Book Review: The Great White Bard - How to Love Shakespeare While Talking About Race by Farah Karim-Cooper

Romeo and Juliet is obviously about a young Pakistani girl whose overbearing father wants to marry her off to a cousin, despite her age and wishes. How could it be anything but?

‘Oh dear, please don’t ruin Romeo and Juliet by talking about race!’ said a member of the public when the Globe hosted an anti-racist webinar on the play. You may be thinking this too. But worry not, because the play can’t be ruined. It can be opened up, however, and questioned, unpacked, challenged even

I've reviewed several books about "Shakerace" the study of Shakespeare through a lens of race and racism. This is a sober and thoughtful look at how we critically evaluate text in the 21st century.

There's something magical about being able to read Shakespeare in a whole new light - to see the plays from a different point of view. Some people seem to want to preserve him carved in marble, never to be sullied. But all art must be examined.

One way to examine Shakespeare is to look him dead in the eye. This is hard to do if we keep him on his pedestal. Shakespeare teaches us this each time he satirises the poets who worshipped their mistresses in florid terms that turned them into nameless, faceless statues or dolls. Shakespeare couldn’t abide it. But there are many people who insist passionately that he should remain in an elevated position of godliness. So we must start by asking ourselves what sort of readers and lovers of Shakespeare we want to be.

This is the key. If we are going to study Shakespeare, we have to burst the bubble of his fame. A large part of the start of the book is dedicated to understanding how the myth of Shakespeare was created. Shakespeare wasn't immediately elevated to "National Treasure" status; it took a concerted effort by his supporters to raise him to secular sainthood.

Shakespeare-the-myth is a relatively modern invention. He was Bowdlerised, whitewashed, cleaned up, and elevated long after his death. The relentless marketing of Shakespeare has been impressive - but leaves little room for dissent when it comes to discussing his works.

Shakespeare, as far as we know, did not own any slaves. But he was writing in an era when the slaver Francis Drake was enriching the nascent British Empire. We often talk about separating the art from the artist - but can we separate the artist from the times they live in? Shakespeare often refers to sugar - both real and metaphorical - but where did that sugar come from?

Most of the chapters take a play-by-play approach, which means you're not jumping around to much. The book always tries to tie us back to 20th & 21st century contexts.

If Iago were real and alive today, he’d spend most of his time in a Reddit chatroom provoking misogynistic, racist and homophobic involuntary celibates to deepen their fear and hate.

Another good example is that, despite Cleopatra being ostensibly a woman of colour, she has mostly been played by white women until comparatively recently. Why is that?

Why has it taken so long, we might wonder, to acknowledge the skin colour of Cleopatra? Perhaps due to white academics and directors failing to see inequalities where they exist in the study as well as the performance of Shakespeare’s plays, Cleopatra’s racial identity is continually denied and she is presumed to represent the default position: whiteness. […] But there is something particular about Cleopatra and the imaginative escape she offers for white performers. She presents a fantasy of a stately queen with an erotic power that white actresses can inhabit and take pleasure in without facing any of the difficulties faced by Black women. Like white European colonial settlers, they occupy her character though only briefly.

It is, of course, impossible to know what Shakespeare and his actors truly felt. But we can examine how their work makes us feel.

Given the way some Black actors view Othello – as a racist portrayal and over-fictionalised fantasy of how a black man might behave under pressure – I wonder could Shakespeare have created such a deep and biting portrayal without having a more than anecdotal awareness of race?

There's an excellent discussion about whether Othello is a dangerous stereotype and one that conscientious Black actors should avoid, and whether it is still acceptable to "black up" when non-Black actors play the part. In an ideal world, we could be race-blind in all our casting decisions, and we could let actors use whichever tools they want to convey a character. But this isn't an ideal world. We have to face the world as imperfect as it is, and find ways to make art inclusive.

Jews had mostly been expelled from England when Shakespeare was writing The Merchant of Venice. Are his actors playing caricatures designed to be jeered at by an anti-Semitic audience? Should a modern audience boo at Shylock?

Perhaps it is wishful thinking, but I like to imagine that Shakespeare himself saw these ideas as problematic even then. Why else would he stage them other than to be provocative, political, and at times, critical, of his own moment?

We can set Shakespeare plays in space, in the modern day, as cartoons, or as musicals. So why can't we revisit some of the language which is deeply hurtful?

Racist slurs in classic texts hurt as much if not more because they get excused for being ‘original’, authentic and historically legitimated and this somehow means we have to keep them around like old relics or statues of slave traders. This desire to keep Shakespeare static normalises the racist language and its effects upon those of us who are

And, of course, the plays do contain racist "jokes". Anyone who claims otherwise is wilfully ignorant. In "Much Ado about Nothing" alone, you have Claudio telling Leonarto he would marry Hero's cousin "were she an Ethiope", and Benedict saying that Beatrice is "too brown for a fair praise". What else can you call that?

The chapters can be a little scattershot. They mostly focus on one play, or theme, but then include several seemingly irrelevant observations tacked on. There are some minor formatting errors with the eBook - almost like it was copied from a paper typeset. Nothing too egregious, but it can be distracting. Like lots of eBooks the majority of the images are at the end (where they're cheaper to print on paper).

That said, I thoroughly recommend this book. It doesn't require you to read dense academic text and jargon. It reasonably accessible to people with only a passing interest in Shakespeare. It might even open your mind.

If Shakespeare is your favourite playwright, reading his plays through race will not threaten that. It may make you uncomfortable at times, but in the end, I believe you’ll know him better, love him more, and all the more enjoy the myriad ways he can be presented by actors of all backgrounds on the 21st-century stage.