'The Great White Bard' by Farah Karim-Cooper

400+ years after his death Shakespeare continues to fascinate, his plays and poems speaking to us in very different eras, across dramatically different cultures.  We continue to see him anew. Relatively recently scholarship has turned a lens on race in his works beyond the obvious (Othello, The Merchant of Venice), a fine example being The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race edited by Ayanna Thompson, which is full of riches.

Now Farah Karim-Cooper, Professor of Shakespeare Studies at King’s College London and Director of Education at the Globe (so she could hardly be more perfectly placed for this work), gives us The Great White Bard: Shakespeare, Race and the Future. This is no dismantling of Shakespeare as a dead white male. Instead,

I love him. I am a foreign, brown woman - and I feel seen and heard in Shakespeare’s plays. A lot of us, certainly many students or audience members at the Globe whom I have spoken to over the years, tend to admire Shakespeare, even worship him. But to love Shakespeare means to know him. To love is to get to grips with the qualities in others and crucially in ourselves that need to be challenged. At some point, love demands that we can reconcile ourselves with flaws and limitations. 

And so she calls for us to read him bravely.

The opening chapter, ‘The Making of the Great White Bard’, is an overview of how since his death Shakespeare’s image has been made, right up to the present day: bizarrely and perversely, the January 6th insurrectionists in Washington reassured the Folger Shakespeare Library and staff in advance that they would be not inconvenienced by the attack, as if the Library in some way represented so-called ‘Anglo-Saxon’ culture.

Farah Karim-Cooper then starts her analysis of plays with the extraordinary Titus Andronicus, which includes Aaron, ‘Shakespeare’s first Moor’: the dramatic ferment that is this play is a fascinating way into the topic. Cleopatra, the ‘tawny Queen’, follows: just a couple of months ago she featured in a yet another cultural/racial dispute, this time about a Netflix docudrama.

Later we have those Venetian plays which are overtly about race, in the stories of Othello and Shylock. When discussing the former, Karim-Cooper points out something that struck me:

It’s intriguing that this transference of symbolic colour is materially realised in the staging of race and gender in the original performances - Othello played by Richard Burbage in blackface and Desdemona by a boy actor in whiteface - the facial makeup used might have been literally transferred or stained the other during the couple’s more intimate exchanges.

Such observations about performance, particularly productions Karim-Cooper has attended, are one of the strengths of the book.

Later chapters examine The Tempest (I once played Prospero: what a strange mixture that late work is). There, Caliban is clearly ‘othered’, and here I have a question. 

At the time, ‘wicked’ meant ‘foul’, synonymous as we know with ‘polluted’, ‘dirty’, ‘corrupt’, ‘deformed’ and ‘black’.

As we know, ‘foul’ is a key word in Macbeth (introduced in the very first scene by the witches in conjunction with ‘fair’), and I would have liked some explanation of why ‘foul’ is automatically a racialised word in that work:

What we deem ‘fair’ in this play will prove ‘foul’, as deception becomes the play’s very operating system. The imagery, like it or not, points to race.

Whiteness in ‘fair Verona’ is looked at later (my comments on Sophie Duncan’s recent book on Juliet, with an interesting analysis of its indisputable primacy, followed by ‘Anti-Black Comedy’ in Much Ado About Nothing and As You Like It.

All of this adds up to a rich and provocative book. As the author concludes,

No one group can claim entitlement over these works or has special access to the gloriously diverse, discomforting and capacious store of words that is Shakespeare.