The Great White Bard
Shakespeare, Race and the Future
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The Great White Bard
Buy Now for $26.99
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Narrated by:
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Farah Karim-Cooper
About this listen
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 21st century. We might expand and enrich his extraordinary legacy. We might even fall in love with him all over again.
©2023 Farah Karim-Cooper (P)2023 Penguin Random House LLC