile geopolitical allegiances: the replica Globe that a young Sam Wanamaker saw at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1934 was funded by the British government, and when Wanamaker came to London in 1949 and found no such structure marking the former site of the real Globe he was surprised and disappointed. ‘By this time,’ he wrote later, ‘the concept of Globe reconstructions had taken a strong hold in the US, and this was part of and contributed to a great revival and interest in Shakespeare and America’s English language heritage.’ Wanamaker was regarded as a dangerous leftist by Senator McCarthy, and in Stratford in 1959 he played Iago opposite the Othello of the blacklisted civil rights activist Paul Robeson, but tourists drawn to the theatre Wanamaker campaigned to build on Bankside – and which eventually opened in 1997, four years after his death – might be forgiven for thinking that its thatched roof and oak timbers are all about celebrating a version of Englishness that has everything to do with defeating the Spanish Armada and founding the Virginia colony and nothing at all to do with the Empire Windrush.

But the expectation that Shakespeare’s Globe will provide a theme-park experience of Merrie England, in which his plays will be situated emphatically in a whitewashed version of history rather than in the present, is at odds both with the heightened form of liveness produced by daylit open-air performance (at the Globe we can see our present-day fellow audience members at least as well as we can see the actors, and even if the latter are wearing Elizabethan-style clothing they may well be ad-libbing a gag about a noisy helicopter) and with the progressive casting practices espoused by most of the company’s productions. Shakespeare, as Karim-Cooper points out, ‘was never invested in natural realism. A young white male was the first person to ever play his black and quixotic Cleopatra’ and in any case ‘the plays lend themselves to diversity because of their creation within the context of racial formation.’

It is this inclusive version of Shakespearean heritage that usually occupies the replica’s stage; for example, the 2019 Richard II played entirely by women of colour, with which Karim-Cooper concludes her epilogue. Her careful, lucid book is informed by her vast experience working alongside racially mixed casts and with racially mixed classes as they have sought to make sense of Shakespeare’s canon at a theatre that emits fascinatingly mixed signals about what the perpetuation of Shakespeare means, and for whom. This isn’t a perfect book – there are missteps, such as the decision to refer to ‘Our revels now are ended’ as an ‘infamous epilogue’ (the speech is famous rather than infamous and isn’t an epilogue) and Karim-Cooper’s curtain line strikes both a tonal and an ideological discord. ‘And we all have the right to claim the Bard’ makes the appreciation of Shakespeare sound like an onerous task rather than something enjoyable, and if after all those demystifying and enabling chapters Shakespeare is still ‘the Bard’, even if no longer the great white one, then something has failed.

Strikingly, Karim-Cooper, too, cites the 6 January rioters as an example of people who still regard Shakespeare as evidence of the superiority of white culture, quoting a letter drafted by the insurrectionists to reassure the employees of the Folger Shakespeare Library. ‘We will be blocking access to your building … to prevent our persons of grievance from using you as a loophole. This is nothing personal to the library itself. We have no intention of damaging, trespassing or otherwise altering your facility in any way … We sincerely apologise in advance to any inconvenience this may cause you.’ The letter is so badly written one doubts its authors ever read any Shakespeare (perhaps their professed respect for the library owed more to its status as a monument to the excess profits of Standard Oil), but Karim-Cooper must now be even more interested in its contents, given her new job as the director of the Folger. If her book is as widely read as it deserves to be, the library had better have a solid contingency plan ready in case the white supremacists return. Next time they may not be so willing to leave the Folger undisturbed.