4/10/2023 0 Comments No fear shakespeare othelloThe collection contends, though, that what’s beautiful in Shakespeare-or what Shakespeare’s speakers take as beautiful-is often cast in racial terms. The complexity and power of his dramatic verse are givens in these essays. This is not, to be clear, a book that tries to demonize Shakespeare or vilify folks who relish him. Shakespeare’s work, the collection argues, was central to the construction of whiteness as a racial category during the Renaissance, and white people, in turn, have used Shakespeare to regulate social hierarchies ever since. White People posits that Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and the sonnets are just as much about race as Othello, because they’re all involved in defining whiteness. White people in Shakespeare? Isn’t that, well, redundant? That reaction is part of Little’s and his fellow essayists’ point: White people have for so long been taken as the universal norm in the Western canon that to name them as white is to engage in critical race study. Little Jr., a UCLA professor and notable scholar of Shakespeare and race, and even the title is a doozy. Such a view is definitively rejected in the revelatory new essay collection White People in Shakespeare. A limitation of that understanding, however, is that it assumes that race applies only when people of color are present. These works compose the lineup typically billed as Shakespeare’s race plays. You might also recall that Shakespeare wrote a few other plays with nonwhite characters: the Prince of Morocco in The Merchant of Venice, a suitor to the heiress Portia, who begs her, “Mislike me not for my complexion.” Or Cleopatra, the African queen whom Roman soldiers blame for seducing their general, Antony, with her “tawny front.” Or Aaron the Moor in Titus Andronicus, a schemer alternately villainous and compassionate, who asks, “Is black so base a hue?” Or even Caliban, the island native in The Tempest whom Prospero, his enslaver, calls “this thing of darkness.” Many of us have been taught that Othello is Shakespeare’s primary race play, because, of course, it focuses on a Black character. Resonate more than three hundred years after his death.Pop quiz: Which of the following Shakespeare works is about race? (A) Hamlet, (B) Othello, (C) Romeo and Juliet, (D) the sonnets. Popular in his lifetime, Shakespeare's works continue to Of Lord Chamberlain's Men, a popular dramatic company of hisĭay, and of the storied Globe Theatre in London. Like many of hisĬontemporaries, including Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeareīegan his career on the stage, eventually rising to become part-owner Histories, tragedies, comedy, and romance, Shakespeare's most famous Numerous narrative poems and short verses. Under the patronage of QueenĮlizabeth I, he penned more than 30 plays, 154 sonnets, and Shakespeare was a seventeenth-century writer and dramatist, and Translation that puts Shakespeare into the kind of English peopleĬomplete list of characters with descriptionsĪrguably the greatest English-language playwright, William The left-hand page, side-by-side with an easy-to-understand modern You Shakespeare's complete text of Othello on Read William Shakespeare's great tragedy Othello in all its brilliance and actually understand what it means. and Canada for another season, playing in 45 cities, a longer run than any other Shakespeare play in U.S. Shakespeare play on Broadway, with 296 performances. Was quite popular, and still holds the record for longest-running Play in the United States to cast a black Othello, noted actor andĬivil rights activist Paul Robeson, opposite Uta Hagen asĭesdemona and her then-husband Jose Ferrer as the evil Iago. Shubert Theatre was the first major production of the Shakespeare The Theatre Guild's 1943 production of Othello at the Sam The "green-eyed monster" soon rears its ugly head, as the previously happy couple are set onto a path to tragedy. Seemingly trustworthy ensign, Iago, suggests to him that she may be Sees his happy marriage to the beautiful Desdemona destroyed when his Othello, a Moor who has become a general in the Venetian army, An epic Shakespearean tragedy, Othello, is brimming with jealousy, passion, ambition and betrayal.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |