What Shakespeare can teach us about racism

A scene from Shakespeare’s play ‘Othello.’ Universal History Archive/ Getty Images by David Sterling Brown, Trinity College William Shakespeare’s famous tragedy “Othello” is often the first play that comes to mind when people think of Shakespeare and race. And if not “Othello,” then folks usually name “The Merchant of Venice,” “Antony and Cleopatra,” “The Tempest,” or his first – and bloodiest – tragedy, “Titus Andronicus,” my favorite Shakespeare play. Among Shakespeare scholars, those five works are known as his traditionally understood “race plays” and include characters who are Black like Othello, Jewish like Shylock, Indigenous like Caliban, or Black African like Cleopatra. But what did Shakespeare have to say about race in plays such as “Hamlet” and “Macbeth,” where Black characters do not have a dominant role, for example? As Shakespeare scholars who study race know, all of his plays address race in some way. How could they not? After all, every human being has a racial identity, much like every living human being breathes. Said another way, every character Shakespeare breathed life into has a racial identity, from Hamlet to Hippolyta. The playwright wrote about many key subjects during the late 15th and early 16th centuries that are relevant...