Given my blog's domain name, I don't write nearly enough about Shakespeare. Luckily, the good folks at NetGalley have sent me Irene Coslet's provocative new book to review.

Who was the real Shakespeare? It's the sort of low-stakes conspiracy theory which is driven by classism ("a low-born man couldn't write such poetry!"), plagiarism ("he stole from other writers!") and, according to this book, sexism and racism.

From the blurb:

Now, in this intriguing and well-documented book, Irene Coslet conclusively demonstrates that Shakespeare was a not a man, but a woman: a dark-skinned lady, of Jewish origin, born into a family of Court musicians from Venice, and the mother of the English-speaking world. Her name was Emilia Bassano.

Yes! In your face, Bacon! Get stuffed, Marlowe! Edward de Who?!

The life of Emilia Bassano is genuinely fascinating. The book offers some excellent insights into the lives of women, Moors, and Jews during the time period. The analysis of the sexual politics - both in the plays and real life - are both interesting and well researched. For that reason, I have to give it some stars.

The book starts with Kuhn and his ideas about paradigm shifts - the more tweaks we have to bolt on to a model, the more likely it is the model will eventual collapse and a new model will emerge. I'm 100% behind that - given the deficiencies in Shakespeare's biography, people keep adding more and more fantastical explanations to it. But the counterpoint is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

So, what evidence is there that Emilia Bassano was the writer of Shakespeare?

• Shakespeare's name is an anagram of "A-She-Speaker".
• Beatrice from Much Ado shares the same Myers-Briggs type as Emilia Bassano.
• The names "Emilia" and "Bassano" pop up in several plays.
• If you fold the portrait of Shakespeare in a certain way, it looks like a portrait of Emilia.

And so it goes on. Sadly, the evidence presented rarely rises to the level of circumstantial, let alone extraordinary. Some of it is of the sort found in the discredited Bible Code. If you selectively squish the data, you can make it say anything:

Here, the author exploits the similarity in Hebrew between the word Portia (PRT) and the word lead (YPRT). Portia (PRT) is nested within the lead (YPRT), embedding one one term inside the other to create multiple layers of meaning. Only a person who is fluent in Hebrew [...] would be able to make such a pun.

This book is a monument to what happens if you start with a conclusion and then selectively pick only the clues which support your case. There's no testing of the evidence against other candidates - for example, the author describes folding the Droeshout portrait in a specific way until it looks a bit like one of the portraits which might be of Emilia Bassano. It's a bit "Mad Magazine Fold In" - but can the image be folded different ways? Are there other people that it looks like? Sadly, the folded image isn't included on (dubious) copyright grounds.

There's also no mechanism suggested. Let's suppose that Emilia Bassano did write all these plays and poems. What was the method whereby "The Man From Stratford" took them and passed them off as his own? Was there payment? Why did she keep writing if they were being stolen? Wouldn't someone have noticed her slipping in all these "clues" about the true authorship and then removed them?

I'm generally sympathetic to the idea of trying new ways to look at old problems and I genuinely found some of the analysis interesting. I tried to keep an open mind and to steelman the arguments. Nevertheless, I found most of it unconvincing.

Here are some of the arguments I have trouble with.

Scholars agree that the plays are ‘feminist’ but have not been able to explain why the author was interested in gender issues.

To which a suitable response might be "Hath not a man eyes? hath not a man hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?" It also ignores all the decidedly unfeminist tropes and characters in Shakespeare.

Emilia Bassano tells about this portion of her life in Cymbeline through the character of Posthumus Leonatus. Posthumus is the son of Sicilius, a reference to the Sicilian origin of the family. Sicilius has two other sons, who both die prematurely, an allusion to Lewis and Philip, Baptista and Margaret’s sons who died in infancy.

You could pick any random character out of any play and find someone in history who it could be an allegory for.

But, again, there are some reasonable arguments that Shakespeare may not be who we think. Emelia Bassano certainly had some of the background necessary:

The playwright had direct knowledge of the Veneto region. The playwright is familiar with the Commedia dell’Arte. [...] In 1582, Emilia Bassano travelled to Denmark, and that journey, according to Hudson, provided the material for Hamlet. [...] They all stayed at the Castle of Elsinore – which is renowned today as the setting of the play Hamlet. The delegation met two prominent Danish noblemen: Georgius Rosencrantz and Petrius Guildenstern

Most of these arguments seem to be taken from John Hudson's 2014 book "Shakespeare's Dark Lady: Amelia Bassano Lanier The woman behind Shakespeare's plays?" with very little in the way of original research.

The author does prove that there are a few positive connections between Emilia Bassano and Shakespeare. For example, she was the paramour of Henry Carey - founder of the Lord Chamberlain's Men. Could that have taken her into the orbit of Shakespeare's theatre company?

Yet, in 1594, Henry Carey was a sixty-eight military General (he died in 1596): it is hard to believe that the creation of a theatre company was his initiative. It is more likely that it was Emilia Bassano’s idea, who was twenty-five and a playwright at the peak of her creativity.

That's just pure speculation! When you go looking for evidence, and squint your eyes, it's possible to make anything seem like a connection:

Ophelia – whose name rhymes with ‘Emilia’ – has a relationship with the Lord Hamlet and gets pregnant. Ophelia is the daughter of the Lord Chamberlain – a reference to the Lord Chamberlain, Henry Carey, who was her fiancé in real life.

The book veers between cold-reading and the Forer effect. For example, the author asserts that one of Shakespeare's characters is based on a friend of Emilia Bassano. How can that be proven?

Shakespeare had the uncanny ability to give an accurate impression of the characters without describing them in detail. There is a painting by Thomas Francis Dicksee entitled Anne Paige (circa 1862). Although Dicksee was not aware that the character of Anne Paige is based on Lady Anne Clifford, his impression of Anne Paige looks strikingly similar to the portrait of Lady Anne Clifford by William Larking (1618): brown-haired, big-eyed and with a rounded face. It appears that the way the audience imagines Anne Paige when reading the play – and the way Dicksee represented her – is exactly how Anne Clifford looked. Same goes with Falstaff: Shakespeare gives such an accurate impression of Falstaff, without describing him in detail, that now we have an idea of how Alfonso Lanyer looked in real life.

I don't know how to fully respond to that. Two paintings looking slightly similar is not evidence! Where are all the other paintings of Anne Paige? Do they all look similar? There's cherry-picking, and then there's this!

Anyway, I give you Dicksee's portait and Larkin's so you may compare their similarity.

Similarly, some of the discussion is of the sort you might have after imbibing a few bottles of wine:

It is fascinating how two very different cultures and religions used the same sounds, Shekinah and Shakti, to indicate the divine feminine presence, and how these sounds can also be found in the name Shakespeare: Shekinah, Shakti, Shakespeare.

Emilia Bassano is the acknowledged author of the poem "Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum". Surely a textual analysis of her work and that of Shakespeare's would throw up some similarities? Alas, all we get are:

Prospero asks Miranda: ‘Cants thou remember / A time before we came unto this cell?’. In Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum Emilia Bassano says that she lives in a cell: ‘I that live clos’up in Sorrowes Cell’

And

there are many rhetorical similarities between the Passion in Salve Deus and Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece. For example, Jesus is associated with the colours white and red, like Lucrece. In Salve Deus we read: ‘The purest colours both of White and Red’ (1828). In the Rape of Lucrece: ‘To praise the clear unmatchèd red and white’

Frankly, that's less than nothing!

The book concludes with this:

From the viewpoint of white men and businessmen, the story of the Stratford man is inspiring. It is the story of a white boy, a merchant, with little education, who resorted to writing and miraculously became a genius. Society likes the narrative of the genius, because when we say ‘genius’ we think of a miracle and it does not require much explanation. It is all about magical thinking.

I agree that there's a lot to be said about Shakespeare and race. There may well be arguments about the true authorship of the plays and sonnets - and it is certainly interesting to approach them from a new perspective. The book does a reasonable job of contextualising some of the gender politics surrounding Shakespeare's propaganda for Queen Elizabeth and, similarly, the historical context in which the plays were written. But most of the evidence presented is somewhere between magical thinking and divine inspiration.

Emilia Bassano was undoubtedly a fascinating woman - poet, teacher, entrepreneur, confidant of the Queen - she deserves better than this scattershot ramble through her life.

‘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.

The stage is bare, the costumes are monochrome, Pepper's Ghost serves as a backdrop, the audience wears headphones. Is this style over substance? Almost.

So let's talk about the schtick. Every actor is wearing a microphone which allows their merest whisper to be picked up. An impressive audio mix is created, with ravens flying o'erhead, along with other non-diegetic sounds. The music is played live for the most part and is also perfectly incorporated into the world. Are we listening to a live-action radio play? It feels like it at times. I'll admit, I occasionally slipped the headphones off so I could hear the actors raw.

But it works. There are a few giggles from the audience at the start as "When shall we three meet again?" sidles into our ears, and then we all just accept that we're surrounded by sound. It becomes an intimate production full of whispered oaths and subtle inflections. Is this what Shakespeare was like when performed in court far away from the rabble?

Tennant plays a Macbeth riddled with PTSD from the battlefield, equally seduced and repelled by his abominable wife. Jumbo drips poison in his ears and, spookily, into ours.

Obviously the whole cast is magnificent (at West End prices, you'd hope so!) with Jatinder Singh Randhawa stealing the show as the Porter. His performance perfectly shows the power of comic relief after a bloody murder. He smashes the tension to smithereens, indulges the audience, brings us into his lunatic world, and then serves us up raw for other performers.

The whole thing is stunning and powerful. The cast are kinetic, bouncing and twitching with energy, the spartan set and costuming means we can concentrate on the performances, and the tension is perfectly built up.

From a production perspective, the technology is brilliantly integrated - although perhaps open-ear headphones would have allowed a greater mix between performed audio and piped audio? (There are also many accessibility options available.) Similarly, the use of Pepper's Illusion is superb - giving a literal ghostly quality to some of the performers (although not necessarily the ones you expect).

If you want traditional Shakespeare, you might find it a bit gimmicky. If you've seen Macbeth a dozen times and are longing for a new way to experience it, this is perfect.

The play has been cut down to a tight 1 hour 50 minutes with no interval. So expect hefty queues at the loos before and after (the Pinter at least has loos on every floor, distributing the load somewhat).

Shakerace

How does this add to the study of #ShakeRace? Each time you see Shakespeare performed, the nature of the cast transforms your understanding of the text.

As befits a modern production, the cast are not all-white. What they are, however, is all Scottish.

Well, all except one.

Lady Macbeth.

There stands Cush Jumbo, dressed in pure white, with a cut-glass English accent to mark her as different from the others members of court. Is it her perfidious English nature that drives the pair's murderous ambition? Can we ever really trust an Englishwoman so close to the crown? Perhaps the coming of ten-thousand of her kinsman, ready to slaughter, is what causes her to die?

The character of Fluellen from Henry V is a Welshman who is treated as an immigrant to London - so would the original audience of this play have treated Scots as foreigners? If so, how would they feel about seeing a pure Englishwoman married to savage Macbeth?

At the time the play was first performed, England was ruled by King James (VI Scotland and I England) who had married a Danish lass. Were his subjects worried about her foreign influence?

Are Tennant and Jumbo a modern power-couple in a post-race world, busting stereotypes, and liberating themselves from the confines of traditionalism? Or are they stuck in a mixed marriage which was doomed from the start?

The interpretation is, of course, up to you.

What is the city but the people?

What indeed? David Oyelowo is a powerhouse. His Coriolanus is a shitheel teetering somewhere between Trump and Mugabe. He isn't a noble character with a fatal flaw; his flaws are his character. The citizens celebrate him, turn on him, fear him. It isn't about power corrupting, it's about venal people abusing power structures.

There are persistent theories about the authorship of Shakespeare's plays. My personal favourite is that, in the absence of extant texts, the original publishers asked actors to recite the speeches they'd learned decades previously. Actors, not known for their modesty, surreptitiously added an extra soliloquy or two, padded the verses, and made sure their character got the longest speeches possible.

This explains a lot about Coriolanus.

Much like every modern miniseries, is padded out with exposition and hefty monologues. Endless scenes which don't move things forward, hoping you'll come back for the next act / episode.

Lyndsey Turner's staging is magnificent. The whole theatre becomes a kinetic museum. Swordplay is elegant and vicious, turning to slow motion to allow us to revell in its brutality. The lighting perfectly accentuates the power of the character, the fires make their shadows longer than their souls. Ominous music hums in the background like the finale of 2001.

And yet…

There are so many maddeningly long speeches that I rather wished the cast would have used their swords on the script. A few actors tackle them head on and charge at pace. Others turn to the Toast Of London school of acting and place their stresses wherever they land. What else can they do?

It is an excellent production of a difficult script. The humour comes out well, but simply can't keep 2 hour 50 minute show from flagging.

We went to see a relaxed performance - they'd turned down some of the special effects, and specifically told the audience that they were free to move around, and let people know that the theatre is a welcoming space for all; no matter how they react to the text. It made for a delightful atmosphere.

ShakeRace

Previous readers may be familiar with the idea of #ShakeRace. A few years ago, I reviewed Ira Aldridge - The African Roscius by Bernth Lindfors - it looks at early reactions to Black actors who played Shakespeare.

A contemporary reviewer said of him:

Owing to the shape of his lips, it is utterly impossible for him to pronounce English in such a manner as to satisfy even the unfastidious ears of the gallery.

This is, of course, bullshit. But it is important for people to understand the intersection of Shakespeare and Race when watching a modern version of the Bard's plays.

Coriolanus may or may not have been a real person. His ethnicity is uncertain. With a predominantly Black cast, we're forced to reevaluate the story as presented. Is this a story of old white men manipulating an upstart Black man? What drives Volumnia, his mother, to treat her son so harshly? Why do the plebeians so quickly turn on their champion? Why does Coriolanus have such disdain for the Roman hoi polloi?

When the generals try to thrust greatness onto Coriolanus, they demand an immediate answer. He is covered in blood and replies somewhat ambiguously:

CORIOLANUS: I will go wash;

And when my face is fair, you shall perceive

Whether I blush or no.

As I said, this is a complex and flawed play which is performed brilliantly. It is challenging and exciting - but it cannot escape the density of the script.

The cast - all six of them - give the prologue in song. Reminding us (in updated English) that we all know what's coming. It had never occurred to me that the rhythm and rhyme of Shakespeare's poetry fits perfectly to music.

Now, by any count, there are at least 20 characters in the play. So the cast of 6 has to go through some rapid (and hilarious) costume changes to bring them all on to the stage. It also means that Romeo ends up marrying his father while Juliet is engaged to her mother. Freud would be proud. Various members of the audience are roped in to playing parts, holding scenery, and making music - which is rather jolly.

And I think that's the way I'd describe this production - jolly. We're all sat in a pub garden, beer in hand, catching a tan from the English rain, watching Bright Young Things dick about on stage. Half the audience muttering along to the half-remembered soliloquies while the other half are creased over with laughter. There are sword fights, fart jokes, teenage histrionics, and a scene-stealing nurse played by Vicky Gaskin. What more could you want?

The stage is cleverly designed multi-level bit of scaffolding - allowing the cast to clamber all over it, retrieve hidden props, and fits in well with the slightly shambolic æsthetic.

The entire cast were wonderful. They bantered with the audience beautifully, brought out the true emotion behind the play, and gamely gambolled away. The use of costumes to switch between characters is deftly done. And the whole thing ends with a song and jig, as is traditional.

The show is touring at a pub near you this summer and I thoroughly recommend it.

You can find out more by following Open Bar Theatre.

A Word On #ShakeRace

The term "#ShakeRace" was coined, I think, by Dr. Ambereen Dadabhoy. It looks at the intersection between Shakespeare and race. I've enjoyed reading several books about it.

We're firmly in the 21st century, so there's nothing particularly remarkable about seeing a mixed race cast in Shakespeare. And anyone who has been bedazzled by "& Juliet" will be used to a Black Juliet. But it is worth understanding a little about the history of how we got here.

The earliest evidence we have for a Black woman playing Shakespeare is a (sadly unnamed) actress touring the north of England some two-hundred and fifty years ago! Coincidentally she also played Juliet. John Jackson writing in 1770 had this to say:

John Jackson, History of the Scottish Stage (London, 1793), pp. 349-51

So anyone who claims a white-washed Shakespeare is somehow more traditional can get in the sea!

As noted by Jackson - does the intertextuality of the actor's skin colour change the meaning of the play? Does the speech need updating to account for the race of the players?

In the performance I saw, they skipped the word "Ethiop". Which I think makes sense. It's nothing to do with bowdlerisation, but rather a reflection on both the attitudes of the performers and the audience.

But, of course, as the play progresses we get more intertextuality. Consider Juliet's words as she speaks to Romeo:

Thou knowest the mask of night is on my face, Else would a maiden blush bepaint my cheek For that which thou hast heard me speak tonight.

In one sense, it is night and Romeo cannot see her. But what if she is making reference to her skin colour? It is unlikely that Shakespeare imagined the speech being given by a Black woman (although there were Black Tudors) - but this is the joy of seeing Shakespeare modernised! Whether it's a play set in outer-space or in a cliquey high school, Shakespeare's words become reinterpreted by our experience of seeing different actors play the parts.

Is the Montague and Capulet rivalry an ethnic conflict? After all, Lady Capulet reminds us that:

He is a kinsman to the Montague. Affection makes him false; he speaks not true. Some twenty of them fought in this black strife, And all those twenty could but kill one life.

Which is, of course, how West Side Story interprets the play.

All of which is to say, Romeo and Juliet remains as relevant as ever. As long as there are stars in the sky there will be people finding new and interesting ways to reimagine it for their audience.

It's always worth re-examining our relationship with "classic" works. There are some very obvious immigration issues in Shakespeare - and this book does a plausible job of uncovering some of them. It also takes us through some of the issues facing Elizabethan England - for example, how the Welsh "immigrants" were treated by the "native" London population, and how that manifests through Fluellen in Henry V.

Some of the essays are a little more scattershot. One attempts to compare the US's Green Card Lottery with Portia's caskets test in Merchant of Venice. I sort of get the parallel, but it really only warrants a paragraph or two, rather than an entire essay.

As usual with theses sorts of books, it was a little too academically written for my tastes. I think it might have benefited from a more populist tone. There are acres of fascinating stories and titbits hidden behind some exclusionary language.

But, in the end, I can't help but agree with its conclusion:

Access to alternative perspectives changes our orientation with regard to Shakespeare’s work because, from the vantage point of other possible homes, the home that Shakespeare offers is not always optimal and, instead of the stranger in Shakespeare, we may find that Shakespeare has become the stranger.

Ira Aldridge -- a black New Yorker -- was one of nineteenth-century Europe's greatest actors. By the time he began touring in Europe he was principally a Shakespearean actor, playing such classic characters as Shylock, Macbeth, Richard III, and King Lear. Although his frequent public appearances made him the most visible black man in the world by mid-nineteenth century, today Aldridge tends to be a forgotten figure, seldom mentioned in histories of British and European theater. This collection restores the luster to Aldridge's reputation by examining his extraordinary achievements against all odds. The early essays offer biographical information, while later essays examine his critical and popular reception throughout the world. Taken together, these diverse approaches to Aldridge offer a fuller understanding and heightened appreciation of a remarkable man who had an exceptionally interesting life and a spectacular career.

After reading "The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race", I decided to pick up some more books about the history of Black people playing Shakespeare. First up - Ira Aldridge.

Ira was, reportedly, the first Black man to perform Shakespeare plays in the UK. He seems to have been incredibly popular with audiences - although less so with some critics.

The book contains all manner of contemporary accounts - reviews, pamphlets, and letters. They give us a fascinating glimpse into what the reaction was from all sections of society. There are some astoundingly racist contemporary comments - apparently Black people's lips are the wrong shape to pronounce English properly! On that note, because of the verbatim reproduction of documents, there are a wide variety of offensive words and sentiments embedded in the story. The past isn't always a pretty place - and we have to acknowledge that.

Similarly, Ira Aldridge himself isn't treated as a saint. Clearly a talented individual - but with some disturbing aspects to his personal life. The book doesn't shy away from discussing him as a complete human.

It isn't quite an autobiography - there's no narrative arc. Instead, the book is a bit of a hodge-podge of essays - and suffers a bit from being repetitious. One of the essays is a series of letters to Aldridge from his admirers - which might be interesting to the completionist, but otherwise just feels like padding. Unfortunately, the eBook version is missing the images from the printed version. That's just hostile from the publisher.

Ultimately, it is a fascinating glimpse into the life of a man who helped redefine audience's expectations of Shakespeare. It's also contains a number of disturbing facts about the past - I had no idea that African-American New Yorkers were banned by the police from playing Shakespeare!

It also made me think about how we define civilisation. Aldridge was performing towards the end of the legality of the slave trade in Britain. He became a symbol to many people - "proving" that Black people were capable of attaining moral and intellectual greatness. Why is acting in the classics seen as something which elevates men above each other?

If you have even a passing interest in the way Shakespeare was performed, and how one man became such a star only to fade into obscurity - this is a great starting point.

And yet… it is perfect.

Joel Coen's direction shows exactly what can be accomplished with a set that looks like it is out of a 1960s BBC dramatisation. Sure, there are little touches of CGI here and there, but he demonstrates that he is at the peak of his creativity and can cajole magic out of thin gruel.

While the whole cast are amazing, it is Kathryn Hunter who completely steals the show as The Weird Sisters. She is truly terrifying and dominates the screen. Her performance has to be seen to be believed.

The production is shocking - both in intent and delivery. It uses every trick in the book to show exactly how Shakespeare can be modernised, without sinking into gimmickry.

And now, the slightly thorny question of Race And Shakespeare. To ask whether a Black cast can play the parts is as churlish as asking whether non-Albans can play "authentic" Scots. I thoroughly recommend reading Ayanna Thompson's The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race to gain a fuller appreciation of the way that race plays a critical part of Shakespeare. I'm currently reading a biography of Ira Aldridge, an African-American actor who played Shakespeare all over the world. There are reports that Aldridge appeared as Macbeth in Hull in 1832. Black people have been playing Shakespeare for a long time.

Reading those books has made me question how audiences react to multi-racial casts. What new ways do audiences experience Shakespeare - and what questions do they begin to ask of the characters?

Is Denzel Washington's Macbeth the stereotypical "Angry Black Man"? Or is he being manipulated by his white wife - dripping poison in his ear?

Macduff abandons his wife and children - is that a commentary on Black fathers? Or is the (white) Malcom forcing him to commit unspeakable acts for the survival of the white royal bloodline?

What's the significance on the King's admonishment of his "whey-faced" servant that "the devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon!"? When Lady Macbeth chides her husband with "My hands are of your colour, but I shame to wear a heart so white" is this an oblique reference to the stresses of interracial marriage? Why has the screenwriter cut the line saying "black Macbeth will seem as pure as snow"?

Would you ask these questions if the cast were of a different race? What new lessons do you learn about the nature of power, and the ways individuals wield it?

It is a terrific film which shows just how incredible Shakespeare is. It is dizzyingly inventive while staying very true to its roots.

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race shows teachers and students how and why Shakespeare and race are inseparable. Moving well beyond Othello, the collection invites the reader to understand racialized discourses, rhetoric, and performances in all of Shakespeare's plays, including the comedies and histories.

Race is presented through an intersectional approach with chapters that focus on the concepts of sexuality, lineage, nationality, and globalization. The collection helps students to grapple with the unique role performance plays in constructions of race by Shakespeare (and in Shakespearean performances), considering both historical and contemporary actors and directors.

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race will be the first book that truly frames Shakespeare studies and early modern race studies for a non-specialist, student audience.

I'm not sure I'm qualified to read or understand this book. I'm not a scholar, but an occasional Shakespearean actor. I also have very little understanding of literary theory. But I'm greatly interested in both Shakespeare and race - so let's dive in!

It's a series of (mostly) good essays setting out the modern literary criticisms of Shakespeare's attitudes to race. It takes great pains to say that it isn't being critical of Shakespeare the person but it is a critical reading of its works to help us understand the prevailing attitudes of his contemporaries.

We know that there were Black people living in Tudor England - but how did Shakespeare's audience understand the concept of race? What historic literary allusions does Shakespeare use which would be understood in The Globe, but are lost to modern audiences?

I found the introduction slightly muddled. We're told that scientific race does not exist. And that notions of race are a relatively modern invention. So how can there be prejudice and systemic discrimination on something that doesn't exist? The book introduced me to the terms race-making and racecraft - which attempts to define a form of racism outside of notions of race. I found the arguments somewhat circular and, to be frank, a little question begging:

In the past some scholars have argued that the malleability and inconsistency of racialized discourses in the early modern period are evidence that Shakespeare and his contemporaries were not engaged in a racialized epistemology. In their formulation, inconsistency is a negative indicator of racecraft. Let me be clear, critical race theory has slain this dragon. Constructions of race are inconsistent and opportunistic; that is one of the hallmarks of race-making and racecraft.

I find that a difficult statement to get on board with. It might be my lack of familiarity with the arguments - but I don't understand how something inconsistent can correlate strongly with an attitude. Nor how non-modern attitudes can be successfully applied to historic attitudes.

Some of the essays are disappointingly short. Patricia Akhimie's discussion on "Racist Humor and Shakespearean Comedy" could easily have been twice as long. As she says, explaining a joke kills it - but it would be lovely to have gone into a deeper dive.

With other essays, the phrases "what if…" and "perhaps" do a lot of a the heavy lifting. Yes, maybe Othello's Bianca is intended to be Black. That's certainly an interesting reading of it - and brings up all sort of questions. But there's scant evidence to support it.

A few of the essays barely touch on Shakespeare. While it is nice to understand some of the geopolitics - it sort of feels like padding. There are some impressive essays giving context to what audiences of the time would have expected from the plays in terms of racial tropes. And the discussion of the practical nature of "blacking up" and general stagecraft are excellent.

On the literary theory side, I found the constant assertion that the word "black" automatically referred to skin colour a little facile. A dark and stormy night doesn't necessarily mean that people equate blackness with unpleasantness. In my (uneducated) opinion, the over-reliance on dubious semiotics does no favours to the overall thesis. I also didn't agree with lumbering in the bloodline of kings with the notion of race - but found the look at how the different nations were stereotyped a useful primer in the ways that Shakespeare and his audience thought about social differences. Indeed, several essays cover attitudes to religion, class, and sexuality - which are often intersectional with race.

The book also introduced me to Ira Aldridge - an African-American actor who played Shakespeare around the UK in the 1800s! I had no idea of his story - nor his struggles - and I'm eagerly looking forward to reading more about him.

Adrian Lester brings some much needed modern perspective. The unique voice of an actor - who has extensive practical experience performing rather than theorising - is refreshing. He identifies the inherent tension in performing in front of an audience with a modern understanding of race. Sadly, there are still too few non-white actors on the British stage and screen.

One thing it doesn't look at is the future of interpreting race in Shakespeare. Modern performances often play with race. And audiences are used to gender-flipped and age-blind casting. But it's rare (in the UK) to see an all-Black cast play Shakespeare. What does it do to our sense of the plays if Juliet is Japanese and Romeo is a love-sick Weebo? If Lear is played as an Angry Black Man? What if Oberon, Titania, and the fairy court are all Māori? Do we feel more sympathy to Shylock if he's Ethiopian?

In short - how does a modern audience understand the race aspects of the plays?

With all that said, this is a fascinating look at what "race" meant to Shakespeare and how it is expressed in his works. Are some of Shakespeare's jokes racist? Yes. But they're also classist, ableist, and homophobic - he was an intersectional bigot.

This is an excellent book. I found it a difficult read - there were lots of words and phrases I was unfamiliar with. But it will certainly stretch your brain and force you to confront the genteel stereotype of Shakespeare.

The brilliant thing about Shakespeare is its versatility. You can do almost anything with it. Mess around with genders, set it in space, make a puppet show. It all just works. Perhaps you've seen a gender-flipped version of one of the minor history plays set in Wales against the Miners' Strike and it was proper theatre. Or maybe you only ever watch all-male casts from the groundlings to see what it was really like back in the day.

Whatever. Each retelling gives us something new:

• When you watch an all-female cast, it plays with your sense of the presentation of masculinity.
• When it's set in the modern day, it challenges your notions of progress.
• When it's an all-star cast, you get the joy of intertextuality.

You can watch the same play a hundred different times and get a hundred different interpretations of the text. That's what I love - seeing a version that I'd never even considered.

Anyway, I don't think I've ever seen an all-black* cast perform Shakespeare. So, I found PBS's Much Ado About Nothing.

*NB that's how the PBS website describes it.

The only actor I'd seen before was Danielle Brooks from "Orange is the New Black". It's always tempting to think of TV stars as inferior theatre stars, and I'd only seen her in a few early episodes of OitNB. But, obviously, she is brilliant. She's fierce and frosty, sweet and merciful, and utterly hilarious.

Previously, I'd have said that Catherine Tate was my favourite Beatrice. But perhaps that's intertextuality talking?

The rest of the PBS cast are superb - although unfamiliar to me. That also brings a new dimension, when you have no preconceived notions of who an actor is, it frees you to enjoy them as a character.

You can watch clips of the whole show at PBS.org.

Shakespeare has a.... errr... complex relationship with racism. Othello, Shylock, Caliban - all great parts - but not exactly sympathetic characters, are they? Again, it can depend on how you cast the part, and how it is directed.

So, what does it mean to watch an mono-racial Shakespeare performance?

Well, first off, how often have you seen an all-white cast? The "Ado" with Tate and Tennant is embarrassingly pale.

So, my top tips for all of you:

• Seek out media which challenges your ideas of what "proper Shakespeare" looks like.
• Find things performed by casts which don't look like you.
• Notice how it changes the way you react to characters.
• Realise that the only bad Shakespeare is Shakespeare performed without enthusiasm.

Sadly, the PBS video is blocked in the UK. Although fairly trivial to circumvent.

If you're interested in Shakespeare, and if you think #BlackLivesMatter - you owe it to yourself to watch it.