Chapter 3 homes in on the intersection of femininity and race: to put pressure on Antony’s curious whitening of the Black Egyptian Queen’s hand in the play’s climactic act. Extending the second chapter’s emphasis on gender, “On the Other Hand: the White(ned) Woman in Antony and Cleopatra” positions Cleopatra as collateral damage, caught in the play’s intraracial crossfire. I depict the significant dangers of the whiteness that gets magically mapped onto Cleopatra’s Black body so she can momentarily become a form of what Arthur L. Little, Jr., has described in Shakespeare Quarterly as “Shakespearean white property.” Through Cleopatra’s whitened body and her interracial relationship with Antony (and by extension, the ensuing intraracial tensions caused by Antony’s movement between Egypt and Rome), I further complicate the white other concept to reflect on integral matters such as white property, white dominance and white women as props: patriarchal, theatrical, cultural, economic, domestic props.

“Negotiating Whiteness” draws on the work of critical race studies scholars and whiteness studies scholars to present my book’s main argument and outline its core theoretical concept: the “intraracial color-line.” Shakespeare’s plays disrupt the common understanding of the Black/white racial binary in ways that have implications for modernity regarding the uncivilized, less-than-ideal white self. In Shakespearean drama, this figure serves two functions: The white other is an embankment that keeps “good” white people in check by demarcating the ever-shifting boundary between what the ideal white self should and should not be or do, by showing the costs of “bad” whiteness; and the white other figure embodies non-somatic blackness, constantly reifying anti-black and anti-Black discourse. By centering critiques of whiteness, I isolate the kinds of intraracial tensions that underscore the instability of racialized whiteness and that emphasize the need for understanding how that instability depends on upholding whiteness as superior.

“Somatic Similarity: The White Other in Titus Andronicus,” uses Shakespeare’s first tragedy to expose the presence of the intraracial color-line. My book begins with this tragedy because it is the Shakespeare play that most efficiently showcases the white/white other binary produced by the intraracial color-line. This particular iteration of the color-line aligns and separates the play’s white characters along spiritual and moral lines. I use Titus pedagogically to guide the reader’s understanding of my book’s driving theoretical apparatus—the intraracial color-line—so they can then apply that concept in subsequent chapters and beyond the plays analyzed in my book. Shakespeare’s oeuvre is replete with appearances of the white other, as I suggest in the Introduction and at other moments. This gateway chapter challenges the easy assumption that one needs somatic Blackness in order to discuss race, or in order for race to be happening.

This chapter reflects on the psychological, physical consequences of sexual violence in and beyond Othello—in contemporary times. I argue that the white identity formation process, and allegiance to its ideals, inherently impedes racial equality; the process itself works to reiterate white superiority. This is evident as I apply the intraracial color-line mainly to readings of Iago, the play’s most visible and vocal white other. In conjunction with readings of Othello, I look back at the transatlantic slave trade and examine the trajectory of white violence that has led to Black silence and the de-victimization of Black boys and men, which is one of many reasons psychologists suggest Black males are not always heard, much like Othello, when it comes to their experiences with sexual and non-sexual violence. With historical examples in mind, I return to Shakespeare’s canon to reflect on how early modern texts amplify the “white voice.”

Drawing on race-centered Hamlet scholarship by Patricia Parker and Peter Erickson, and alluding to work by Scott Newstok and Ayanna Thompson, “Engendering the Fall of White Masculinity in Hamlet” offers a racially focused analysis of this rich text that centers white people watching other white people. Hamlet surveys deviations from ideal white conduct and reveals how gender expectations are violated and how white people repeatedly disrespect, only to redefine, socially constructed racialized boundaries. I offer a critique of Hamlet that directly associates white unmanliness with Denmark’s “rotten” state, its socio-political ruin. Specifically, I read the intraracial discord against the play’s structure as a decomposition process. Hamlet depicts uncouth, less-than-ideal whiteness in relationship to gender expectations: unmanliness gets coded as black so the play can suggest certain Danish figures do not epitomize ideal white masculinity.

Shakespeare’s White Others’ conclusion engages The Comedy of Errors to reaffirm how race always matters. I argue that The Comedy of Errors’ concern with mistaken identity resonates with the modern Black experience. While considering my book’s preoccupation with the effects of racism, othering, anti-Blackness, and racial profiling, I turn to Patricia Akhimie’s Comedy of Errors criticism to consider how one can be “bruised with adversity” not just physically, but also psychologically. The conclusion’s title plays on the name of Shakespeare’s comedy because, as I see it, anti-blackness and anti-Black racism position white people, including white others, in opposition to Black people in what feels like a comedy of (t)errors: a space that is a genre of its own and akin to Negro-Sarah’s funnyhouse environment in Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro. Racial tribulation is a life sentence tied to the Black existence.