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As readers head into the second fifty years of the modern critical study of blackness and black characters in Renaissance drama, it has become a critical commonplace to note black female characters' almost complete absence from Shakespeare's plays. Despite this physical absence, however, they still play central symbolic roles in articulating definitions of love, beauty, chastity, femininity, and civic and social standing, invoked as the opposite and foil of women who are "fair". Beginning from this recognition of black women's simultaneous physical absence and imaginative presence, this book argues that modern Shakespearean adaptation is a primary means for materializing black women's often elusive presence in the plays, serving as a vital staging place for historical and political inquiry into racial formation in Shakespeare's world, and our own. Ranging geographically across North America and the Caribbean, and including film and fiction as well as drama as it discusses remade versions of Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespearean Adaptation, Race, and Memory in the New World will attract scholars of early modern race studies, gender and performance, and women in Renaissance drama.
Über den Autor / die Autorin
Joyce Green MacDonald is Associate Professor of English at the University of Kentucky, USA, where she teaches courses on Shakespeare and Renaissance drama. She is the author of Women and Race in Early Modern Texts (2002) and has published widely on Renaissance racial formations, Shakespearean adaptation, and performance.
Bericht
"MacDonald ... offers up a monograph that aptly demonstrates how adaptations fill in the representational gap of Shakespeare's missing black women even as she undertakes the same gap-filling work herself by spotlighting the endeavors of creators of color all-too-often overlooked in Shakespearean adaptation studies, as well as in contemporary culture." (Vanessa I. Corredera, Early Modern Women Journal, Vol. 16 (2), 2022)
