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1 results

  • Chapter 6 - Race in Shakespeare’s Tragedies

  • Edited by Ayanna Thompson, Arizona State University
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race
    Published online:
    09 February 2021
    Print publication:
    25 February 2021, pp 77-92

  • Summary

    This chapter reveals the ways in which race is not incidental to tragedy’s moral and aesthetic claims, but rather central to the genre’s attention to social forces and philosophical concerns. Shakespeare’s tragedies reveal how the premodern imaginary considers race as both a mimetic, ephemeral enactment and proof of an essential, inherent difference. As opposed to being hampered by this contradiction, depictions of race often move between fluid, malleable, and unstable expressions of identity, providing a lexicon for the epistemological crisis of tragedy’s formation of subjectivity. In the genre’s epistemological exploration of subjectivity as a publicly scripted experience and a fundamentally separate, and at times inaccessible, essence, Shakespeare’s tragedies engage the multilayered, contradictory template of racial impersonation. Thus, attention to regimes and categories of race animates some of the most fundamental issues of inclusion and exclusion that the English looked to tragedy to illuminate.