When goes through your mind when reading stuff Shakespeare wrote that is racist by today's standards? Can we justify it by acknowledging that he was simply a man of his time? I've been finding it to detract from my enjoyment of plays that I otherwise love e.g. lines like "if I did not love her I would be a Jew" or the pejorative use of "Ethiope" in Much Ado About Nothing. And then just...Shylock. Is there evidence that Shakespeare was actually progressive for his time?
Thanks for this question, anon. This is an important point that’s worth thinking about in some detail, because, while you can’t really judge someone in the past by standards they didn’t even have a word for, Shakespeare is not just a past author but someone whose works continue to have meaning for people today. But it’s not as simple as a case of blame or justification, nor are those examples quite as straightforward as they may seem.
Let’s think first about the question of pejorative uses of words like ‘Ethiope’, or ‘Jew’ in passing phrases. These are definitely offensive by today’s standards, but are more like set phrases in Shakespeare’s time, where ‘Jew’ is used as a shorthand for anything un-Christian, especially those things stereotypically associated with Jewish people, such as avariciousness. The same goes for ‘Ethiope’: since the beauty standards of the day dictated that white, gold and pink were the signifiers of beauty, anything dark is used as shorthand for unattractive, and calling someone with dark features an ‘Ethiope’ is then an exaggeration of those features. They’re lines that you have to either cut or bring attention to in modern productions because you can’t really justify their usage. But it’s really important to see that set phrases are phrases that have become common and therefore that people use them without necessarily thinking of their implications. To position ourselves as somehow better because we have the benefit of the many wonderful things that people have done to advance human rights and equality is a little wrongheaded. We need to be aware that we have similarly offensive terms that people use today that most likely won’t stand up to scrutiny in the future. I know when I was younger, people used the word ‘gay’ pejoratively without thinking about who that might offend, and people use ableist phrases like ‘I’m so blind’ without consideration too. In other words, as unjustifiable as it is that there are such phrases, there’s a difference between using them directly to injure and using them unknowingly.
And that brings me to my second point: Shakespeare is writing plays, which means that these are phrases he puts into the mouths of particular characters. We don’t really know how Shakespeare himself spoke, but it’s necessary to distinguish between an author's position and his depiction of certain characters. Writers regularly write from the perspective of people whose views they don't share, and there's no way every single one of Shakespeare's characters is a mouthpiece for his beliefs. We can't attribute racism to Shakespeare any more than we can say he must have had thoughts about regicide because he wrote Macbeth. This definitely applies to The Merchant of Venice: the so-called 'Christian' characters mistreat Shylock, but that's not the same as saying the play condones that behaviour.
As for whether Shakespeare was progressive... Personally, I'm not sure about judging a work based on what one thinks of the author, especially if the author is long dead and no royalties are going to them. While I can understand that one's feelings about a particular author might hinder the enjoyment of the work, on some level, once a work is produced, it acquires a life of its own which is not up to the author's control anymore, especially for someone like Shakespeare who is surprisingly quiet about what he thinks of his own work (unlike, say, Ben Jonson).
So perhaps it doesn't matter very much, but I do think that Shakespeare writes in a way that shows something of the breadth of his view of life. As I've already said, we don't know what he thought. Still, the multiplicity of perspectives that is characteristic of his writing suggests he could think outside of the common understanding of his time. So, for instance, he really doesn't go in for low blows about religion the way many of his contemporaries do, and whenever there is a character like Aaron, Othello, or Shylock, he includes something that complicates the stereotype. Thus, we have Aaron being a more caring and loving father than anyone else in Titus Andronicus, and asking 'Is black so base a hue?' (4.2.73); Shylock's famous 'Hath not a Jew eyes' (3.1.55) speech; Othello's nobility, and Shakespeare's sonnets on the Dark lady, which really question the beauty standards of the day. This is far more than we get from the general use of stereotypes in city comedies, or in two-dimensional depictions of the stereotypical early modern Jew as in The Jew of Malta.
Though he often starts from the stereotypes he's familiar with and depends on the language of his time, Shakespeare shows an imaginative empathy that makes him consider what it might be like to be the characters he depicts. What could be more progressive than empathy? Shakespeare can write from the perspective of characters we'd consider racist now, but he also writes, and writes convincingly, from the perspective of those who are abused, regardless of their religion, sexuality or gender.
