White People in Shakespeare: Essays on Race, Culture, and the Elite ed. by Arthur L. Little Jr (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: White People in Shakespeare: Essays on Race, Culture, and the Elite ed. by Arthur L. Little Jr Christina Moe Simmons Arthur L. Little Jr., ed., White People in Shakespeare: Essays on Race, Culture, and the Elite (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2023), 322 pp., 4 ills. Arthur L. Little Jr.’s edited volume, White People in Shakespeare, contains a collection of essays from acclaimed early modern critical race scholars that will undoubtedly radically shift how early modernists engage with Shakespeare and his legacies. From the introduction, Little carefully yet clearly establishes what conversation in early modern studies the volume rests in, addressing the noticeable voids in the historical framework used to critically engage with Shakespeare that prevent early modern scholarship from asking the question of race. The introduction provides a necessary rundown of the key differences between “whiteness” and “white people,” the significant transformation of whiteness as a valuable property through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and why Little has entitled this collection of essays White People in Shakespeare, rather than “Whiteness” in Shakespeare. Little argues that “Shakespeare remains key to any study of the further emergence of a ‘white people’ in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century,” establishing this collection as a critical analysis of the property of whiteness—and those who own it—through the early modern period (7). The volume is split into two separate parts. Part 1, “Shakespeare’s White People,” consists of essays focusing mainly on the characters from Shakespeare’s plays that have received critical attention. The analyses provided by the contributors to the volume all have one significant aspect in common: they all thoughtfully address the missing question of race in the litany of critical works available around these characters. Ian Smith’s “Antonio’s White Penis: Category Trading in The Merchant of Venice,” for instance, reengages “the question of Antonio’s sexuality in relation to race” (77) to argue that “whiteness is an expression of a sexuality—whiteness is a sexuality—and any departure from its idealization marks a venture into its literal opposite: blackness and corresponding notions of deviance that are assiduously avoided and denigrated as un-Venetian” (79). In “Disrupting White Genealogies in Cymbeline,” Joyce Macdonald draws a connection between “the questions of succession, descent and lineage that drive Cymbeline” with “its racial anxiety over the fortunes of British whiteness” (136). The accumulated essays not only contend with the critical gap left in early modern studies regarding race but also point out the problematic proclivity for critical white studies to apprehend “race as a post-Enlightenment phenomenon” by [End Page 253] delineating both the historical context and textual evidence that unequivocally demonstrate race operating in Shakespeare’s plays (1). Each essay in part 1 provides its relevant, historical evidence before engaging with the plays themselves, boldly confronting—and contradicting—any early modern scholarship that supposes “race” as a modern or postmodern understanding that cannot apply to the early modern period. “Red Blood on White Saints: Affective Piety, Racial Violence, and Measure for Measure” by Dennis Austin Britton opens with an “epigraph from a 1611 English translation of Bernard de Clairvaux’s Meditations” that proves an existing, early modern association between Christ’s purity and his whiteness (65). Leaving no space to reasonably argue that critical race theory or critical white studies is unsuitable for reading early modern literature allows the essays to move into the truly rich scholarship that wrestles with the appropriation of Shakespeare into white supremacy and redefines what early modern literature offers for critical race theorists and critical white studies scholars. Part 2, “White People’s Shakespeare,” cleverly pivots toward “those persons or entities that have racially weaponized Shakespeare” to illuminate why these interrogations of whiteness and white people in Shakespeare are imperative to not only Shakespearean scholarship but early modern scholarship in general (12). While part 1 lays out how “white people”—those who “have the property of being white” (5)—are created through Shakespeare’s plays and within Shakespearean England, part 2 demonstrates where Shakespeare’s constructions and reconstructions of the English body have been extrapolated, appropriated, and deployed in the modern world. Whether in South Africa or the theater, the Civil Rights...