Among Shakespeare scholars, those five works are known as his traditionally understood “race plays” and include characters who are Black like Othello, Jewish like Shylock, Indigenous like Caliban, or Black African like Cleopatra.
But what did Shakespeare have to say about race in plays such as “Hamlet” and “Macbeth,” where Black characters do not have a dominant role, for example?
As Shakespeare scholars who study race know, all of his plays address race in some way. How could they not?
After all, every human being has a racial identity, much like every living human being breathes. Said another way, every character Shakespeare breathed life into has a racial identity, from Hamlet to Hippolyta.
The playwright wrote about many key subjects during the late 15th and early 16th centuries that are relevant today, including gender, addiction, sexuality, mental health, social psychology, sexual violence, antisemitism, sexism and, of course, race.
Here are four things to know about Shakespeare and race.
1. No one should fear Shakespeare
For a long time, I was afraid of Shakespeare. I am not the only one.
In his 1964 essay “Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare,” James Baldwin detailed his initial resistance. Like many people today, Baldwin wrote that he, too, was “a victim of that loveless education which causes so many schoolboys to detest Shakespeare.”
A major part of Baldwin’s loathing of Shakespeare had nothing to do with the English writer specifically, but rather the white elitism that surrounded his work and literature.
Just as Shakespeare didn’t create misogyny and sexism, he didn’t create race and racism. Rather, he observed the complex realities of the world around him, and through his plays he articulated an underlying hope for a more just world.
2. Shakespeare’s work reveals social injustice
“Titus Andronicus” featured the playwright’s first Black character, Aaron. In that play, written near the end of the 16th century, the white Roman empress, Tamora, cheats on her white emperor husband, Saturninus, with Aaron. When Tamora eventually gives birth to a baby, it’s clear Tamora’s baby daddy isn’t Saturninus.
Consequently, the white characters who know about the infant’s real father urge Aaron to kill his newborn Black son. But Aaron refuses. He opts instead to fiercely protect his beloved child.
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