Great White Bard - How to Love Shakespeare While Talking About Race

'Dive in and your whole cultural landscape will be refreshed and reframed.' Adjoa Andoh
Professor Farah Karim-Cooper grew up loving the Bard, perhaps because Romeo and Juliet felt Pakistani to her. But why was being white as a ?snowy dove' essential to Juliet's beauty?
Combining piercing analysis of race, gender and otherness in beloved plays from Othello to The Tempest with a radical reappraisal of Elizabethan London, The Great White Bard entreats us neither to idealise nor to fossilise Shakespeare but instead to look him in the eye and reckon with the discomforts of his plays, playhouses and society.
If we persist in reading Shakespeare as representative of only one group, as the very pinnacle of the white Western canon, then he will truly be in peril. But if we dare to bring Shakespeare down from his plinth, we might unveil a playwright for the twenty-first century. We might expand and enrich his extraordinary legacy. We might even fall in love with him all over again.

About the author

Farah Karim-Cooper is Professor of Shakespeare Studies, King’s College London and Co-Director of Education at Shakespeare’s Globe, where she has worked for over sixteen years. Farah has recently served as President of the Shakespeare Association of America and is on the Advisory Council for the Warburg Institute and the Council for the Society of Renaissance Studies. She led the architectural enquiries into early modern theatres at Shakespeare’s Globe, overseeing the research into the design and construction of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, the Globe’s indoor Jacobean theatre. She has written two Shakespearean scholarship books published by Arden, and published over 40 chapters in books, reviews and articles and is a General Editor for Arden’s Shakespeare in the Theatre series.

Summary

Shakespeare: increasingly irrelevant or lone literary genius of the Western canon?

Product details

• Authors: Farah Karim-Cooper, Karim-Cooper Farah
• Publisher: Oneworld
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 01.04.2024
• EAN: 9780861548095
• ISBN: 978-0-86154-809-5
• No. of pages: 336
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > English linguistics / literary studies; Non-fiction book > Art, literature > Literature: general, reference works; English, LITERARY CRITICISM / Drama, HISTORY / Social History, Social & cultural history, LITERARY CRITICISM / Renaissance, Social and cultural history, Literary studies: general, Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700, Relating to Black British people, Literary studies: plays & playwrights, c 1500 to c 1600, Literary studies: plays and playwrights, 1558–1603 (Elizabethan period), Literary studies: c 1400 to c 1600, Relating to Shakespeare / Shakespearean