#shakerace

From rehearsal room microaggressions, to the battlefields of France, into the bureaucracy of applying for citizenship, Shakespeare's Globe Ensemble veterans Nina Bowers and Philip Arditti explore their histories alongside England's own as unwilling actors in a national story.

...She anchors her claims to current events, bolstering arguments about Shakespeare being hijacked by White nationalists with a reference to a little-known letter sent by American far-right extremists to Washington’s Folger Shakespeare Library ahead of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, reassuring the library that the mob had “no intention of damaging, trespassing, or otherwise altering your facility in anyway” during the violent events. 

“It turns out there’s a stereotype in early modern England that the Germans and Danes are heavy drinkers because of the chilly, damp, Northern climate, and you find that stereotype in ‘Hamlet,’ she said of the student’s work. “Drunkenness is associated with these northern nations, along with whiteness, so it’s seen as a racial characteristic.”

The most provocative essay to show whiteness under negotiation comes from Ian Smith: “Antonio’s White Penis: Category Trading in The Merchant of Venice.” The provocation doesn’t come from naming the merchant’s penis; that’s not a new move for scholars who have wondered whether the bond he signs with Shylock, a Jewish moneylender, in which he promises that if he fails to repay the loan, Shylock can cut off a pound of Antonio’s flesh “in what part of your body pleaseth me,” might involve a kind of circumcision or castration. Smith’s ingenuity is noticing the precise terms of the bond: “an equal pound / Of your fair flesh” (Smith’s emphasis). In Smith’s reading, Antonio’s whiteness is what Shylock covets as a Jew who, though not dark-skinned, is nevertheless excluded from the privileges that fair, Christian Venetians enjoy.

While looking for an artist, I came across a show Kathy had been in. She played Lady Capulet in a production set in Central Asia, where the Capulets were Chinese and the Montagues were Russian. Wow! Varsha and Kathy were brilliant together. They showed how Romeo and Juliet, a play many people admire for being a ‘universal’ love story, can explore something like Asian cultures in our present moment – varieties of lived experience, ongoing stereotypes, non-traditional casting, the value of representation in the theatre, diverse styles of storytelling, you name it. By approaching Shakespeare’s play from the perspective of Indian audiences or relocating Romeo and Juliet to a different cultural setting, Varsha and Kathy showed how the play is relevant to diverse audiences.

But isn’t it odd that Aaron announces his immorality so blatantly, like a criminal who draws his own crime scene sketch? Furthermore, what do we make of the hyperbolic self-incrimination associated with Aaron’s physical difference: ‘Let fools do good, and fair men call for grace; / Aaron will have his soul black like his face’? It is as if Aaron instructs us to read his black body as the ultimate catalyst to social destruction. I suggest we listen not only to what he is saying, but also question when and why.

As part of the workshop, Thompson spent time with Negga and Craig before the rest of the cast was brought in, during which, she says, she was able to ask the former Bond questions like: “Have you thought about how your whiteness plays?” In other words, as she puts it, it wasn’t just a conversation for the actors of color. “We’re not ignoring it,” says Craig, “neither are we making a huge statement about it—that would be wrong as well.”

Something Sophie Duncan returns to is the refusal of critics to suspend their disbelief in a piece of theatre to believe actors of colour on stage. We believe Oberon when he says he is invisible, but they couldn’t believe a West Indian son of a Scottish king? How did critics get away with all this for so long?