Is Black So Base a Hue? Racism in Shakespeare, by Fran Napolitano

Is black so base a hue?  Or was England’s pride and joy sorely mistaken when he wrote of the black man and his savage murders, ‘changeable wills’, and alarmingly illogical descents from reason to the psychological hell of uxoricide?

It would be an understatement to say that England holds Shakespeare in high esteem.  In fact, I’d say Shakespeare is held very close to the heart of the English legacy, and it is apparent that she will not be loosening her grip anytime soon.  This is true to the point where a vast majority of those who have survived the schooling system here have read or experienced at least two of his texts, be that his sonnets or, more likely, his plays,  Here in St Michael’s, that is most definitely the case.  From two hour long coach journeys to his birthplace, compulsory memorising of his soliloquies and at least one tragedy or comedy to be gorged on per year, it is safe to say us purples are incredibly well-educated when it comes to the writings of the great William Shakespeare, despite critical warnings of the consequences of seeing the world through the ‘distorting prisms’ of his plays.

Yet, how can it be that only now, from studying English Literature at A-Level, have the darker sides of his literature now been unveiled to me?  In fact, it is only from studying Othello that I have been shockingly dragged head first into to the truth that is the horrors and bigotry of our great Bard, and I can only weep for those in other schools who are studying another play for the exam and remain as unaware as I previously was.  

In 2001, a committee of teachers in an important South African province wanted to ban Shakespeare from schools because he ‘failed to promote the rejection of racism and sexism’ and in 2015 a black activist called for ‘the racist William Shakespeare’ to be completely banned from schools in Zimbabwe.  In 2016, undergraduate English majors at Yale University petitioned to eliminate the monopoly of “white male poets” (including Shakespeare) in a compulsory introductory course and Hindu nationalists in India want to ban the teaching of Shakespeare, first imposed on the country by England’s oppressive colonial rule.  Why then, is this the case?  What has your education sheltered you from by simply only forcing you to read ‘Romeo and Juliet’ or ‘A Midsummer’s Night Dream’?

To begin, the quotation that this article gets its title from is from Shakespeare’s ‘Titus Andronicus’, one which is important to be familiar with when studying Othello for context about Shakespeare’s attitudes to race, and the first of Shakespeare’s plays involving characters from Afro-Caribbean descent. In the play, the black character, a ‘Moor’ from Northern Africa, Aaron, is hailed ‘this barbarous Moor, / This ravenous tiger, this accursed devil’ (5.3.4–5). Even Aaron himself appears to relish in the link between evil and his skin colour: ‘Let fools do good, and fair men call for grace, / Aaron will have his soul black like his face’ (3.1.202–05).  Aaron is a typical, yet unsettling depiction of how Shakespeare, or perhaps only the society in which Shakespeare lived and wrote, viewed black people.  A cunning villain, Aaron is behind much of the violence of the play, and that is saying something considering in the play 14 people are murdered or executed, hands are severed, tongues cut out and rapists are baked in a pie and served to their mother in a horrendous exploration of evil, morality and cannibalism.  Aaron encourages the rape of a female character and the framing of other characters for murders they haven’t committed, motivated by a strong desire for revenge.  He feels no regret for his deeds when finally captured, and says that he only wishes he could live to commit more crimes.  Unfortunately, this is not even the most heinous of Shakespeare’s racist plays, albeit the most violent and graphic.

A text many of you will be familiar with is ‘The Tempest’, which I myself briefly studied in KS3, a tale I believed to be full of romance and magic, of pretty fairies and fantastical creatures.  However, what was cunningly erased from my learning of this play was its links to colonisation.  Often, attempts to protect Shakespeare from a legacy of racism and bigotry, his worshippers often beg for readers to take context into consideration.  And I always deliver; ‘The Tempest’ was first performed after the English Invasion of Ireland and before the colonisation of New England.  The Irish were seen as savage, uncivilised, lazy, immoral and animalistic; traits which have an unsettling similarity to descriptor words for Caliban in the play.  This is already shocking, but it grows more so as you recall those times in English when you were forced to read lines and act out moments of what is essentially a remake of events in which real cold-blooded colonists attempted to civilise real native Irish people, calling them barbaric and savage. Furthermore, Shakespeare’s depiction of the Island bears an unsettling similarity to original documents about Virginia, and it is well-known that Shakespeare had friends who were explorers themselves, such as Richard Haklyst, who would have definitely influenced him. This is undoubtedly disgusting, considering research found that settlers in America killed so many native people in America that they indirectly cooled the earth. It is said that around 56 million died by 1600, and Shakespeare appears to parody this in his play by mirroring the geography of Virginia with his island. Not to mention the fact that Prospero’s actions when he first comes to the Island are horrifically similar to the actions of European settlers and explorers coming to America; Prospero sees somebody there, namely Caliban, and decides to civilise him, to declare him his subject, simply because he has more power than Caliban and despite the fact that Caliban has lived there longer.  Sound familiar?  In the play, Caliban states:‘Which first was mine own king; and here you sty me/ In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me/ The rest o’ th’ island’, which I'm certain would sound remarkably similar to the pleas of the indigenous Americans and Irish people who were imprisoned by explorers, despite being the original 'kings 'of their land.  In the play Caliban is referred to as ‘slave’, ‘filth’, ‘abhorred’, not honoured with human shape’ and ‘tortoise’ (meaning lazy), to name only a handful of insults.  Did Shakespeare know what he was doing?  Most definitely, and if he didn’t, he definitely had the means to learn.

To summarise, I feel it is important to discuss why I feel so strongly about this, and why you should too, by including the voices and opinions of black people affected by this.  Zadie Smith’s best-selling novel ‘White Teeth’, for example,  contains a scene in which a student asks her teacher whether the ‘dark lady’ in Shakespeare’s Sonnets is ‘black’. Her teacher answers, ‘She’s not black in the modern sense’–because there weren’t any ‘Afro-Carri-bee-yans in England at that time’; or, if there were, such a ‘black’ woman they would have been ‘a slave of some kind’.  This condescending pedagogical put-down has its intended effect: the student blushes with embarrassment, then retreats into indifference. ‘She had thought, just then, that she had seen something like a reflection,’ as though Shakespeare’s sonnets to and about a black woman might be addressing her own experience, but that apparent connection ‘was receding’.  What’s most interesting to me is the fact that the teacher is actually historically wrong.   We now know that there were black people in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, and especially in London. Most of them were inconspicuous, but none of them were slaves: indeed, in Shakespeare’s lifetime the Protestant English proudly distinguished themselves from the Spanish because, unlike their Catholic rivals, they did not enslave people.  In fact, slavery had no legal status or enforcement mechanisms (yet).  What this can also teach us is that Shakespeare had every access to black people, and I do not mean this in an objectifying sense, but rather that he did not have to present them in such a horrendous way.  Even in ‘Othello’, where the black protagonist is presented as and is indeed the tragic ‘hero’ of the play, it has to bear the epithet of ‘tragic’, meaning that he loses his reasonable nature and ends up smothering and brutally murdering his innocent, loyal wife.  In his article about his reservations on playing Othello as an actor, Hugh Quarshie makes the point that the authority given to Shakespeare and his plays seems to eradicate the reality that both ‘Titus Andronicus’ and ‘Othello’ were written over 400 years ago by a white Englishman for another white Englishman in blackface make-up.  He writes that there may well have been someone who was very much like the savage black people that Shakespeare presents in his plays, ‘just as there may well have been Native Americans who behaved very much like the ‘Red Injuns’ of old Western films, riding around the circled wagons, scalping white men, raping white women and kidnapping white children. But we now know that there were a good many Native Americans who did nothing of the sort, and indeed that those movies were a distorting prism.’ It is true to say that, as we have now established, there were many black people who were nothing like Othello, or Aaron the Moor within his reach to talk to and learn from, ‘but Shakespeare’s types and tropes have not been questioned because of the inherited assumption of his ‘universal genius’.’  

And so, it is clear that Shakespeare could have got to know some genuine black people in the London of his time beyond the actors in blackface on the stage, had he wished to do so. If he decided not to take the trouble of doing this basic research and actually speaking to some good-natured people, was he being lazy? If he did have black acquaintances and had done his research and still went on to write about black people in this way, was he being a bigot?  Nonetheless, I believe that his plays, as Quarshie writes, too easily distort the way we see the world and indeed history, and this constant cry for context in his defence only proves my point more.  Just as we overlook the decisions of authoritative figures in schools and in the government, we seem to overlook the reality of Shakespeare’s racist ways simply because of the assumption that those above us are always right.  This is not true; we must challenge those in positions of authority, and fighting the idea of worshipping figures like Shakespeare for works such as these is a good way to start.  I feel it must be said that as a Literature student, of course I appreciate Shakespeare; ‘Othello’ is a wonderful text, a fascinating love story, and a powerful tragedy.  But is it racist?  And shouldn’t we, in teaching works such as these, teach students also, even in the younger years, about the possibility of their being racist before we send them off into Bardolatry?