Abstract
This chapter is the most theoretical contribution in the book and the first of three ‘race’ chapters. I discuss the genealogy of Shakespeare ‘race’ studies to argue that racial thinking is quintessentially a nineteenth-century product and a powerful ethnic fiction aimed at appropriating symbolic capital. A minor Victorian work, A New Exegesis of Shakespeare: Interpretation of His Principal Characters and Plays on the Principle of Races (1859), which purports to demonstrate that the whole of Shakespeare is just a demonstration of how ‘race’ is no less than the main key to human knowledge, is used to discuss Paul Gilroy’s controversial claim that the category of ‘race’ should be dropped altogether or, at the very least, supplemented by the largely underutilized notion of ethnicity.
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Notes
- 1.
The classic study is: Leo Spitzer, “Ratio > Race.” In Essays in Historical Semantics (New York: Russell and Russell, 1948), 152.
- 2.
Manlio Cortellazzo and Paolo Zolli, Il Nuovo etimologico. DELI—Dizionario Etimologico della Lingua Italiana (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1999).
- 3.
Cornel West, La razza conta (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1995); Barack Obama, Sulla razza (Milano: Rizzoli, 2008); Tatiana Petrovich Njegosh and Anna Sacchi, eds., Parlare di razza. La lingua del colore tra Italia e Stati Uniti (Verona: Ombre Corte, 2012).
- 4.
Giuseppe Verdi, Letters of Giuseppe Verdi, edited by Charles Osborne (London: Victor Gollancz, 1971), 227.
- 5.
The reference here is to Michael. Neill, “His Master’s Ass: Slavery, Service and Subordination in Othello.” In Shakespeare and the Mediterranean, eds. Tom Clayton, Susan Brock and Vicente Forés (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 215–229.
- 6.
Michael Neill, “Introduction,” in William Shakespeare, Othello (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 125–126.
- 7.
Cesare Lombroso, Criminal Man, edited by Mary Gibson and Nicole Hahn Rafter (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).
- 8.
See for an overview Catherine Alexander and Stanley Wells, eds., Shakespeare and Race (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin, eds., Post-Colonial Shakespeares (London: Routledge, 1998).
- 9.
Paul Gilroy, Between Camps. Race, Identity and Nationalism at the End of the Colour Line (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane. The Penguin Press, 2000), 41.
- 10.
Michael Neill, “Othello and Race”, “Looking into the colour of Othello” seminar University of Bergamo, 22 May 2006.
- 11.
Bill Ashcroft, Hellen Tiffin, and Gareth Griffiths, Post-Colonial Studies. The Key Concepts (London New York: Routledge, 2007), 186.
- 12.
Ania Loomba, “Shakespeare and Cultural Difference.” In Alternative Shakespeare 2, ed. Terence Hawkes (London: Routledge, 1997), 164.
- 13.
Sukanta Chaudhuri, “Shakespeare and the Ethnic Question.” In Shakespeare and Cultural Traditions, edited by T. Kishi et al. (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994), 155.
- 14.
New Exegesis of Shakespeare. Interpretation of his principal characters and plays on the principle of races (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1859). Quotation on Shylock is on page 229.
- 15.
New Exegesis, 19–20.
- 16.
“New Exegesis of Shakespeare.” Book Review. North British Review, 31 (1859): 489.
- 17.
North British Review, 481.
- 18.
Hugh MacDougall, Racial Myth in English History (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1982); Inga Bryden, “Reinventing origins: the Victorian Arthur and Racial Myth”, in The Victorians and Race, ed. Shearer West (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996), 141–155. The Celtic Shakespeare had an interesting story destined to continue well into the twentieth century, with distinguished protagonists such as Matthew Arnold, William Butler Yeats and Wyndham Lewis. Lewis’ unpalatable racial politics did not prevent him from concluding that “Race is for the most part too obscure a force for us to be able to organize it into anything coherent, so it is perhaps rightly ignored. […] A man’s race is the most interesting thing about him, usually. […] But Shakespeare’s race (not his nation), if we knew it, would not be the most interesting thing about him.” The Lion and the Fox (1927) (London: Methuen, 1951), 295.
- 19.
The debate on races has always been a debate over ethnic supremacy. A. Orsucci (1998) “Ariani, indogermani, stripi mediterranee: aspetti del dibattito sulle razze europee (1870–1914)”, Cromohs-Cyber Review of Modern Historiography 3 (1998). http://www.fupress.net/index.php/cromohs/article/view/15749/14635, accessed 3 September 2015.
- 20.
North British Review, 491.
- 21.
Ayanna Thompson, Passing Strange. Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 3.
- 22.
The bibliography is by now immense, and one could also distinguish between studies that deal with the topic directly and the far more numerous studies and editions of the plays that use “race” casually.
- 23.
Quoted by H. R. Coursen, “The Case for a Black Othello” in Watching Shakespeare on Television (London: Associated University Press, 1993), 157.
- 24.
The most explicit illustration I know is Charles B. Lower, “Othello as Black on Southern Stages, Then and Now”, in Shakespeare in the South. Essays on Performance, ed. C. Kolin (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1983), 199–228.
- 25.
Jarro [Giulio Piccini], L’Otello di Guglielmo Shakespeare (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1888), 10.
- 26.
Luigi Lugiato, Pazzi, squilibrati e delinquenti nelle opere dei letterati. Vol. 1: Guglielmo Shakespeare e le sue “masterpieces” (Bergamo: C. Conti & c., 1926), 221.
- 27.
Benedetto Croce, Shakespeare (Bari: Laterza, 1925), 167, 154.
- 28.
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Letteratura inglese. Vol. I: Dalle origini al Settecento (Milano: Mondadori, 1990), 83–84.
- 29.
D.[?], L.[?], “Un’interpretazione razzista dell’Otello”, La difesa della razza, 3, 24, 20 October 1940.
- 30.
Gilroy, Between Camps, 52.
- 31.
A. Little, Jr., Shakespeare Jungle Fever. National-Imperial Re-Visions of Race, Rape, and Sacrifice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 1.
- 32.
Little, Shakespeare Jungle Fever, 1.
- 33.
On the American ethnic gaze, see William Boelhower, Through a Glass Darkly: Ethnic Semiosis in American Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
- 34.
The sources are certainly more international (Fanon, Derrida, Bhabha, etc.) but it is undeniable that America is the critical laboratory where contemporary theories of ethnicity have been molded with poststructuralist instruments. See also the introduction to this book.
- 35.
Ania Loomba, Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989); Martin Orkin, “Othello and the Plain Face of Racism”, Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (1987), 166–188.
- 36.
I plead guilty of the very same operation in my Le metamorfosi di Otello. Storia di un’etnicità immaginaria (Bari: Graphis, 2000), in which I suggested a different emplotment for the history of Othello’s ethnicity.
- 37.
Stephen Greenblatt, “Racial Memory and Literary History”, PMLA, 116 (2001): 54.
- 38.
Pierre-André Taguieff, Le racisme (Paris: Flammarion, 1997).
- 39.
Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 71.
- 40.
Graham Bradshaw, Misrepresentations. Shakespeare and the Materialists (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 211. While I agree that Western conceptualizations of culture have embodied ethnic (and sometimes racial) hierarchies, as shown in Robert J.C. Young, Colonial Desire. Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995), I object to the notion that the whole of culture is permeated by racial claims.
- 41.
Lorenz Oken, Elements of Physiophilosophy (London: Ray Society, 1847).
- 42.
Keir Elam, ‘“In What Chapter of His Bosom?”: Reading Shakespeare Bodies’ in Alternative Shakespeares 2, edited by Terence Hawkes (London: Routledge, 1997), 160.
- 43.
Coursen, “The Case for a Black Othello”, 126.
- 44.
Quoted in The Post-colonial Studies Reader (1995) eds. B. Ashcroft et al. (London: Routledge), 225.
- 45.
Gilroy, Between Camps, 22–23.
- 46.
Ania Loomba, “Local-manufacture-made-in-India Othello fellows”, in Post-Colonial Shakespeares, edited by Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin (London: Routledge, 1998), 162.
- 47.
Shaul Bassi, “Barefoot to Palestine: The Failed Meetings of Shylock and Othello.” In Tosi and Bassi, Visions of Venice in Shakespeare, 232–233 (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011).
- 48.
Julia Reinhard Lupton, Citizen-Saints. Shakespeare and Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 177.
- 49.
He also adds: “I welcome the chance to emphasize that it was never my intention to overlook the undoubted sufferings of US blacks at the hands of white supremacy but rather to say clearly to them and to the emergent formation of black Europeans, that we should not forget our historic responsibility to act in solidarity with the post-colonial movements for justice and human rights that are flowing out of the global “south” and composing a new planetary network in pursuit of a more thoroughgoing democracy than was offered earlier in color-coded forms.” Paul Gilroy, Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race (New York: Routledge, 2013), xiii.
- 50.
New Exegesis, 41.
- 51.
New Exegesis, 46–47, 49, 62.
- 52.
Alessandro Serpieri, Otello: l’eros negato (Napoli: Liguori, 2003), 21.
- 53.
New Exegesis, 48.
- 54.
New Exegesis, 51, 56.
- 55.
Edward C. Banfield, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1958).
- 56.
New Exegesis, 45.
- 57.
Barbara Everett, “‘Spanish” Othello: The Making of Shakespeare’s Moor.’ Shakespeare Survey, 35 (1982), 101–112.
- 58.
Cited in Werner Sollors, ed., Theories of Ethnicity. A Classical Reader (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), xxxv.
- 59.
Ugo Fabietti, L’identità etnica (Roma: Carocci, 1998), 21.
- 60.
John Hutchinson, John and Anthony D. Smith, eds., Ethnicity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 6–7.
- 61.
Werner Sollors, “Ethnicity.” In Critical Terms for Literary Study, ed. Frank Lentricchia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 288, 303.
- 62.
Cornel West, “The New Cultural Politics of Difference”, in Out There: Marginalizations and Contemporary Cultures, edited by Russell Ferguson and Martha Gever (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 19–36.
- 63.
Introduction to Shakespeare, Othello, 23.
- 64.
Thomas Rymer, A Short View of Tragedy (1693) in The Critical Works of Thomas Rymer, edited by C. A. Zimansky (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1956), 134.
- 65.
Charles Gildon, “Some Reflections on Mr. Rymer’s Short View of Tragedy and an Attempt at a Vindication of Shakespeare” (1694). In Shakespeare. The Critical Heritage. Vol. 2: 1693–1733, edited by Brian Vickers (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), 74.
- 66.
Gildon, “Some Reflections”, 75.
- 67.
“Some Reflections”, 72.
- 68.
B.J. Sokol says than I am “less than attentive” in bracketing some of these characters as “racists”, insisting that Emilia’s phrases “dull Moor” or “cruel Moor” are “more descriptive than racial” (Shakespeare and Tolerance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, 207–208, n83). While I am convinced that not all forms of racisms are equivalent, I find equally problematic to find these descriptions, where Othello is significantly no longer called by his proper name, neutral.
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Bassi, S. (2016). Iago’s Race, Shakespeare’s Ethnicities. In: Shakespeare’s Italy and Italy’s Shakespeare. Reproducing Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-49170-1_2
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