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!
Co-incidentally today I was reading an article in the London Review of Books on this theme.
“Shakespeare’s canon is now to be read as a literary counterpart to England’s first ventures into the slave trade, its characters’ every reference to colour and ethnicity understood as part of the making of a white supremacist hegemony; and Shakespeare’s persistent presence in anglophone culture since then – especially in contexts where his works have been hailed as universally relevant and truthful, exempt from any compromising association with white privilege – is to be seen as one means by which that hegemony has been ratified and maintained.”
Well that doesn’t work for Othello for instance – the references to colour and ethnicity come from the malevolent or foolish characters; the good characters are not doing PR for the slave trade.
“academics and theatre-makers alike, seem to have an exaggerated sense that Shakespeare as institutionalised in America is not just symptomatic of the country’s racial politics but the key to them, whether as a cause or, less frequently, as part of a potential cure. In his introduction, Little admits that ‘quite likely very few’ of the rioters who stormed the Capitol on 6 January 2021 ‘thought of Shakespeare or theatre’, but insists that ‘resonances of a white Shakespeare haunted the insurrection,’ not just because the Capitol is near the Folger Shakespeare Library, but because the building is an architectural homage to republican Rome, rather than a specimen of generic megalomaniac neoclassicism, and thus is ‘very much indebted to England’s Shakespeare’. The whole event, he concludes, was a specimen of ‘white people’s Shakespearean theatre on a grand scale’.”
I don’t decry different approaches to Shakespeare, via feminism, class analysis or what have you, and don’t join in instant denunciation of critical race theory in universities, but that does sound fairly barmy. [The author of the essay calls this “an instance of guilt by unproven association.”]
And as for rampaging mobs – both Julius Caesar and Coriolanus are full of fear and disgust at their impulse to destroy – he would have seen those who threatened to hang Pence as the same type as those who tore apart Cinna the poet thinking he was Cinna the conspirator.
The essay does deal with how the new Globe does not celebrate Merrie England but is a lively performance space with racially mixed casts who still put on Shakespeare. So Shakespeare still lives.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n02/michael-dobson/i-saw-them-in-my-visage
Oh good grief.
I think that the “resonances” that “haunted the insurrection” were more likely to be coming from Ted Nugent or Kid Rock than the Bard.
If we draw a circle centered on the Capitol, with a radius equal to the distance to the Folger, what other literature or architecture can we besmirch with the accusation of haunting or inspiring the Insurrection through mere propinquity? Looking at Google Maps, there’s THE WHOLE GODDAMN LIBRARY OF CONGRESS which is EVEN CLOSER. Might also choose to share the architectural responsibility with the Grant Memorial and the Garfield Memorial, or are bronzes on plinths somehow less culpable than neoclassical facades and porticos? Tell me how this even works.
Hahahaha ok but dissing the whole Library of Congress would be a lot of work, while the Folger shrinks the task nicely.
The idea of Republican Rome, very influential in both the American and French revolutions, was less Shakespeare, more Cicero – who plenty of the big names could read in the original.