From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited.

I'm Michael Whitmore, the Folgers director. This podcast is called Teach Him How to Tell My Story.

It's a discussion that started out being about one thing and then turned into something larger.

Originally, we wanted to look at attitudes around the practice of blackface as it is applied to the performance of Othello over the centuries.

As you'll hear, though, we move from there to a much broader and richer conversation on many topics,

illuminated by the ideas of two young scholars who are bringing an exciting and new perspective to the

study of Shakespeare. Ianna Thompson is professor of English at George Washington University,

and Ian Smith is Professor of English at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. Their thoughts on

race, history, and theatrical practice may leave you looking at Othello in

an entirely new way.

Ianna and Ian are interviewed by Barbara Bogave.

Ian, I'd like to start with a story that you tell about the time you were on a panel

at a Shakespeare conference, and it was about Othello.

And one of your fellow panelists kept insisting that Othello is not about race. So tell us about

that and your reaction to that. It was actually a seminar. So there were a group of us participating

in the conversation. And somebody asserted several times actually that Othello is not about race.

My sense is that he felt that this statement was supposed to be a corrective of some kind.

And a corrective in that people talk about Othello, being about race,

obviously there are a lot of references to race or to color,

and he was going to correct this simplistic reading?

Yes. I think on two grounds. One, he thought that perhaps historically, people weren't interested in

seeing the play in that way in Shakespeare's time, which, as you just suggested, is really sort of startling because of the

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