THE GREAT WHITE BARD

A scholar of Shakespeare comes not to praise him nor to bury him, but instead to complicate him.

At a time when the reverence historically shown to dead White men is being questioned, is the Bard of Avon still relevant? Yes, answers Karim-Cooper, who should know: She teaches Shakespeare at King’s College London and serves as director of education at the Globe Theatre. She’s also a Pakistani American woman who fell for Shakespeare in high school, recognizing in Romeo and Juliet “the archetypal South Asian teenage experience.” Arguing that if “instead of worshipping his words, we contend with them,” she assures modern-day readers and theatergoers that they will find much of relevance to today’s world in Shakespeare. Karim-Cooper begins with a fascinating survey of how Shakespeare has become a “cult figure and secular god,” in large part due to an Enlightenment campaign to cultivate “a unique brand of English white superiority.” The author devotes the bulk of her text to exegeses of what she terms his “race plays”: Titus Andronicus, Antony and Cleopatra, Othello, The Merchant of Venice, and The Tempest. In these passages, she discusses how Elizabethans might have understood race in words such as barbarous and fair and ruminates on how productions through history have been cast and staged. Karim-Cooper frequently brings modern critical theory to bear, leaning on misogynoir, for instance, to explore the racial construction of Cleopatra in Shakespeare’s time and text—a construction not acknowledged in the casting of British productions until the 1990s. She is careful to remind readers that Shakespeare’s England was not an all-White one, bolstering her assertion that Shakespeare “explores different modes of racial formation” even in plays not commonly associated with race. The author is most convincing when she insists that readers consider “how students…or actors of colour…can get to grips with the excessively valued and quite sublime poetry that just happens to, at times, diminish their own bodies.”

Illuminating both words and performance—an essential addition to Shakespeare studies.