In this chapter, I consider how we might address the legacies of race and racism in The Magic Flute and its performance history, and what opportunities there might be to re-envision the Singspiel, by looking at parallels with Shakespeare repertory and #ShakeRace studies. Scholars working at the intersections of premodern critical race theory, postcolonial studies, Shakespeare studies, and performance studies have for decades considered how what Kim Hall calls “race thinking” permeates Shakespeare’s texts, contexts, and audiences, as well as productions and interpretations in our own time. What kind of freedom or flexibility might we have to adapt, translate, appropriate, and “unsettle” The Magic Flute in scholarship, performance, and pedagogy, by taking our cue from experimental approaches to Shakespeare?

It tends to be assumed that Shakespeare was enthusiastically mobilized as a patriotic figurehead during the First World War. Evidence of this practice can be found throughout the conflict, most often by individuals who had a prior vested interest in Shakespeare; but Chapter 4 exposes the dramatist’s contested position by examining four kinds of fragmentation that clarify his presence on wartime stages: fragmented users, fragmented texts, fragmented appeal, and fragmented evidence. It builds on Chapter 3’s discussion of patriotism, a concept that seems to indicate confidence and unity, but often reveals division. Chapter 4 evaluates the work of passionate theatre practitioners such as Frank Benson and Lena Ashwell who saw the performance of Shakespeare as a national service that could boost morale, raise funds, and educate both civilians and troops. It shows how the memoirs, public statements, and articles authored by these individuals have had an outsized influence in mediating our understanding of Shakespeare’s appeal. This chapter considers Benson’s performances within Britain; Ashwell’s work with the YMCA on the frontline and the provision of entertainment to troops; and, finally, the use of Shakespeare as part of theatre in Ruhleben, a civilian internment camp in Germany.

This chapter reflects on the psychological, physical consequences of sexual violence in and beyond Othello—in contemporary times. I argue that the white identity formation process, and allegiance to its ideals, inherently impedes racial equality; the process itself works to reiterate white superiority. This is evident as I apply the intraracial color-line mainly to readings of Iago, the play’s most visible and vocal white other. In conjunction with readings of Othello, I look back at the transatlantic slave trade and examine the trajectory of white violence that has led to Black silence and the de-victimization of Black boys and men, which is one of many reasons psychologists suggest Black males are not always heard, much like Othello, when it comes to their experiences with sexual and non-sexual violence. With historical examples in mind, I return to Shakespeare’s canon to reflect on how early modern texts amplify the “white voice.”

In this essay, retired Major-General Jonathan Shaw, who served as commander of the allied forces in southern Iraq in 2007, gives a vivid account of his role as military adviser during the rehearsals of Nicholas Hytner’s production of Othello at the National Theatre in 2013. Shaw explains why he focused his briefing of the actors on the dynamics of garrisoning, on how ‘command’ operates, and what the stresses and strains for soldiers are in these circumstances. Shaw’s first-hand experience as a military leader stationed in the Middle East during the Iraq War gave the actors fresh insight into how the play’s wartime setting, as much as Othello’s racial diversity, shapes his reaction to Cassio’s disorderly and drunken behaviour and to Iago’s accusation of infidelity against Cassio and Desdemona.

This interview offers Iqbal Khan’s directorial perspective on his influential production of Othello (2015). The casting of Hugh Quarshie as Othello and Lucian Msamati as Iago made Othello a play more about intra-racial than inter-racial relations. However, Khan explains how the inclusion of references to the torture of prisoners of war by the allied forces during the Iraq War helped him highlight the ways in which Othello is more than a play about its protagonist’s doubt about his place as a person of colour in a world dominated by people with different traditions that exclude him. According to Khan, the play is equally (if not more) invested in exploring the nature of Othello’s work and the nature of his experience as the leader of mercenary forces. Besides, as Khan points out, the questions that haunt Othello haunt all of us. Some of these questions – including what makes up one’s systems of loyalty, what makes up one’s systems of justice and judgement, or whom one is accountable to – are especially problematic at times of war, because they often reveal a slippage between lack of control (and victimhood) and abuse of power (and complicity).

While it is only recently that disgust has been (re)assessed as a category of analysis for the Early Modern period, its temporalities are in need of further investigation. The chapter argues that disgust is triggered and represented by material memory objects in Hamlet and Othello. Here, disgust serves as affective response to the pressure of seemingly paradoxical temporalities – Hamlet’s experience of a past that is embodied in the untimely object of the skull, and Othello’s experience of a ‘future anterior’ that is mediated by and manifested in the handkerchief, respectively. In the two plays, the temporality of disgust is paradoxical: it simultaneously lags behind the memory object from which it recoils and generates the object in the very act of recoiling. By reading the respective temporalities of disgust both tragedies display, I suggest that the affective dynamics of disgust find literary analogy in the structural dynamics of both Hamlet’s and Othello’s fundamental dramatic conflict.

Focuses on Shakespeare’s Interregnum reception in print and wider culture, arguing he was more popular in theory than in practice because, although much was (mis)attributed to him, few of his plays were reprinted during the 1640s and 1650s. Systematically examines the stationers who together held the rights to the thirty-eight plays in the modern Shakespeare canon but who, for various reasons, did not publish them. Describes the importance of dramatic novelty for the Interregnum playbook market, and the consequent neglect of "old" Shakespeare, whose texts were frequently printed and reprinted before the Interregnum. Argues that stationers’ interest in new plays ensured the survival of many plays in the early modern dramatic corpus. Also explains the timing and appearance of full-length Interregnum Shakespeare editions (The Merchant of Venice, Othello, King Lear, Lucrece), and the significance of Shakespeare’s continued circulation in the abbreviated forms of commonplace books, drolls, book list catalogues, and other printed allusions to Shakespeare’s name, his characters and play titles. Demonstrates Shakespeare’s elastic cultural associations in this period, and how "Shakespeare" came to be a dramatic category in its own right.

This chapter explores a specialized use of the word "free" in Shakespeare's works. It does not deny that Shakespeare often uses term in political and legal senses. What it shows is that Shakespeare also often uses the term to denote a quality of mind or soul, and that this quality can be thought of as a virtue when it is acted upon. The quality is shown to be related to generosity -- or partly constituted by it -- but also to include an element of other-directedness and the possession of what might be called an unarmed ego. The chapter argues that while the term occurs in this sense throughout the Shakespearean corpus, the term is most clearly defined and focused on in one of the great comedies, Twelfth Night. The play is shown to be built around the concept. The chapter then turns to how the term -- that is, the quality -- functions in tragedy. It is shown, in Hamlet, and especially in Othello, to function explicitly as a liability to the protagonist. But this is not seen as undermining its status as a virtue, merely as defining one of the differences between a comic and a tragic world.

Chapter 3 investigates colonial actors’ performances on the 1841 opening night of the Queen’s Theatre, Adelaide. The Queen’s is the oldest extant theatre on mainland Australia. Its establishment reflected the South Australian colony fashioning itself as a colony of free settlers. We delve into the performance possibilities in this imported, Regency-style venue which opened with Othello, performed when race relations were particularly volatile. While we do not lose sight of the staging of the black body, we focus on corporeality in the shape of the audience. We reconstruct a culture of spectatorship across the auditorium by producing responses of the distinctive 1841 audience of Adelaide. The aim was to make in the Queen’s, and the rest of Adelaide, a better version of Britain, against the suppression of indigenous peoples, a matter that took on an even more macabre setting after the theatre’s closure, when it became the court that adjudicated on frontier politics. The performance laboratory for this chapter worked in conjunction with artists, actors, and a set designer to model an Othello for 1841 to consider audience responses to it at a time when race relations were topical.

Leslie Arliss’s The Man in Grey features a Regency-period staging of Othello’s murder of Desdemona, with a white Jamaican named Swinton Rokeby (played by Stewart Granger) blacked up for the title role. Partly through Othello, the film suggests a racial fantasy in which Rokeby reaffirms his whiteness by violently reclaiming his island home from emancipated black slaves. In this way, the film captures anxieties about race, sexuality and colonial participation that are activated by the migration to Britain of black West Indians to aid in the war effort; to put it differently, The Man in Grey appropriates Othello in order to explore how racial difference reveals the limits of a coherent British identity. The film also collapses the distinction between Shakespearean tragedy and costume melodrama, thereby mocking the canons of taste (and the view of the Bard) generally shared by film companies, period critics and government propagandists

offers canonical and non-canonical examples of early seventeenth-century female voices that call for freedom of speech and resistance to tyranny. Drawn from drama and print culture, authored by men and women, such voices figure the connection between women and political dissent. If Othello’s Emilia and Desdemona use free speech to express their virtue and contest male authority, Paulina in The Winter’s Tale plays the shrew to call out domestic and political tyranny, while Webster’s Duchess of Malfi and Vittoria speak truth to power and Elizabeth Caldwell’s Letter denounces her husband in a display of Protestant religious zeal. Rooting these voices in sixteenth-century female-voiced political and religious dissent, the chapter suggests that representations of the woman as resistant subject could take on a particularly acute political inflection during the early Stuart period.

Both Othello and Macbeth show how men can be shamed by other people into committing murder, and how guilt can motivate self-murder. Othello felt humiliated when Iago deceived him into believing Desdemona had made him into a “cuckold.” When he discovers she has actually been faithful, he feels so guilty he punishes himself by suicide – as many such murderers still do. Iago shames Othello into ruining himself because he felt Othello had shamed him. Lady Macbeth shames Macbeth into murdering Duncan, which finally leads to so many murders that she feels guilty enough to kill herself; and he feels so exhausted he longs for death as the only face-saving way to rest in peace – again, like many murderers we have seen.

Starting with the story of a man, a successful publisher, who like Othello kills his wife and then decides to kill himself, we find that Shakespeare’s plays are the richest source of insight into what motivates violence, toward others and also toward oneself, and what is needed to prevent violence. In contrast to Shakespeare, the mental health system has directed its attention almost exclusively to suicide, and relegated homicide to the criminal justice system. But that system asks only how evil are people who have committed murders and how much punishment they deserve– not what caused them to commit murder, and what we can do to prevent such behavior before it occurs. Criminology is of little help, because most violence is not criminal, and most crimes are not violent. More than experts in any of those fields, Shakespeare illuminates the thoughts, feelings, and social forces that drive people to kill others, themselves, or both.

Chapter Two focuses on imagination, the cognitive faculty allegedly residing in the front of the brain. Early moderns worried about this faculty especially, as it introduced harmful forms into girls’ minds and enabled them to produce illicit visions. But it also appears as a generative faculty in girls. The adolescents under consideration here use their imaginations to see beyond what is tangible and take on uniquely ameliorative roles in relation to dominant restrictive ideologies and damaging norms. The chapter begins with fifteen-year-old Alice Egerton and her performance as the Lady in John Milton’s Comus. Her imaginative brainwork emerges as a powerful, righteous phenomenon against her sorcerer-captor. Next, a reading of Othello’s Desdemona demonstrates how her extended imagination challenges the gender and race codes that inform the play’s basest mentalities. Desdemona also serves as a case study in how marriage binds the female mind to her husband’s fantasies, eventually limiting its cognitive reach. Finally, the chapter analyzes the teenagers of Fletcher and Shakespeare’s Two Noble Kinsmen. The “coining” brain of the Jailer’s Daughter is shown to complement and compound the brainwork of particular girls within and beyond the play — including Desdemona — and gives their previously contracted, suffocated body-minds a second life.

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.

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.

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.

Chapter 2 takes us through the dynamics of the interpellation of Othello’s blackness in the cosmopolitan contexts of Shakespeare’s Othello. The focus is on the effects of Iago’s modularity, that is to say, on his capacity to “make images” and to then use them as the means for eliciting strong emotional reactions from the other characters. I argue that Shakespeare’s inclusion in a book on postcolonial tragedy is guaranteed not because he is himself a postcolonial, but because his work has served to illuminate postcolonial conditions in different epochs and climes. One need only think of the impact The Tempest has had on arguments concerning the appropriation by the colonized of the colonial language itself as a tool to fight back, or the impact of The Merchant of Venice in illuminating the processes of endemic racism and anti-Semitism to be found in many societies today to see that Shakespeare is amenable to many postcolonial applications.