The Great White Bard : Shakespeare, Race and the Future

Author: Karim-Cooper, Farah

English

Published on 27 April 2023 by Oneworld Publications in the United Kingdom.

Hardback | 336 pages
164 x 244 x 36 | 568g

SHAKESPEARE: increasingly irrelevant or lone literary genius of the Western canon?'Powerful and illuminating'James Shapiro, author of1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, winner of the Baillie Gifford 'Winner of Winners' 2023'Insightful, passionate, piled with facts and has a warm, infectious love for theatre and Shakespeare running through every chapter'Adrian Lester, CBEProfessor Farah Karim-Cooper grew up loving the Bard, perhaps because Romeo and Juliet felt Pakistani to her. But why was being white as a snowy dove essential to Juliets beauty?Combining piercing analysis of race, gender and otherness in beloved plays from Othello to The Tempest with a radical reappraisal of Elizabethan London, The Great White Bard entreats us neither to idealise nor to fossilise Shakespeare but instead to look him in the eye and reckon with the discomforts of his plays, playhouses and society.

If we persist in reading Shakespeare as representative of only one group, as the very pinnacle of the white Western canon, then he will truly be in peril. But if we dare to bring Shakespeare down from his plinth, we might unveil a playwright for the twenty-first century. We might expand and enrich his extraordinary legacy. We might even fall in love with him all over again.