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

Reviewed by: White People in Shakespeare: Essays on Race, Culture and the Elite ed. by Arthur L. Little, Jr. Virginia Mason Vaughan White People in Shakespeare: Essays on Race, Culture and the Elite. Edited by Arthur L. Little, Jr. London: Bloomsbury, 2023. Pp. xviii + 298. Hardcover $81.00. Paperback $26.95. E-book $21.56. Arthur L. Little, Jr.'s edited collection, White People in Shakespeare, is a thought-provoking introduction to the burgeoning new field of early modern critical white studies. Little brings together a diverse group of academics to interrogate the role that Shakespeare played and still plays in the development and continuation of white supremacy. In graduate school during the 1970s I can't recall anyone ever mentioning early modern race as a topic for discussion. Only later, after I began work on Othello's historical context by reading the work of pioneers in early modern race studies—Anthony Gerard Barthelemy, Joyce Green MacDonald, Margo Hendricks, Sujata Iyengar, Dennis Britton, Ian Smith, and Ayanna Thompson, just to name a few—did I think seriously about early modern constructions of race. But, as Little explains, late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century studies of early modern race were focused on Blackness, often with the assumption that it was only after England joined the slave trade that the English began to consider Black people a "race." Except for the prescient work of Kim F. Hall, Gary Taylor, and Peter Erickson, early modern scholars paid little attention to how white English people came to believe in their own superior identity. With this collection of essays—and other studies of early modern whiteness published this year by Farah Karim Cooper, Ian Smith, and Urvashi Chakravarty—Shakespeare's role in the early modern development of white supremacy can no longer be ignored. Little notes that the first recorded use of the term "white people" occurred in Thomas Middleton's mayoral pageant, The Triumphs of Truth (1613). Like other mayoral pageants, Middleton's drama was performed before all the people, whether they were aristocrats, tradespeople, or servants, in honor of London's newly installed mayor. In Middleton's pageant a Black king addresses the onlookers as "white people," suggesting whiteness as not simply a characteristic of the elite (e.g. Elizabeth I's famously whitened complexion) but inherent to the English masses. Like Middleton, Shakespeare wrote for a varied audience, and his representation of whiteness as a racial category has served to reinforce the idea of white—"fair"—superiority then and now. Consequently, Shakespeare "remains key to any study of the further emergence of a 'white people' in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century" (7). Little divides the nineteen essays of his book into three groups. The first section, "Shakespeare's White People," interrogates the ways in which Shakespeare's plays and poems contribute to the construction of whiteness as a racial category. The second section, "White People's Shakespeare," examines how from the seventeenth century to the present white people have appropriated Shakespeare's works and his status as a cultural icon to reinforce white superiority. The third section, "The White Shakespearean and Daily Practice," concludes the volume with two calls for actions to combat white privilege. [End Page 334] Little observes that "the word 'fair' occurs more than nine hundred times in Shakespeare, often in relationship to a woman's skin and beauty" (7). Accordingly, four of the first section's essays address Shakespeare's representation of white women, demonstrating ways in which gender and race coalesce. Evelyn Gajowski draws on Petrarchan love poetry in which a nexus of white skin and red cheeks and lips is associated with virtue and beauty, whereas blackness signifies ugliness and deformity (47). This leads her, in the collection's only diversion from Shakespeare, to Elizabeth Cary's tragedy Mariam (published in 1613), which figures the virtuous heroine Mariam as white, and her conniving enemy Salome as Black. Gajowski concludes that in the Jacobean period, female tragic heroines were "deployed to do racial work, as well as gendered work" (59). Dennis Austin Britton draws on medieval martyrology that highlighted a whitened Christ and fair martyrs made black and blue with suffering. Measure for Measure...