The Great White Bard: How to Love Shakespeare While Talking About Race

"This blend of scholarly research and accessible writing helps readers approach Shakespeare with new insight. Farah Karim-Cooper, a professor at King’s College London and education director at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, unpacks some of the more problematic elements of race, misogyny and otherness in plays like Othello, Antony and Cleopatra and Merchant of Venice, as well as in the very language Shakespeare uses in his comedies and sonnets: white versus Black, fair versus brown. Using a contemporary lens on a playwright over 400 years after his death, the book unlocks, as Karim-Cooper told me in an interview, “Shakespeare’s capacity to make sense in the world today.” Highly recommended."