Guest post: You’ve got to be able to say precisely how
Originally a comment by Enzyme on No YOU decolonize.
My tuppence-worth on the “whitness” of Shakespeare:
Let’s allow, for the sake of the argument, that there is racism in his plays. Well, OK; but that’s not enough. We need to know more about whether that putative racism maps on to today’s definition of racism; and I don’t think it does. And I take Othello as my case-in-point.
Here’s a trivial starting-point: Othello is a tragedy. This means that, in Shakespeare’s handling of the form, the titular character is brought down by a flaw in his own character. For Macbeth it’s ambition; for Hamlet it’s over-thinking; for Othello it’s jealousy. But the titular characters of a tragedy are all high-status people: people you’d want to be, in effect. Were they just plebs like you or me, their ignominy would not be tragic, because they’d’ve been ignominious from the beginning.
What else do we know about Othello? He’s black. So he’s an admirable black man. More than that: he’s not just a visiting prince from Egypt, and so a passing curiosity or noble savage character; he holds high military office in a European state. This means he must command respect both from his peers and from the men he commands, skin-tone notwithstanding.
And this must have made sense to Shakespeare’s audience. This stands spelling out. It must have been perfectly straightforward to a 17th-century costermonger that a black guy could have been in charge of a European army, and been worthy of respect, and married a nobleman’s daughter, because if any of that were not true, the tragedy simply wouldn’t have worked. One might as well have written a play about Caliban or a dog holding a place among the Venetian nobility. In that case, his being brought low would not be a tragedy, but the restoraton of order. Othello would be a kind of comedy; it would never have succeeded as a tragedy. But it isn’t, and it did.
Now imagine another world, in which Shakespeare lived in (say) the nineteenth century. Could he have written Othello then? That’s not nearly as clear, because racism – as we see it – was by that point A Thing. There would have been something faintly obscene about the premise of the play.
And so I think it’s fair to deduce that even if you want to say that Shakespeare was racist, you can’t just help yourself to it. You’ve got to be able to say precisely how, and you’ve got to be alive to the possibility that you’re being deeply anachronistic.
I’m perfectly willing to believe that white supremacists try to use Willie’s plays for their own noxious agenda, presumably insisting that no person of color could have ever written such works (never mind that, statistically, no white person could, either; genius is always an anomaly).
But the proper response is not to agree with those louts and declare Shakespeare ‘too colonial’ or whatever; it’s to meet the challenge head-on and wrest the great writer back from those who would abuse his legacy. But that’s a lot of work, and these folks would rather just lay about and, I dunno, exchange bon mots about how marvelous they are for ‘decolonizing’ Shakespeare, instead.
Good point, and worth highlighting. I remember a presentation in a graduate seminar years ago in which a researcher reviewed documents describing the visit of a head of state of an African country to England during Elizabeth I’s reign. She argued that these descriptions were no different than descriptions of a similar event involving a European (white) head of state. Her conclusion is that while we wouldn’t want to rule out altogether that racism existed in England at that time, it wasn’t visible in public discourse of this type.
That’s very well put. Cassio, Othello’s lieutenant, treats him with the deference that is due to Othello’s rank of general.
@guest –
There was a documentary fronted by David Olusoga in about 2018 in which he talked about a painting called The King’s Fountain; it’s a Lisbon street scene, in which there’re loads of black people. Some are slaves, but there’re white slaves as well. And some of the black people are high-status: there’s a black knight. His point: in 1575, when the painting was created, there was a very different dynamic between Europe and Africa than that which emerged not so long afterwards.
We had to invent racism. It didn’t come naturally.
Oooh: here we are.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p05xyfg6/civilisations-series-1-6-first-contact
I read the book Black Tudors a few years ago. The thrust of the book is that there were black people in various walks of life in Tudor England. Wouldn’t have been strange for Shakespeare to interact with black people, and there were probably some in his audience.
Not available in US; is this the same one?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIezKlEt7Uk
@4 interesting, thank you – and well after this paper I mentioned :) kudos to the researcher at my alma mater….
@Ophelia: No, but I’ll check that out later!
@KBPlayer: Good point!