If I could resurrect William Shakespeare from the dead and ask him a question that I am dying to pose, it would be this: “How does it feel to be a problem?”³ If I could be certain that he would not become defensive; that Shakespeare would not irrationally accuse me of “reverse racism,” of being racist toward white people, for respectfully naming and recognizing his whiteness; that he would not remain silent but would actually answer my burning question,⁴ then I would ask more pointedly, “How does it feel to be a white problem?”⁵ In the context of race, “white” changes everything. Here, in fact, “white” refocuses a question W. E. B. Du Bois considered in relationship to Blackness in his early twentieth-century treatise The Souls of Black Folk. For me, if it is clear that Blackness, understood more generally as one’s race, is a problem, then of course whiteness, too, is a problem. Yet, white people “do not live with constant reminders that [they] are seen as problems due to [their] race.”⁶ Therefore, white people do not actively or regularly consider the abovementioned inquiries because the idea of being problematic is estranged from their collective racial consciousness. For white people, the problem is always the somatically different Other.⁷ That is to say, I am the problem. To that I say, “What about you?”⁸

I wrote this book to reflect on the “white problem” question, so that we continue integrating critical whiteness studies into early modern studies and Shakespearean discourse as people engage the playwright’s work in different ways: critically, pedagogically, and theatrically, for instance.⁹ Long-term, this book is meant to serve as a reminder that racial whiteness – Shakespeare’s, the Macbeths’, Tamora’s, Hamlet’s, Antony’s, Iago’s – is a problem.¹⁰ To achieve these goals, I use Shakespeare’s dramatic literature to position him as a theorist of whiteness who illustrated and critiqued intraracial, or white-on-white, conflict.¹¹ In Shakespeare studies and premodern critical race studies, there exists an unarticulated and therefore understudied problem that I refer to as the “intraracial color-line,” another key theoretical intervention of Shakespeare’s White Others.

Building on Du Bois’ interracial “color-line” theory,¹² the intraracial color-line delineates distinctions among early modern English white people that rely on the devaluing of somatically similar white folks: the white others, who violate the dominant culture’s norms. Through its engagement with, and as a contribution to, early modern literary criticism, Shakespeare’s White Others reminds readers that persistent anti-Blackness, often revealed through intraracial violations of whiteness, is a constant problem. This problem substantiates the need for antiracist intervention by exposing through the white other the dark side of whiteness. “It is no longer sufficient to be not racist, as we have come to understand, but we must be actively and declaratively antiracist,” according to Smith.¹³ Scholarship, too, must be active and declarative in its antiracism. Among other things, Shakespeare’s White Others asks readers to consider how race is crafted through racism, a process Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields term “racecraft” because, similar to witchcraft, it is “imagined, acted upon, and re-imagined.”¹⁴ Importantly, they add that “racecraft is not a euphemistic substitute for racism. It is a kind of fingerprint evidence that racism has been on the scene.”¹⁵ It is up to us to do the detective work with respect to Shakespearean drama and examine the residue of racism left behind by white others, for it is within whiteness where one can see the unrelenting workings of racecraft.

Shakespeare’s White Others builds on the intellectual insights of scholars who have contributed work to premodern critical race studies, whiteness studies, Black studies, Black feminism, sociology, and social psychology in particular. Regarding the white other concept, this study builds on ideas articulated by Morrison in The Origin of Others, by Arthur L. Little, Jr. in Shakespeare Jungle Fever, and by Lauren S. Cardon in The “White Other” in American Intermarriage Stories, 1945–2008¹⁶ in order to expand the understanding of racial “borders of power.”¹⁷ Moreover, as citations throughout the book demonstrate, several scholars within early modern English studies have influenced my thinking about race and whiteness.

Specifically, I argue that Shakespeare strategically othered white figures in his dramatic oeuvre to condition dominant English attitudes toward white people, white others, and non-white people, namely Black people.¹⁸ The playtexts position whiteness as a marked racial category that is heterogenous and unstable. The overt investment in intraracial division and related racialized conflict, even among culturally or ethnically similar white people such as the characters in Hamlet and Macbeth, reflects early modern preoccupations with “‘ideal’ and ‘less-than’” ideal intraracial conduct.¹⁹ Shakespeare’s dramatic literature functioned, then, as a textual and theatrical channel that facilitated processes of white identity formation and manufactured the illusion of white racial solidarity.²⁰ At the same time, those processes worked to encode racialized distinctions created by and validated among white people. These distinctions illuminate intraracial tensions. And they expose the ever-shifting boundaries that denote the white person’s or white other’s insider/outsider status.²¹

Spiritually, sexually, psychologically, emotionally, morally, and even sartorially, as I will show, Shakespeare’s plays mark and marginalize white people in ways that depend on a character’s internal rather than epidermal status. The abstract marking signals the failure to meet white hegemony’s expectations. In this sense, the white other reflects crises that develop among the plays’ white people. Unsurprisingly, these crises, centered on intraracial otherness, often exploit emblematic blackness and/or racialized Blackness to signify racially a person’s less-than-ideal status and to reify the perceived superiority of whiteness. My book invests in acknowledging the playwright’s unique past and continued influence on white identity formation. This book invests in the processes of inclusion and exclusion among white people that also have an impact on non-white figures like Othello, Cleopatra, and even me. I consider the white other to be a figure like Richard III, Tamora, or Macbeth who is not “white enough” or who registers as less-than-ideal. This figure is useful for highlighting what manifests in the “racial imaginary” as meaningful differences among white people, differences that work to²² perpetuate anti-blackness and anti-Blackness; expose the façade of white racial cohesion and identity stability; and reaffirm white supremacy, a phrase I deploy in reference to the imagined superiority of whiteness.²³

As historian Keith Wrightson asserts, “The most fundamental structural characteristic of English society was its high degree of stratification. The reality of inequality was displayed everywhere” with respect to wealth, rank, living standards, and social power.²⁴ Within England, and even within England’s broader relationships with other white Europeans, it was evident that “degrees of people” existed.²⁵ Between 1590 and 1610, the approximate time period when Shakespeare wrote most of his plays, for example, a range of historical incidents occurred that marked persistent tensions among white English people, and between the English and ethnically different white Europeans:²⁶ the Anglo-Spanish War (1585–1604); the Irish-English Nine Years’ War (1593–1603); Robert Devereux, the second Earl of Essex’s attempted rebellion against Queen Elizabeth I (7–8 January 1601);²⁷ James VI of Scotland’s contentious merger of the English and Scottish crowns (24 March 1603); the attempted Gunpowder Plot (5 November 1605); and the Northamptonshire witch trials (22 July 1612). By acknowledging historical moments such as these, one can see how conflicts within whiteness, a racial category that has a “recognizable” two-thousand-year-old history according to historian Nell Irvin Painter, were being negotiated as the English dominant culture defined for its convenience acceptable and unacceptable racial behavior.²⁸ To the list of characteristics that were used to distinguish white people from one another I would add race, in the intraracial sense. Degrees of whiteness exist.

More than any other early modern dramatist, Shakespeare’s white masculine authorial power permeates various facets of modern local and global society such as education, literature, and theater. And more than a symbol with unlimited cultural capital, Shakespeare, I argue, is a chief literary architect of how hegemonic whiteness was (re)produced and negotiated in early modern England. Thus, Shakespeare’s White Others interrogates how his plays reflect and/or depend on the emerging, and continually developing, construction of whiteness; the embeddedness of racism in literary art, anti-Black racism in particular; and the centering of white-on-white, or intraracial, tensions that too commonly evade critique. Shakespeare’s White Others reveals – through readings of five core plays, Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, Antony and Cleopatra, Othello, and The Comedy of Errors – how ideal behavior among white people was, and still can be, significantly influenced by Shakespeare’s dramatic literature. The consequences of this reality cannot be overstated. In targeting less-than-ideal white behavior, the dominant culture deploys racist tropes of blackness that have real-life implications for present-day Black people, as I suggest throughout the book and as I stress in Chapter 4 and the Conclusion. Because of the implications for present-day Black people, this book offers a theoretical intervention that challenges the uncritical pedestalization of Shakespeare, his characters, and his plays.²⁹ This book also challenges the uncritical theatrical production of Shakespearean drama. I introduce my intraracial color-line theory through Shakespeare’s work to articulate and hopefully alter the critical, pedagogical, and theatrical possibilities for deploying Shakespearean drama for antiracist purposes. Among other things, Shakespeare’s White Others urges white people to understand how antiracist action is a responsibility wrapped up in their socio-political power.³⁰ One of the most influential ways white people wield power is through policing of all kinds, especially the policing of what it means to be white, white other,³¹ and Black.

As I close this opening section of the Introduction, I want to turn to Much Ado About Nothing, a romantic comedy that is set in Messina and centers racially white figures and their experiences. Hidden within the centering of people who are “fair,” a term used over a dozen times in the play, are representations of the Black/African woman; and these cameos expose the malleability of both the white identity and white superiority, in addition to the ever-present tensions within whiteness that often become apparent in relationship to blackness, as Kim F. Hall cogently outlines in Things of Darkness – a masterful early modern race study.³² When Claudio publicly shames Hero, his wife-to-be, and wrongfully accuses her of being an “approved wanton” (4.1.43) who is “most foul, most fair,” phrasing that recalls language spoken by Macbeth’s Witches (4.1.103), he blackens and then blackballs her for her alleged offense. He initiates her figurative transition from pure, virtuous white woman to lusty, Black strumpet; in so doing, Hero becomes like Cleopatra – discussed in Chapter 5 – whom Antony labels a “foul Egyptian” (4.12.10). Claudio’s description indicates he sees Hero’s undeniably white skin and the external somatic similarity between them; yet he also claims to see her unverified lascivious deeds, which cause him to reject Hero because he presumes she is tainted inside, both in her moral character and precious chastity. If Claudio’s discourse appears to contradict itself, that is because “skin color is significant but only a piece of the early modern racial story,” as Little, Jr. argues.³³

Hero’s racialized transition, which marks the introduction of an invisible Black woman, is fully realized when her father Leonato accepts without proof the whore allegations and essentially disowns his daughter, noting:

Resurfacing as the white other from the pit of ink her father figuratively pushes her into with his racist discourse, Hero, now unclean and being studied, is³⁴ covered in sin and fallen from the privilege of pedestalized whiteness, and physically covered head to toe in blackness (if one were to stage Leonato’s language)³⁵ that now complements and captures the blackness of the character Claudio thinks he sees. To distance themselves from shame and the loss of their masculine holds on the white female body,³⁶ and to distance themselves from this manufactured image of the sexually unrestrained and monstrous Black woman,³⁷ these white men conceptualize³⁸ a Black woman whose allegedly foul body and soul reflect the play’s anti-Black sentiments. For example, Leonato’s language links Hero’s blackened white skin to death and decomposition, matters I explore at length in Chapter 2. As such, he positions blackness, embodied by Hero, as undesirable and in need of salvation. Fully imagined as black, inside and out, racially white Hero disappears from Act 4 once she is thought to be a whore. She returns in the last scene as the possible African “Ethiop” Claudio notes he would marry right before his redeemed wife-to-be enters (5.4.38).³⁹ He safely makes the Ethiop remark with his masked misogynoir, for the play does not give us any reason to believe a real Black woman can appear out of nowhere, unless she emerges from a pit of ink. With her credibility and the value of her white womanhood restored, Hero is freed from blackness, from being blackballed by Claudio. She is therefore free to enter with him into the institution of marriage, into which the play does not allow the metaphorical Black woman to enter.

Racial matters present themselves as complicated and deep in this play that does not contain somatic Blackness; an actual Black person, or even the representation of a Black person, never appears onstage.⁴⁰ Instead, Much Ado utilizes somatic similarity to illustrate diminished whiteness and the characters’ responses to their white identity crisis, responses that notably differ along gender and class lines. Like the other Shakespeare plays critiqued in this book, Much Ado About Nothing shows how ideal whiteness is constructed by exclusion. Through Hero’s emblematic racial transformation, Much Ado suggests white people are willing to accept and disown other white people based on how they adhere to the tenets of ideal(ized) hegemonic whiteness. Furthermore, this comedy implies that not adhering to the tenets of whiteness – due to an association with blackness or due to the performance of behaviors that defy white propriety, for example – puts one at risk for being seen as or somehow becoming less white. In other words, there is what social psychologists would consider a white ingroup and a white outgroup;⁴¹ and it is this latter group that defines what I refer to as the white other. Upon descending into blackness in Much Ado, Hero temporarily becomes viewed as something other than her pure racially and morally white self once beloved by white men – her father and Claudio in particular. I contend that she – a white woman – is racially othered despite no somatic difference between her and the other figures in the play. This kind of racial difference is possible because of anti-Black sentiments that produce the intraracial color-line, the unstable boundary between acceptable and unacceptable whiteness.

Hidden in Plain Sight

Shakespeare’s White Others aims to reveal how anti-Black racism, anti-Black violence, and general, harmful anti-Black sentiments were and are integral to white identity formation and white ideology construction. This is true even in the absence of somatic Blackness, as my book shows. With Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk in mind, Shakespeare’s White Others works with and moves beyond the Du Boisian color-line – by relying on the intraracial color-line – because a predominant theoretical emphasis on just the Black/white binary, while incredibly useful, has its limits. For one, the Black/white binary does not always prompt people to apply antiracist theory and interrogate whiteness in ways that hold the mirror up exclusively for white people to see themselves. Consequently, I establish the intraracial color-line as a theoretical tool that allows a principal critique of and focus on whiteness by way of the white other, a racially white figure like Hero who is blackened, and presented as less-than-ideal, for a variety of reasons I introduced in the Preface and will expand on throughout the book.⁴² In short, the white other does not allow white people to escape racial examination of themselves, for the intraracial color-line is relevant to all white folk, as the my analysis of Much Ado in the previous section indicates.

Regarding the British preoccupation with perpetuating anti-Blackness, which historian Peter Fryer writes about in Black People in the British Empire: An Introduction and which the world saw in prevalent twenty-first-century responses to Meghan Markle’s Blackness (Duchess of Sussex and wife of Prince Harry),⁴³ The Souls of Black Folk emerges as a powerfully rewritten history. It is one where Du Bois asserts his agency to rebuff the historical rejection of Blackness by situating himself next to Shakespeare as author, as thinker, as artist, as human. Beyond his direct allusion to Macbeth,⁴⁴ an allusion that incorporates Shakespeare’s white authorial and authoritative voice into the text, Du Bois’ poetic statement, “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not,” invites his audience to see Black and white together. He invites his audience to (re)imagine their co-existing transhistorically and transnationally. He imagines them existing with accord in the face of pervasive anti-Black sentiments expressed in his time, Shakespeare’s time, and our own time. Yet, there is something else happening with Du Bois’ language relating to his use of iambic pentameter, which I write about in “(Early) Modern Literature: Crossing the Color-Line.”⁴⁵ The poetic quality intentionally adds rhythm to his bold claim that draws the premodern into his present to further reject ideas about Black inferiority.⁴⁶ As the author of Souls, Du Bois wields the power to prevent symbolically white-on-Black policing as he crosses the color-line and negotiates whiteness.

Yet, across the intraracial color-line, in a gray area where whiteness polices whiteness and negotiates with itself, a race war rages on. The white self – the social, cultural, physical, and psychological white self that is an amalgamation of conveniently shifting ideologies of superiority – is constantly engaged in battle. The mounting casualties are innumerable. The conflict I refer to is not about the centuries-old physical and rhetorical clashes⁴⁷ racially white people have had with various “strange” religious and racial Others such as Muslims, Jews, Asians, Native Americans, Africans, and Black people as a result of discrimination, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia.⁴⁸ Rather, the white self is literally and symbolically at war with an “ontologically insecure”⁴⁹ version of its own self that is preoccupied with preservation⁵⁰ because of perceived threats to the white existence.⁵¹ The white self paradoxically needs but cannot stand the ontologically insecure version of itself, which it must constantly acknowledge only to dismiss, discourage, disappoint, disparage, and attempt to destroy. All of this points toward the instability of whiteness, which depends on the white other’s presence. And this instability is reflected historically in certain people’s acceptance into whiteness over time, that is, Jewish and Irish⁵² people, and in specific intraracial conflicts, such as those that I listed in the first part of this Introduction.

The cyclical sadomasochistic dynamic between the white self and the white other is apparent in the world at present, too. This white-on-white dynamic was apparent in the world as it was centuries ago in the early modern period, visible in Shakespearean drama and Elizabethan and Jacobean culture, although sometimes obscured by the disruptive presence of somatically different Others, like the Black characters in Shakespeare’s more commonly recognized race plays: Titus Andronicus, Othello, The Merchant of Venice, The Tempest, and Antony and Cleopatra.⁵³ For some time, then, the white self has battled with a version of itself that has tried to remain hidden in plain sight. In different ways, the intraracial color-line reveals how such anti-Blackness, whether physical, rhetorical, emotional, metaphorical, or psychological, functions as a multifaceted white supremacist tool. This tool simultaneously and paradoxically shapes and harms white identity and white people’s “self-concepts”⁵⁴ while undoubtedly harming racial Others, particularly Black people. The intraracial color-line explicitly illustrates racial whiteness as an ideology and intentionally unstable identity category that depends parasitically on violence and imbalanced power relations of all kinds. It is an ideology that necessitates antiracist intervention.

By centering white-on-white relations, the intraracial color-line illuminates the prevalence of white-on-white violence in Shakespeare’s plays, especially in tragedy, which I recognize as a white genre that depicts racial whiteness as tragic, as a catastrophic construct. Within this one dramatic genre, Shakespeare centers and sensationalizes intraracial conflicts from his first play, Titus Andronicus (circa 1590), to his last, Timon of Athens (circa 1608). Shakespeare’s White Others leans on critiques of Shakespearean tragedy, with references here and there to comedy, romance, and the history plays, to suggest that genre and form can be useful for tracing the development of racial constructions and observing the white other’s presence. It is my hope that future book-length studies will address genre more comprehensively in relationship to race. While this study is not invested in explicit analyses of the plays’ formal and structural features,⁵⁵ this study’s awareness of genre informs the Shakespearean textual analyses that engage antiracist theory, critical race studies, whiteness studies, Black feminism, social psychology, and sound studies. Finally, in being a genre that scholar Patricia Parker associates with blackness, when observing that “black was the color of tragedy and revenge tragedy in particular”:⁵⁶ Tragedy is a prime dramatic site for examining whiteness and the white other because it is consumed by representations of blackness. As I note, tragedy is also preoccupied with centering white people.⁵⁷ Given the very few cameos of Black characters in Shakespeare’s canon, and certainly within his tragedies, which contain only Aaron, Othello, and Cleopatra amid dozens upon dozens of racially white characters, tragedy functions as a useful site for investigating and thinking about whiteness, which has been treated in so many ways – racially, aesthetically, historically, culturally, socio-politically, religiously, and metaphorically, for instance – as Blackness’s binary opposite.

“It [Does] Matter if You’re Black or White” … or White Other⁵⁸

What does it mean to be Black, white, or white other?⁵⁹ And why does it matter? In 1991, the late global pop superstar Michael Jackson asserted in the chorus to his wildly popular song “Black or White” that it doesn’t matter if someone is Black or white.⁶⁰ With Black and white being the extreme ends of the racial hierarchy, the added implication, as suggested by the song’s music video visuals, was that the racial backgrounds of everyone in between Black and white do not matter either. Jackson’s idealistic song followed significant twentieth-century social, political, and cultural moments that exposed the pervasiveness of global white supremacy and/or responses to it: South African apartheid, the Harlem Renaissance, Brown v. Board of Education, the American Civil Rights Movement, the Black Arts Movement, and the Black Power Movement, to name a few. Moreover, Jackson’s song emerged around other significant socio-political moments such as the end of Nelson Mandela’s lengthy imprisonment, the infamous Rodney King beating and the 1992 LA Riots. Jackson’s racial equality anthem, which was created because of global and anti-Black racism, today sounds more like confirmation of a hopeful dream deferred, especially in light of the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin on my birthday, February 26, and the 2013 inception of the Black Lives Matter movement that continues to be relevant and necessary, and will be so indefinitely. Ironically, Jackson’s “Black or White” exists precisely because race matters. Everything in between Black and white matters.

Amplifying “colorblind” rather than antiracist or color-conscious ideals when the song’s featured rapper L.T.B. declares in his final verse, “I’m not going to spend my life being a color.” Jackson’s “Black or White,” which contains positive if sometimes naïve messages about race and racism, registers like a harmonious fantasy that elides the incredible authority of white patriarchal power and white supremacy (phenomena Jackson’s music video calls attention to throughout, though it is unclear if that is all deliberate).⁶¹ On the heels of the song’s release, overt anti-Black racism and violence persisted. Such racism is arguably even more visible now in the post-postracial twenty-first-century, in part, because of how easily racist content moves across the internet and the globe.⁶² If it was unclear or seemed irrelevant to some people in the late twentieth century when the world first heard “Black or White,” it is certainly apparent now that being white matters, as does being Black and all that lies between Black and white in the racial hierarchy. That it matters, and how it matters, is an integral premise of this book, which situates itself among a range of scholarly and non-academic work invested in antiracism and/or undoing the invisibility of racialized whiteness: texts such as Little, Jr.’s Shakespeare Jungle Fever and White People in Shakespeare, Smith’s Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance and Black Shakespeare, Crystal M. Fleming’s How to Be Less Stupid about Race, and even D. L. Hughley’s How Not to Get Shot: And Other Advice from White People.⁶³

Racial Blackness and whiteness are understood today as social constructions, rather than biological realities. Even so, race still matters significantly in virtually all conversations that involve human beings.⁶⁴ To understand this reality, one must consider what it means to be Black and what it means to be white, for the white other exists precisely because of those two racial categories. To that end, I offer first a definition of Blackness, since both white and white other depend on the devaluing of it. With Toni Morrison’s (Playing in the Dark) and Hall’s examinations of “blackness” as a guide, I deploy “Black” and “blackness” here with respect to “the denotative and connotative blackness that African peoples have come to signify, as well as the entire range of views, assumptions, readings, and misreadings that accompany Eurocentric learning about these people.”⁶⁵ How the Black person, and literal and metaphorical blackness, gets written about, and read, informs anti-Black ideas and even the socio-political reception of real Black people. Morrison’s attention to what she calls the “carefully invented Africanist presence”⁶⁶ in literature resonates with how Hall uses “‘blackness’ and ‘black’ to cover both social practices and cultural categories” that then allow her to discuss Black “Africans and African-descended people” across time and space – then and now, here and there.⁶⁷ I find Morrison’s and Hall’s attention to Blackness and blackness to be useful aids for establishing the parameters defining the Black/white binary as I consider what lies in the gray area between those two racialized categories that are treated as racially oppositional.⁶⁸ That gray area is where I locate the white other, a figure “marked as ‘white,’” much like Hero, who is metaphorically blackened in a pit of ink.

Because Blackness and its meaning constantly gets policed by white hegemony, and because Blackness is thought to reflect whatever whiteness is not or sometimes even to serve as a surrogate for whiteness,⁶⁹ whiteness is more challenging to define.⁷⁰ Whiteness is afforded the liberty and privilege to mean whatever it needs to mean in any given moment, since white people retain systemic control⁷¹ and since “whiteness is coterminous with domination,” as scholar Zeus Leonardo posits.⁷² Despite the definitional difficulty, I lean on one understanding of whiteness and acknowledge others to offer deep consideration of this complex, elusive racial category. Whiteness, and negotiations of it, depend on a dynamic elucidated by sociologist Matthew W. Hughey’s definition of whiteness that explicitly aids our understanding of the white other: Whiteness is “a configuration of meanings and practices that simultaneously produce and maintain racial cohesion and difference in two main ways: (1) through positioning those marked as ‘white’ as essentially different from and superior to those marked ‘non-white’, and (2) through marginalizing practices of ‘being white’ that fail to exemplify dominant ideals.”⁷³ Simply put, being white and being marked as white do not mean the same thing, hence the distinction between white and white other.

Beyond Hughey’s useful articulation of what racial whiteness is, there are other ways to think about this racial category, in addition to the following definition that frames whiteness as a figurative and literal imitation of socio-cultural superiority and moral goodness, broadly speaking. As a carefully curated imitation of the things it seeks to represent and embody (whether it be innocence,⁷⁴ supremacy, honor, chastity, beauty,⁷⁵ and so on), the white identity exists as a social, political, cultural chameleon whose ability to morph at a moment’s notice enhances whiteness’ overall purpose and power:⁷⁶ Morphing is a survival mechanism designed specifically to protect, serve, and preserve the myth of the stable ideal white self.⁷⁷ That the white self can transform is what makes it especially dangerous; and this danger is, in part, what links the white identity and whiteness to violence,⁷⁸ since there are no conditions under which the ideal white self will not work to protect itself amid its constant striving for perfection – what idealized whiteness ultimately, and perhaps frustratingly, represents for the dominant culture.⁷⁹

The unattainable goal of perfection makes narrowing down a singular definition of whiteness a difficult, if not impossible, task. Yet, if I had to create a definition, it would be this: At its core, whiteness is a violent, incestuous, interdependent power system; within this system, it is essential that white females birth, nurture, and celebrate the white males who own, oppress, and “protect” them. The chameleon aspect of the white identity helps explain why it has been so challenging for scholars, and even white people themselves, to define whiteness concretely. On the one hand, locating an exact definition is a futile endeavor, since malleability⁸⁰ and invisibility are core components of whiteness, which will be forever changing. On the other hand, as the meaning of racialized whiteness constantly changes, it makes sense that various ways of understanding it would manifest, given that one of the greatest strengths of whiteness and white supremacy is to generate chaos and confusion – or what Morrison succinctly describes as “distraction.”⁸¹ The ability simultaneously to destroy and re-produce its own meaning, to seem simple but be “a conglomeration of diverse and complex shapes or forms that resist organisation,”⁸² is what makes whiteness so intriguing, so prevailing.

Power in its many forms is what aligns various theorists’ different articulations about racial whiteness, which is “a product of institutionalized power.”⁸³ Beyond the literal authority instilled in white, or fair, skin and bodies,⁸⁴ whiteness also possesses metaphorical⁸⁵ power that makes its meaning boundless. In The Souls of White Folk, cited in my Introduction’s second epigraph, Watson presents whiteness “as a way of seeing and knowing the world that masquerades as universality and remains largely unnamed and unrecognized.” Watson continues, “It is exposed as a mode of social organization that is shaped by skin-color privilege and that is inextricably enmeshed with other vectors of identity such as gender, class, sexual orientation, and the organization of space.”⁸⁶ Like Leonardo, Watson links domination and violence to the white identity, specifically by reflecting on how whiteness takes up and occupies space.⁸⁷ And who gets to exist where, and who gets what, in society is very much determined by the racial hierarchy and white superiority, as legal scholars Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic assert in their assessment of the “binary thinking” that generally positions white in contrast to Black or non-white.⁸⁸ Yet, as Shakespeare’s White Others argues, white necessarily stands in contrast to white other, a fact that enables the logic that drives my intraracial color-line theory.

Occupying a position of superiority always, whiteness, according to scholar-activist Peggy McIntosh, inherently comes with a set of privileges⁸⁹ made possible by the assets that are white skin and the overall symbolic goodness of whiteness, which legal scholar Cheryl I. Harris describes as “simultaneously an aspect of identity and a property interest.” Harris adds that whiteness “is something that can both be experienced and deployed as a resource. Whiteness can move from being a passive characteristic as an aspect of identity to an active entity that – like other types of property – is used to fulfill the will and to exercise systemic power.”⁹⁰ Shakespeare’s White Others adds to contemporary understandings of the various meanings of whiteness⁹¹ by positioning it as a systemic problem, a colossal socio-political, psychological, and intellectual problem that perpetuates violence and destruction. Approaching this matter slightly differently than Judith H. Katz, who defines racism as white people’s problem,⁹² I use this study and its theoretical interventions to define the various machinations of racial whiteness as the problem. There is not a single Shakespeare play where such figures are not causing racialized problems.

(De)Centering Whiteness

Shakespearean drama is an exceptionally generative site for interrogating the definitional problems of racial whiteness and Blackness, and for understanding whiteness’ dependency on Blackness to generate its own racialized meaning and subsequently the meaning of “white other.” For instance, in Romeo and Juliet’s climax, Shakespeare illustrates how easy it is to valorize whiteness through contrasting, color-coded sentiments that reject blackness and deem it inferior. Fantasizing about her new husband, Juliet passionately says in a soliloquy:

Throughout this passage,⁹³ Juliet beckons blackness, which carries whiteness forward, to augment the beautiful vibrancy of Romeo’s racial whiteness.⁹⁴ With the raven allusion in particular, the anti-blackness of Juliet’s metaphorical love language provides an interesting example of white females’ complicity in upholding the superiority of whiteness and patriarchal authority and the alleged inferiority of Blackness. Juliet transforms Romeo into the day and instills his whiteness (and hers through the marriage) with supreme power. Exalted, her husband is the brightness in night’s darkness, so stellar that he and his whiteness outdo the sun. Juliet even creates an image of hyperwhiteness, a topic I cover in Chapter 1, by making Romeo whiter than snow. She employs blackness to paint this picture. In the form of the tiny stars that are mentioned, Juliet’s rhetoric and Romeo’s whiteness do racialized work by decentering blackness – the raven, the night – to emphasize the centrality of a particular kind of whiteness, which is here equated with light. Night, or blackness, becomes lovable only once its proximity to whiteness is visible. Dangerous because of its furtive anti-blackness, Juliet’s logic is psychologically violent. Furthermore, by positioning the “little stars” in opposition to the sun, her sentiments transform the sun into a light source that is less than Romeo, who is the ideal light and thus the ideal white man.

Homing in on the problematic aspect of whiteness specifically linked to the violence and anti-Blackness generated by the intraracial color-line distinguishes this book from past studies that have in some fashion considered whiteness and/or otherness in relationship to religious, skin color, or ethnic difference. Similar to Matthieu Chapman, whose Anti-Black Racism in Early Modern English Drama: The Other “Other” insightfully deploys Afro-pessimism and “argues for the divide between black and non-black as the primary determinant of humanity for both those with an English gaze and those recognized as their Other,”⁹⁵ I examine a divide between Black and non-Black. However, my pronounced antiracist agenda exclusively others whiteness, recognizing the strangeness of racially white people, the “normative subjects” who are of the same hue, blood, household, gender, religion, social class, culture, and/or ethnicity as one another.⁹⁶

In that respect, my study also differs from Mary Floyd-Wilson’s English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama, which relies on “geohumoralism”⁹⁷ to propose, among other things, that we “reinterpret the Englishmen’s encounters with West Africa with the understanding that their own sense of whiteness and ethnicity was in flux.”⁹⁸ As I make clear above and throughout this book, the dominant culture’s understanding of whiteness will remain in flux so long as white people embrace white supremacy instead of antiracist practices that acknowledge and interrogate the systemically racist underpinnings of society;⁹⁹ take seriously “the history, politics, psychology, and sociology of race relations”;¹⁰⁰ resist reinforcing white superiority through the devaluation of Blackness;¹⁰¹ and directly confront the anti-Black racism and systemic oppression that are integral to the white other’s existence.¹⁰² Like Jean Feerick – who, in Strangers in Blood, employs the “system of race-as-blood”¹⁰³ to explain early modern emerging racial discourse and distinctions that make Black Othello racially superior to white Iago in her reading¹⁰⁴ – Floyd-Wilson maintains an investment in discussing race in a way that destabilizes modern notions of racial construction rooted in premodernity. In so doing, Feerick and Floyd-Wilson sidestep the urgent need to confront racism and anti-Blackness in Shakespeare’s time and our own. Contrastingly, Shakespeare’s White Others illustrates how it is in fact whiteness’ embodiment and mediation of Blackness and blackness that nuance and reinforce the “white over black” racial hierarchy both Feerick’s and Floyd-Wilson’s analyses contradict, contradictions that Dennis Austin Britton provides a useful counter to in Becoming Christian: Race, Reformation, and Early Modern English Romance.¹⁰⁵

Patricia Akhimie’s Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference bears close resemblance to Shakespeare’s White Others due to its engagement with conduct and its concern with cultivating personal behavior. Yet, whereas Akhimie’s text reads the body through both Black and white bodies, and “focuse[s] on conduct literature as a potential source for understanding the production of race through the promotion of stigmatized somatic difference and the racialization of class difference,” I concentrate on the somatic sameness of white and white other figures to think exclusively about how racial formation necessitates understanding the inner workings of marked whiteness.¹⁰⁶ Building on Leslie A. Fiedler’s The Strangers in Shakespeare (Stein and Day, 1973), Marianne Novy’s Shakespeare and Outsiders acknowledges how “many of Shakespeare’s characters move between inside and outside,” but, unlike Shakespeare’s White Others, Novy’s text is not invested in analyzing the distinction between characters being marked as white and enacting the power of racial whiteness.¹⁰⁷ Novy is not concerned with how the other is always more near than far: As I suggest, when the self “invents an other,” the boundaries of power and status are determined in direct relationship to the self.¹⁰⁸

The intraracial color-line allows for exploration of the racial polarity between Black and white by putting pressure on distinctions within whiteness. While I do not focus comprehensively on religious difference in this text, I would like to call attention here to Jews in the Early Modern English Imagination, a study in which Eva Johanna Holmberg acknowledges the instability of Jewish people’s designations as Others with respect to their bodily appearance.¹⁰⁹ For early modern English people, it was largely Jewish people’s religion that made them different; what we might interpret as Jewish people’s seemingly diminished whiteness, associated with what Christians interpreted as their spiritual blackness. Adding to this conversation by using The Merchant of Venice as a guide, Lynda E. Boose observes how “Shylock in particular raises special problems. According to the prevailing connection between skin color and race, ‘Jewishness’ is not a race; nonetheless, it was and still is treated as if it were – as if Jews and Christians were separated by something (beyond white otherness) more incontrovertible than religious differences alone.”¹¹⁰ (While thorough consideration of Jewishness is outside of this project’s scope, I want to note that Shylock does fit into the white other category, albeit in a rather complex way.) In agreement with historian Nell Irvin Painter, I am convinced “the meanings of white race reach into concepts of labor, gender, and class and images of personal beauty.”¹¹¹ This is evident in Shakespeare’s drama, for example, through the application of “fair” across religiously and culturally different groups. And this evidence opens up possibilities for extracting meaning from intraracial moments and for learning how they inform our understanding of anti-Blackness and racism, even in the subtlest ways, as I assert in the following analyses of Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, Antony and Cleopatra, Othello, and The Comedy of Errors.

Seeing Race: “I Sit With Shakespeare and He Winces Not”¹¹²

As the previous section stresses, the color-line matters. Introduced in Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk, the color-line emerged as a theoretical tool for identifying and explaining the systemic global and domestic interracial, racist dilemmas one can see and assess with the naked eye, even in Shakespeare’s oeuvre.¹¹³ The interracial color-line establishes race and racism as ocular phenomena that depend on people perceiving differences between Black and white and, of course, assigning seemingly fixed meanings to those differences that are not natural or biologically significant, but socially prescribed and constructed.¹¹⁴ Despite being discussed at the turn of the twentieth century, the interracial “race feud”¹¹⁵ Du Bois described in his writing has undoubtedly bled into the twenty-first century globally. Anti-Black racism has been a problem in American society since its inception; and history indicates this is also true in relationship to the development of Britain, as historian Peter Fryer argues.

Considering how British history has been represented, for instance, Fryer succinctly asserts that “the official version of our history labels itself as ‘patriotic’. It is more accurately described as conservative, nationalist, and racist.”¹¹⁶ In other words, if one is looking for more racially inclusive depictions of the British past, certain studies that position themselves as capturing that history tell a racially biased version of reality.¹¹⁷ Other studies overtly omit important historical information about the Black existence.¹¹⁸ Nikole Hannah-Jones argues in The 1619 Project that the same is true for the past telling of American history.¹¹⁹ Within British Black history, there is evidence that Peter Negro, a Black man, provided service to the state;¹²⁰ there were “five Africans [who] arrived to learn English and thereby facilitate trade” in 1555;¹²¹ Black domestic servants and entertainers were brought in by the English courts in the sixteenth-century;¹²² John Blanke was “the ‘blacke trumpeter’” associated with the courts of Henry VII and Henry VIII;¹²³ and Iberian Africans resided in the homes of Jewish Conversos.¹²⁴ Beyond these smaller examples, Imtiaz Habib declares in Black Lives in the English Archives that the “documentary materials” he utilized indicate the “plentifulness of black people in early modern England.”¹²⁵ Fryer’s fierce indictment of British history and historians aligns the past and present by positioning racism as the common ground between then and now. Moreover, his critique of the British past, and how it is discussed in the present, says a lot about the anti-Black white world in which Shakespeare lived, wrote, and produced his art.

The Du Boisian color-line stresses the tensions between Black and white, and so does the intraracial color-line, this book’s ideological driving force, which I use to expose the tensions within whiteness. Such tensions often exploit dominant, negative narratives about blackness and Black people. This is why (as noted previously) racial whiteness is at war with itself and, thus, exists as a figurative but also very real phenomenon that must be fought against – from within and from without. Shakespeare’s White Others concerns itself with reflecting on, observing, and paying attention to the external and the internal, or psychological, conflicts that are a byproduct of both intraracial and interracial tensions. For me, a Black man and Shakespeare scholar, the racial tensions are best exposed by and fought against with theoretical antiracist weaponry like the intraracial color-line and the white other, concepts engineered to explode the race conversation and to shatter harmful white hegemonic views and values that degrade blackness and Black people because of whiteness’ crisis of conflict with itself.

Mining Whiteness

Where there are people, there you will find race, because race is always happening.¹²⁶ Race always matters and makes meaning, even when racialized whiteness is the only quality on display. While Shakespeare’s White Others examines one English dramatist’s canon to generate a specific critical conversation, this study by no means suggests that Shakespeare is the only early modern author, or dramatist, whose work can aid understanding about whiteness, race, and the intraracial color-line, for other scholars have considered whiteness in drama and elsewhere.¹²⁷ Rather, Shakespeare’s work is a way to contain this conversation about the white other that I believe extends to his contemporaries, who also produced interracial as well as racially homogenous plays like Hamlet, the subject of Chapter 2.¹²⁸

To bolster its arguments, Shakespeare’s White Others alludes to a range of Shakespeare plays, including Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado About Nothing, Henry V, The Merchant of Venice, Troilus and Cressida, Love’s Labour’s Lost, As You Like It, The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale, Twelfth Night, and Macbeth. Additionally, as previously mentioned there are five core plays at the heart of my four chapters and the Conclusion. Titus Andronicus’ racial triangulation among the Romans, Goths and Moors makes it a fitting play to introduce the intraracial color-line and several of the white other’s distinguishing features. Hamlet, beyond dramatizing the tensions between white racial identity and masculinity, nuances the race discussion in a play that only features white characters. I find Antony and Cleopatra valuable for its illustration of how white(ned) women are used to reaffirm white supremacy and patriarchal power. With Iago’s extreme attention to sex and psychological violence, Othello brings into view the psychology of white people’s racism. And lastly, in the Conclusion, The Comedy of Errors reminds us how the profiling and stereotyping of people is dangerous and, depending on what one looks like, even deadly – especially if one is Black.

While critiquing Shakespeare’s dramatic literature and interrogating premodern and contemporary issues, Shakespeare’s White Others simultaneously capitalizes on and overwrites the years of education that brought me to this intellectual point. By that I mean that interrogating and studying whiteness, and critiquing whiteness, was not an extensive part of my educational training. As one can observe in modern debates, such as the widespread opposition to critical race theory in the USA, UK, and beyond,¹²⁹ critiquing whiteness and the history of white dominance is not a formal part of most people’s education. In 1996, Hall said as much in her pedagogically oriented article “Beauty and the Beast of Whiteness: Teaching Race and Gender.”¹³⁰ Shakespeare’s White Others, then, consciously and conscientiously follows a theoretically antiracist program of action to see and center whiteness, so that people can continue to further their understanding of its functions and idiosyncrasies. I intend for this book to show readers how to apply the intraracial color-line in and beyond Shakespearean drama, for the intraracial color-line is also relevant in our modern world. In the following chapter descriptions, I outline how mining whiteness – actively digging into this racial category – yields racial knowledge from Shakespeare’s dramatic works.

Chapter 1, “Somatic Similarity: The White Other in Titus Andronicus,” primarily critiques Shakespeare’s first tragedy to expose the presence of the intraracial color-line. I begin with this tragedy because it is the Shakespeare play that most efficiently showcases the white/white other binary slippage produced by the intraracial color-line, which separates the play’s white characters along spiritual and moral lines. I use Titus pedagogically to guide the reader’s understanding of the intraracial color-line so they can then apply that concept both in subsequent chapters and outside of the plays analyzed here. Shakespeare’s oeuvre is replete with appearances of the white other. This gateway chapter challenges the easy assumption that one needs somatic Blackness in order to discuss race, in order for race to be happening. I seek to understand: What is Titus without Aaron? Building on Francesca Royster’s field-changing work featured in Shakespeare Quarterly, Chapter 1 reveals Titus’ concerns with examining white-on-white violence and violations – intrafamilial, intraracial, and intracultural. This chapter demands that readers put whiteness under the microscope to see how intraracial otherness works even in unexpected places, such as the gruesome pasties Titus bakes.

As I argued previously in “Code Black: Whiteness and Unmanliness in Hamlet,” Shakespeare nuances intraracial conflict in Hamlet, the subject of Chapter 2: “Engendering the Fall of White Masculinity.”¹³¹ Drawing on race-centered Hamlet scholarship by Ian Smith, Patricia Parker, and Peter Erickson, and alluding to work edited by Scott Newstok and Ayanna Thompson, this chapter offers a racially focused analysis of this rich text that centers white people watching other white people. Hamlet surveys deviations from ideal white conduct and reveals how gender expectations are violated and how white people repeatedly disrespect, only to redefine, socially constructed racialized boundaries. I offer a critique of Hamlet that directly associates white unmanliness with Denmark’s “rotten” state, its socio-political ruin. Specifically, I read the intraracial discord against the play’s structure as a decomposition process. Hamlet depicts uncouth, less-than-ideal whiteness in relationship to gender expectations: Unmanliness gets coded as black, so the play can suggest that certain Danish figures do not epitomize ideal white masculinity. Defining one side of the intraracial color-line, these characters contrast with the deceased valiant Old Hamlet as well as Young Fortinbras, the Norwegian savior who closes Hamlet by restoring ideal masculine whiteness and patriarchal hegemonic values after the predominant white others are purged in Act 5.

Transitioning to Antony and Cleopatra, after beginning with brief analyses of white hands in Shakespeare plays such as The Winter’s Tale and Henry V, Chapter 3 homes in on the intersection of femininity and race to put pressure on Antony’s curious whitening of the Black Egyptian Queen’s hand in the play’s climactic Act. Extending the second chapter’s direct emphasis on gender, “On the Other Hand: The White(ned) Woman in Antony and Cleopatra” positions Cleopatra as collateral damage, caught in the play’s intraracial crossfire. This chapter depicts the significant dangers of the whiteness that gets magically mapped onto Cleopatra’s Black body so she can momentarily become a form of what Arthur L. Little, Jr. has described in Shakespeare Quarterly as “Shakespearean white property.”¹³² Through the Black Queen’s whitened body and her interracial relationship with Antony (and by extension, the ensuing intraracial tensions caused by Antony’s movement between Egypt and Rome), I further complicate the white other concept to reflect on integral matters such as white property, white dominance, and white women as props: patriarchal, racial, theatrical, cultural, social, political, economic, domestic props. Chapter 3 closes by scrutinizing how white hands¹³³ are always implicated in violence and by asserting that white dominance permits white people to play the ultimate race card – the ace of spades in the invisible race card deck.¹³⁴

Chapter 4, “‘Hear Me, See Me’: Sex, Violence and Silence in Othello,” reflects on the psychological and physical consequences of sexual violence in and beyond Othello – that is to say, in contemporary times. I argue that the white identity formation process, and allegiance to its ideals, inherently impedes racial equality. The process itself works to reify white superiority. This is evident as I apply the intraracial color-line theory mainly to readings of Iago, the play’s most visible and vocal white other. In conjunction with readings of Othello, I look back at the transatlantic slave trade and examine the trajectory of white violence that has led to Black silence and the de-victimization of Black boys and men; this is one of many reasons psychologists suggest Black males are not always heard, much like Othello, when it comes to their experiences with sexual and non-sexual violence. With some historical examples in mind, I return to Shakespeare’s canon to reflect on how early modern texts amplify the “white voice,” a concept Jennifer Stoever and I have examined elsewhere.¹³⁵ Within this analysis I accentuate the personal-critical-experiential to consider the Black male Shakespearean voice and how it can get silenced by white people. Ultimately, I assert that the intraracial color-line and the real-life existence of the white other are impediments to racial equality.

My Othello reading in particular demonstrates the possibilities for post-modern critical, pedagogical, and theatrical application of my book’s theoretical concerns. Shakespeare’s White Others’ formal conclusion engages The Comedy of Errors to reaffirm how race always matters. I argue that The Comedy of Errors’ concern with mistaken identity resonates with the modern Black experience. While considering my book’s preoccupation with the effects of racism, othering, anti-Blackness and racial profiling, I turn to Akhimie’s Comedy of Errors literary criticism to consider how one can be “bruised with adversity” not just physically, but also psychologically.¹³⁶ The Conclusion’s title plays on the name of Shakespeare’s comedy because, as I see it, anti-blackness and anti-Black racism position white people, including white others, in opposition to Black people in what feels like a theatrical comedy of (t)errors: a space that is a genre of its own and akin to Negro-Sarah’s funnyhouse environment in Adrienne Kennedy’s play Funnyhouse of a Negro.¹³⁷ Racial tribulation is a life sentence tied to the Black existence. As scholar Troy Duster reminds us, Black people “have been engaged in white studies, [and the study of white people], for at least three centuries.”¹³⁸ With all of that understood, the very last words of Shakespeare’s White Others appear in the form of an artifact, a letter written at the turn of the twenty-first century by a Black adolescent who was on the verge of adulthood and registering all that the Black experience of racial profiling entails. This letter documents a real-life experience of beginning to understand fully the race-based policing of bodies and the effects of the Du Boisian and Stoeverian color-lines, the combination of which left this Black adolescent psychologically bruised with adversity.