White People in Shakespeare

Essays on Race, Culture and the Elite

Arthur L. Little, Jr.

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781350285668
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350283657
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

What part did Shakespeare play in the construction of a 'white people' and how has his work been enlisted to define and bolster a white cultural and racial identity?

Since the court of Queen Elizabeth I, through the early modern English theatre to the storming of the United States Capitol on 6 January 2021, white people have used Shakespeare to define their cultural and racial identity and authority. White People in Shakespeare unravels this complex cultural history to examine just how crucial Shakespeare's work was to the early modern development of whiteness as an embodied identity, as well as the institutional dissemination of a white Shakespeare in contemporary theatres, politics, classrooms and other key sites of culture.

Featuring contributors from a wide range of disciplines, the collection moves across Shakespeare's plays and poetry and between the early modern and our own time to interrogate these relationships. Split into two parts, 'Shakespeare's White People' and 'White People's Shakespeare', it explores a variety of topics, ranging from the education of the white self in Hamlet, or affective piety and racial violence in Measure for Measure, to Shakespearean education and the civil rights era, and interpretations of whiteness in more contemporary work such as American Moor and Desdemona.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Series
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Assembling an Aristocracy of Skin
• PART ONE: SHAKESPEARE’S WHITE PEOPLE
• 1 ‘Two Loves I Have of Comfort and Despair’: The Circle of Whiteness in the Sonnets
• 2 Staging the Blazon: Black and White and Red All Over
• 3 Red Blood on White Saints: Affective Piety, Racial Violence, and Measure for Measure
• 4 Antonio’s White Penis: Category Trading in The Merchant of Venice
• 5 ‘Envy Pale of Hew’: Whiteness and Division in ‘Fair Verona’
• 6 ‘Shake Thou to Look on’t’: Shakespearean White Hands
• 7 ‘Pales in the Flood’: Blood, Soil, and Whiteness in Shakespeare’s Henriad
• 8 Disrupting White Genealogies in Cymbeline
• 9 White Freedom, White Property, and White Tears: Classical Racial Paradigms and the Construction of Whiteness in Julius Caesar
• 10 Hamlet and the Education of the White Self
• 11 ‘The Blank of What He Was’: Dryden, Newton, and the Discipline of Shakespeare’s White People
• PART TWO: WHITE PEOPLE’S SHAKESPEARE
• 12 ‘I Saw Them in My Visage’: Whiteness, Early Modern Race Studies, and Me
• 13 A Theatre Practice against the Unbearable Whiteness of Shakespeare: In Conversation
• 14 White Lies: In Conversation
• 15 Can You Be White and Hear This?: The Racial Art of Listening in American Moor and Desdemona
• 16 ‘The Soul of a Great White Poet’: Shakespearean Educations and the Civil Rights Era
• 17 White Anger: Shakespeare’s My Meat
• 18 The White Shakespearean and Daily Practice
• 19 No Exeunt: The Urgent Work of Critical Whiteness
• Index
• Copyright