On today's episode, a conversation about how blackness operates in Shakespeare's plays.

From the Folcher Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited.

I'm Michael Whitmore, the Folgers director.

The study of Shakespeare depends on reading.

Whether we're working in the classroom, at a library, or on stage, anyone who wants to understand the plays has to figure out how

to read Shakespeare's text. By reading, we get more fluent and more literate in the language

of early modern England. Scholars are trained to explore references

to the practices, commodities, and beliefs that shaped Shakespeare's world. But how often do we read

race? And when we do take up questions of race in the early modern context, how can we tell if we're

getting it right? In his new book, Black Shakespeare Reading and Misreading Race, Lafayette College Professor Ian Smith urges us to build our racial literacy.

This starts with an acknowledgement that there was a black presence in Shakespeare's England.

Scholars of early modern race have argued for decades

that Shakespeare and other writers were responding

to increasing encounters between Africans and Europeans.

But the discipline of Shakespeare studies, Smith argues,

has resisted acknowledging how deeply Shakespeare's plays

themselves engage with questions of race.

Smith traces this reluctance to a fundamental assumption about who is doing the reading

when we talk about reading Shakespeare. For centuries, the assumed reader of Shakespeare has been

a white person. In Smith's account, challenging this assumed racial identity of the reader

allows us to unlock novel and surprising layers of meaning in the plays.

Ian Smith last appeared on our podcast to talk about Blackface and Othello.

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