A clear-eyed look at the works of Shakespeare through the lens of race, by codirector of education at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, Farah Karim-CooperConsider the dead white male author. No intersection of identities could sound less equipped to address the dire racial inequality that plagues Western society. Now consider Shakespeare, the most venerated of these authors, and we have before us what seems like a cultural relic, all too easy to dismiss.Farah Karim-Cooper, Shakespeare scholar and head of higher education and research at the Globe Theatre, asks us to take a step back from this initial reaction. The first step, she says, is to take him off his pedestal. Karim-Cooper's deft analysis and deep love of Shakespeare generate an account of his works that confronts their complexities, and those of British society and the English-speaking world, through the lens of race. Thinking about Shakespeare through the lens of race may be discomfiting at times, but the depth of understanding that it yields is worth the challenge.In The Great White Bard, Karim-Cooper contends with Shakespeare as neither an idol nor an irrelevant fossil, but as a writer whose works are deeply human and comprehensible by all who actively engage with them. From examining the texts themselves to considering the conventions of the plays' staging, Karim-Cooper unflinchingly interrogates how Shakespeare, both then and now, has been shaped by race "As we witness monuments of white Western history fall, many are asking how is Shakespeare still relevant? Professor Farah Karim-Cooper has dedicated her career to the Bard, which is why she wants to take the playwright down from his pedestal to unveil a Shakespeare for the twenty-first century. 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. Combining piercing analysis of race, gender and otherness in famous plays from Antony and Cleopatra to The Tempest with a radical reappraisal of Elizabethan London, The Great White Bard asks us neither to idealize nor bury Shakespeare but instead to look him in the eye and reckon with the discomforts of his plays, playhouses and society. In inviting new perspectives and interpretations, we may yet prolong and enrich his extraordinary legacy"--
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