Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America

"I wanted to include one book by Ayanna Thompson, so I chose this one. She is one of the leaders of the most interesting work on Shakespeare that’s being done now, which is part of a collective called RaceB4Race . It’s how Shakespeare’s works have been part of the invention and reification of racial categories. This book is about how 19th and then 20th century America took on Shakespeare’s plays and re-engineered them to speak to the two sides of the Civil War , for instance, as well as post-Civil War questions. It looks at how black theatre companies and black actors, from Ira Aldridge (1807-1867) to Paul Robeson (1898-1976), became prominent in Shakespearean theater. She gives us not an alternative history—that would suggest that there is a true history—but shows us that Shakespeare has been, and continues to be, a part of discussions about race right through the history of America. When I went back to this book, it gave me a context for why American culture wars are still preoccupied by Shakespeare and why when your graduate school takes down a picture of Shakespeare and puts up a picture of Audre Lorde or Zora Neale Hurston (say) it becomes a crisis. She helped me to see how it is that at a point of extreme polarization in American politics, Shakespeare is always part of the discussions. Yes, and whether taking out particular lines is an appropriate thing to do in contemporary theatre. Thompson is a big fan of Aaron the Moor in Titus Andronicus as a figure of black empowerment rather than Othello , the character these productions tended to move towards. I think this is a place where reception helps us, because reception can’t really tell us anything about what Shakespeare intended. That’s not interesting to reception. It doesn’t say, ‘Shakespeare is this or that.’ It says, ‘these plays come forward at these points in history, and they make these kinds of waves.’ The question of the Merchant of Venice is a really interesting one. There have probably been more calls for The Merchant of Venice to be suspended from the canon than there have been Othello . I suppose with both plays, one of the critical questions has been, ‘Is this play racist, or is it about racism? Does it have any distance as we look at the characters or structures or societies that are producing these racist stories? Or is that distance just collapsed and we’re right there saying, ‘Hurray! Antonio is saved and Shylock is forced to convert.”"