PROSPECTUS

The following discussion of Shakespeare, tolerance, and what we now call ‘race’ will be divided between this chapter and the next. This one will concentrate on love and desire (including ‘miscegenation’), while the next will be concerned with international topics like slavery and New World encounters. The present chapter will consider Othello, for example, as a play in which bigotry begets bigotry, that is, antipathy to a ‘black’ Moorish man leads to the evil stereotyping of a ‘white’ Venetian woman. The following chapter will analyse images of slavery in Othello and elsewhere, and will focus particularly on Prospero's two exotic servants in The Tempest.

‘RACE’ IN SHAKESPEARE'S TIME

Throughout its (sadly continuing) life the spurious notion of there being a small handful of colour-coded, distinct human ‘races’ has always been both equivocal and historically unstable. This complicates current perplexities, and perhaps some confusion, over whether questions of ‘race’ are anachronistic in, or properly relevant to, discussions of Shakespeare's writing. I am sorry to enter a dermatological prior to a dramaturgical nexus, yet some questioning of ‘race’ itself must preface a questioning of race in relation to Shakespeare.