Black Lives Matter Statement
Photo Credits: Marcus Jackson
In the final scene of William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, Claudio agrees to marry Antonio’s daughter in recompense for wrongfully slandering Hero and causing her death. Hero’s father, Leonato, asks if Claudio is sure about this. Claudio replies: “I’ll hold my mind were she an Ethiope” (5.4.38). In this tiny moment, Claudio’s line of comparison makes clear just how easily, just how casually, white supremacy is baked into the world of Shakespeare’s Messina. Claudio is letting it be known that even if Antonio’s daughter were Black, he would still marry her, because his commitment to remedying Hero’s wrongful death is so strong. Claudio’s admission not only reveals that he thinks that marrying an Ethiope is undesirable but also that he assumes that his view is universal. His comparison, in other words, depends on the assumption that everyone else on stage feels the same way that he does about people with nonwhite skin. This is the same racist attitude that we see Iago, Roderigo, and Brabantio exhibiting at the beginning of the tragedy of Othello, though here it appears at the resolution of one of Shakespeare’s most beloved comedies. What is a racist comment doing here?
Such casual allusions to the undesirability of blackness, and the corollary preference for whiteness, are common in Shakespeare’s plays and the plays of his contemporaries. In 1995, scholar Kim F. Hall detailed many of them in her book Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England, where she demonstrated that “blackness . . . is an infinitely malleable presence that has been used, mostly negatively, to define white subjectivity” (257). Because of Shakespeare’s status in the literary canon, then, his attitudes towards blackness, and the way that blackness can be used to elevate whiteness, have become entrenched in our own understandings of value. If we don’t draw attention to these moments when Shakespeare’s characters speak casually of their preferences for whiteness, we risk endorsing these preferences; when we don’t talk about the ways that Shakespeare’s plays have served the interests of white supremacy and colonialism, we likewise fail at recognizing how the stories we tell help to promote systemic racism and we fail to recognize how these inherited narratives of value have contributed to the unjust killing of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Ahmaud Arbery, and far too many others.
As an academic theatre company designed to share the contexts and histories of Shakespeare’s plays with broader student and public audiences, Lord Denney’s Players is committed to helping better understand Shakespeare’s role in narrativizing and normalizing whiteness and the concomitant devaluation of blackness. We are committed to supporting our colleagues, friends, and fellow students at the Ohio State University as they work towards justice. We all have so much to do.
If you would like to learn more about current scholarship into Shakespeare and race, follow the #ShakeRace hashtag on Twitter or start your research with the Race and Periodization program of the Folger Shakespeare Library.