The central purpose of this chapter is to account for a poetry of war resistance that directly engages the clandestine activities of the national security state. How do poets help us to see anew a highly mediated form of warfare that nonetheless conceals itself in the black ops, redacted docs, dark money, and classified landscapes comprising the secretive theaters of “low visibility” twenty-first-century violence? War writing has come from numerous camps of American verse over the past seventeen years; I will argue, however, its most sustained treatment appears in three overlapping communities: Middle Eastern American poetries, documentary poetics (or “docpo”), and left communist circles. Philip Metres’s Sand Opera, Solmaz Sharif’s Look, Juliana Spahr’s This Connection of Everyone with Lungs, Sinan Antoon’s The Baghdad Blues, and Khaled Mattawa’s Tocqueville are exemplary, as are works by Lawrence Joseph, Craig Santos Perez, Ara Shirinyan, Etel Adnan, Joshua Clover, Hilary Plum, Hayan Charara, Allison Cobb, Samuel Hazo, Anne Boyer, CAConrad, Judith Goldman, and Jena Osman, among others.

This chapter reveals the ways in which race is not incidental to tragedy’s moral and aesthetic claims, but rather central to the genre’s attention to social forces and philosophical concerns. Shakespeare’s tragedies reveal how the premodern imaginary considers race as both a mimetic, ephemeral enactment and proof of an essential, inherent difference. As opposed to being hampered by this contradiction, depictions of race often move between fluid, malleable, and unstable expressions of identity, providing a lexicon for the epistemological crisis of tragedy’s formation of subjectivity. In the genre’s epistemological exploration of subjectivity as a publicly scripted experience and a fundamentally separate, and at times inaccessible, essence, Shakespeare’s tragedies engage the multilayered, contradictory template of racial impersonation. Thus, attention to regimes and categories of race animates some of the most fundamental issues of inclusion and exclusion that the English looked to tragedy to illuminate.

This chapter explains how and why The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race would have been nearly impossible to create thirty years ago. It traces how the volume requires scholars who know not only Shakespeare’s works, the historical and cultural milieu of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries in England and Europe, and the archives that hold the historical documents from these time periods, but also the history of imperialism, alternative archives that reveal more about the various lives of people of color in the early modern world, and the history of Shakespeare’s employment in various theatrical, educational, and political moments in history – from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first century. Post-colonial studies, African American studies, critical race studies, and queer studies allow scholars to apply new methodologies to Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

African American actresses apparently appeared in Shakespeare productions for New York’s African Company in 1821. But after the suppression of the company and for the rest of the century the only other records that seem to survive of black actresses’ public Shakespearean performances describe recitals of speeches from the plays. Despite the recognized talent of two later black Shakespearean elocutionists, Henrietta Vinton Davis and Adrienne McLean Herndon, neither ever appeared in a full Shakespeare production – a prohibition pointing to the belief that black women were manifestly incapable of embodying Shakespearean meanings. Such representational policing operated within the period’s violently reactionary anti-blackness, and both actresses fashioned responses to it, with Davis eventually leaving the stage altogether for pan-African political organizing with Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association. Herndon, however, began a tradition of Shakespeare productions at historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), soliciting new audiences and authorizing black women as Shakespeareans.

Black embodiment has dominated Shakespeare and early modern race research, allowing whiteness too often to go unremarked upon. While the importance of this work cannot be overvalued, this particular focus has not just elided the necessity of thinking about whiteness but has, paradoxically, risked centering whiteness in an uncritical fashion. It’s imperative, however, that we bring critical race and critical white studies to bear on the work of Shakespeare as well as that of his fellow playwrights: The whiteness of humanity as figured in “white people” emerges as one of the most articulated subjects in the early modern period and one that is being fully “discovered” and exploited. It’s critical we understand the white racialization of the early modern stage (especially as the site of embodiment) and Shakespeare’s specific contributions to it, if we seek to understand the making of “white people” in modernity and in our own contemporary moment.

This essay examines the pervasive use of racist humor in Shakespeare’s comedies through stereotypical characters, exoticism, scapegoating, and ethnic slurs. While we may consider the ways in which Shakespeare’s comedies at times question or critique racist attitudes, ultimately the essay encourages readers to acknowledge and to wrestle with the racist language of the plays. The essay offers readers tools with which to identify and analyze racist humor in Shakespeare’s comedies, and to understand the role of racist humor in the social construction of race and the production of stigmatized groups.

This essay examines the meanings of black and white within the early modern lexicon while considering how these meanings translate in performance. It addresses the relationship between the audience perception of race and the performance of blackness on the early modern stage while explaining the various materials and technologies available to early modern actors to create a range of racial identities, such as black and white cosmetic paints, textiles, clothing, and music. Finally, this essay draws upon available evidence about black presence in early modern England to suggest the plausibility of a more diverse audience than theatre scholars have been willing to admit. This diversity therefore would have influenced not only the reception of racial performances but also the development of staged representations of racial otherness over time.

Linking the royal Tudor archive to the Tudor/Stuart stage, this article discloses the ways the stage constructs race in the service of nation and empire. From Elizabeth I’s proclamations calling for the expulsion of ‘blackamoors’ to George Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar, English conceptions of blackness expose the multifaceted nature of racial formation in the early modern period. The construction of race in early modern England is intimately linked to nascent and emergent English imperial ambitions and dependent upon trade, traffic, and enslavement, particularly in Africa. While previous scholarship on The Battle of Alcazar has focused on the Mediterranean milieu and the seemingly elastic racial signification of the identity marker, Moor, this study shifts both the geographical and racial focus to argue that the Atlantic and Africa are significant sites of imperial interest for the English and that blackness is being discursively produced in order to signal race.

The Tempest reflects early modern European trends in racial perceptions, especially in the play’s foregrounding of Caliban, who embodies many of the era’s cultural prejudices. Although Caliban was born on a remote island and is its sole human inhabitant when Prospero and Miranda arrive, his sexual assault on Miranda and their contempt for Caliban as savage, pagan, monstrous, and perhaps cannibalistic provokes Prospero to enslave him. This chapter contextualizes those demeaning categories in light of Caliban’s African and perhaps American roots. Among the developments that profoundly shaped England’s (and presumably Shakespeare’s) attitudes toward “Blackamoores” were the increasingly numerous Africans arriving as offshoots of the international slave trade. Concurrently, Spain’s and Portugal’s settlements in Central and South America and their exploitation, often enslavement, of the natives strongly influenced English policies toward racial “others” at home and in England’s colonies, as did Iberian America’s extensive importation of African slaves.

This essay unpacks the strategic role of race in Titus Andronicus and brings to light the play’s earnest representation of racism’s entanglement in the demands of the global capitalist project born in Shakespeare’s time. Titus Andronicus dreams of London as a cosmopolitan capital with imperial aspirations in a proto-colonial world-economy. In the possible futures that the play dreams up for England, prescribing the most profitable forms of intercultural trafficking is a priority. The smart device used for establishing such prescriptions is called race. The racial regime ushered in by early modern globalization, triggered by colonization, and forged in the furnace of early capitalism, was predicated not upon the elimination of racialized others, but on their strategic and contingent inclusion at inferior ranks in a hierarchical multicultural society. Titus Andronicus dramatizes the push and pull between the exclusion and inclusion of racialized Others necessary to the growth of early modern world-economies.

Adrian Lester talks us through his research in preparation for his portrayal of Othello at the National Theatre in 2013. His examination of the play’s racial politics in performance includes interviews with Iago (Rory Kinnear), Desdemona (Olivia Vinall), and the iconic James Earl Jones who has played Othello four times. In this chapter Lester argues that our reaction to the play is not based on Shakespeare’s intentions but based on Western culture’s manipulative, complex racial history and sexual politics – a history that clouds any attempt at a balanced view when looking at these subjects.

This essay argues that Antony and Cleopatra questions both a binary vision of racialized sexuality and the colonial and imperial projects that such a binary legitimizes. Along with the seemingly whitest of men, Caesar, and the darkest of women, Cleopatra, this play includes a range of racialized sexual types. These include the virago Fulvia, the chaste wife Octavia, the eunuch Mardian, and the spectral figure of the “boy” catamite whom Antony, Cleopatra, and Caesar all fear becoming. These racialized sexual types converge in surprising ways in Antony and Cleopatra, and this convergence undermines any clear opposition between Roman virtus and its seductive and corrupting others. It also illuminates the contradictions and fissures within Roman ideals of self-mastery and self-determination that continue to shape modern ideals of respectability and responsibility. Antony and Cleopatra reveals empire to be a perverse enterprise indeed.