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.

This essay traces the history of Shakespearean actors of color in the UK from the early modern period to the present day. Looking at archival traces such as advertisements and reviews as well as at archival lacunae, this chapter considers the methodologies of and challenges to excavating the performance histories of actors of color. Addressing the socio-historical contexts for the racialized genealogy of Shakespearean performance, including the British and American histories of slavery, British imperialism, Windrush, and Brexit, this chapter explores the range of roles available to actors of color over the years; critical discussions of embodiment, enactment, and staging; and the development of an "unofficial black canon" in British theatre and film alongside more recent attempts to expand this repertoire with renewed attention to dramatic genre, casting practice, and performative setting.

This essay explores the significance of genealogy and inheritance in Shakespeare’s history plays; specifically, the idea that national and racial characteristics were passed down through the generations in the blood. The word "race" is often applied to peoples produced by the intermingling of different lineages and with different characteristics. The essay shows that such issues were important not just for royal dynasties but for the people they ruled, as is demonstrated through readings of King Henry V, King Richard II, and King John. When races are imagined in such ways the word "bastard" assumes particular importance, as the progeny of two different people(s) taking on new characteristics from a combination of those of the parents. Shakespeare demonstrates in his English history plays that nations and races are never pure, but are always intermingled, compromised, revitalized, and constantly transformed by their union with other peoples, especially the neighbours in terms of whom they define themselves.

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.