Focusing on the ways in which Shakespeare’s Othello defies the expectations of its early audiences, this essay argues that the play should be considered as an experiment that can offer new perspectives on race, religion, and the stage in early modern England. In almost every respect, the figure of Othello and his Venetian and Cypriot contexts are the result of Shakespearean innovation. He is the first Christian Moor on the stage; he is racialized differently; his trajectory intentionally defies the model established by the popular "Turk play." He even speaks differently from those "strangers" that had gone before. Reflecting in detail on the nature of those innovations reveals the extent to which the play was a sustained challenge to assumptions regarding race, religion, and the theatricality of difference that had hitherto dominated onstage and beyond. It was an experiment that proved enduringly influential.

We remember Ira Aldridge today as the first black Shakespearean to achieve international professional renown. Indeed, he’s the first American actor to do so. Throughout his life Aldridge was lauded with awards. Born to free blacks in New York at the turn of the nineteenth century, naturalized as a British citizen in 1863, and buried in Łódź, Poland in 1867, Aldridge’s cosmopolitan life was marked by triumphs as well as persistent racist responses to his performances. His cosmopolitan career spanned three continents and countless theatres. This essay surveys seven of Ira Aldridge’s strategies for succeeding on the nineteenth-century stage: educate; emulate; circulate; nominate; innovate; disseminate; elaborate. Such strategies can still inspire us, students, performers, scholars, artists, teachers, and innovators alike.

The anti-colonial movements of the twentieth century created new interpretative contexts that drew attention to the racializations at play in Shakespeare’s work, as well as their disruptions. Using The Tempest as a case study, this chapter demonstrates how Shakespeare can be an ally in the struggle against racist abuse of power. Post-colonial methodologies teach us to notice how language secures the interests of the powerful and legitimizes colonial violence. In The Tempest the antagonism between the colonizer and those whose lands are invaded manifests in the battle between Caliban and Prospero: This is Shakespeare’s subject. But post-colonial theory affirms that the opportunity to attend to the vulnerabilities of the disempowered is available to scholars and audiences of every work. Post-colonial approaches do more than simply diversify the creative palette available to theater-makers; they provide the tools and the vocabulary to confront power and privilege, and affirm the possibility of a more just world.

The Merchant of Venice establishes a connection between racial and religious identity, between outside (body features) and inside (blood and faith), through examining Jessica’s relationship to her father Shylock; the play interrogates the extent to which father and daughter share the same flesh and blood. Two distinct but interrelated understandings of race in the early modern period emerge in the play: race as marked by bodily features and behaviors, and race as defined through the blood that connects individuals to a line of descent. Through alluding to religious teachings and discourses that pointed to bodily and genealogical differences between Jews (and black Africans) and white Christians, The Merchant of Venice racializes religious identity, asserting that both racial and religious identity are inherited from one’s ancestors, passed from parents to children through sexual reproduction, and express themselves on the body and through the body’s behaviors.

This essay begins from the premise that we can best locate Shakespeare’s historical relationship to racist and anti-racist projects not in speculation about authorial intention but in analysis of performances of his plays. I cover a selection of performances of Othello, The Tempest, and Antony and Cleopatra to argue that whatever progressive potential Shakespeare’s plays have arises at the nexus where stage tradition, audience expectation, local racial politics, directorial concept, and performers' choices coincide. There is nothing in the text of the plays – or even in newer casting traditions – that can guarantee that a performance will aid in the redistribution of the property, protection, and pleasure that have accrued to those who claim whiteness. There is, however, the potential that calculated violation of law or custom in performance can make Shakespeare do such redistributive work.

The large archaeological sites in Athens are the result of systematic excavations, while numerous rescue excavations following the pace of modern construction have revealed a wealth of information on all aspects of life in the ancient city. Although rescue excavations are conducted in a piecemeal fashion, they have provided fixed points in the topography of Athens, new finds, and identifications of monuments.

The public, official life of Athens took place mostly in the central square, known as the Agora, described by ancient authors, especially Pausanias, and excavated by the American School of Classical Studies. This chapter explores the buildings that housed the executive (Royal Stoa), legislative (Bouleuterion), and judiciary (law courts, or diskasteria) branches of the Athenian democracy.

Ancient markets and trading activity in the city of Athens are attested not only through literary sources describing where to buy certain goods and what happens when deals fall through, but also through the archaeology of market buildings, the equipment of buying and selling, and the containers for transporting and storing wine, oil, and other commodities.

This chapter studies elite sport in Classical Athens and its relationship to war. It argues that this relationship explains why non-elite citizens support pro-sport policies.

This chapter is about the history, the monuments and the people of Piraeus, the arsenal, and the commercial center of the Athenian empire. The proposed reconstruction of the residential quarters and the harbor installations of this model city designed by Hippodamos, the father of city-planning, is based on recent archaeological research.

The ceramic industry supplied Athenians with a wide variety of products, from fine tableware, utilitarian pottery, lamps, and figurines to water pipes and roof tiles. This chapter reviews the stages of production, from gathering and working the clay through forming and firing the final product and its sale, at home and abroad.

The history of Athens was influenced by the health of her citizens; from birth to old age, disease, injury, and warfare threatened the lives of citizens, or made them unable to participate in the life of the city. The study of skeletal remains from burials in Athens reveals the effect of these threats, and offers new information on historical plagues, attacks on the city, and ordinary events in the lives of Athenians.

This chapter provides an overview of the debate surrounding the population of Athens in the Classical period, and the methodologies used to estimate it. It further summarizes some of the key social, economic, political, and religious groups and divisions in Classical Athenian society and how these interacted with each other and with questions of belonging and identity in the polis.

The food and drink consumed by ancient Athenians and the setting and rules around its consumption reveal a great deal about their society. This study investigates both what they ate and how they ate it; the result provides a lens through which to view their social hierarchies and values.

City streets, fortification walls, and gates were key elements of Athenian topography that structured urban space throughout the history of the city, directing circulation both under urgent circumstances and in everyday life. With their continuous repairs and modifications, they remained a fixed point and the backbone of the urban fabric.