Welcome to Shakespeare’s Stages, a resource designed to introduce you to the key features of the theatrical spaces for which Shakespeare wrote his plays, in which he worked as an actor, and in which he had a financial stake. Like Shakespeare’s narrative sources, the members of his acting company, and the political climate of early modern England, these spaces had a powerful shaping influence on the conception, dramatic design, and performance of Shakespeare’s plays.

It would be ideal if history had gifted us an accurate picture of what each of these spaces was like. Sadly, that couldn’t be further from the case: we have no complete picture of any of the London playing spaces from the period, and much of what we (think we) know of the Globe and the Blackfriars can only been inferred from evidence relating to other playing spaces. Reconstructing these spaces requires piecing together fragments: chiefly, the architectural foundations of the Rose, Curtain, and Theatre playhouses, along with a tiny portion of the Globe, and a copy of a Dutch tourist’s sketch of the Swan playhouse’s interior.

Welcome to Shakespeare’s Stages, a resource designed to introduce you to the key features of the theatrical spaces for which Shakespeare wrote his plays, in which he worked as an actor, and in which he had a financial stake. Like Shakespeare’s narrative sources, the members of his acting company, and the political climate of early modern England, these spaces had a powerful shaping influence on the conception, dramatic design, and performance of Shakespeare’s plays.

Scholarly discussions of race in Othello have almost exclusively focused on the eponymous character.1 Often forgotten is another Moorish character the play evokes, even if she does not make an appearance on the stage: Barbary, the maidservant Desdemona remembers in the Folio version and with whose tragic story she identifies to process her own experience of rejection and grief.2 Barbary is an example of those women about whom Kim F. Hall wondered: why, ‘[w]hile feminists are increasingly uncovering the voices and presence of white Englishwomen’, do ‘women of color … [even though] clearly a presence in … sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, … remain “invisible women” existing at the margins of English culture and current critical practice[?]’.3 Barbary’s near absence from the critical response to the play is paralleled by the excision of her story in the early decades of the twentieth century when act 4, scene 3 was routinely cut from performances.4 This article seeks to fill this gap by arguing that Barbary, a figure with no counterpart in Shakespeare’s principal source, Giraldi Cinthio’s Hecatommithi (1565), is crucial to the play’s engagement with race and gender. Through Barbary, Othello challenges stereotyped racist and sexist representations of Moorish female servants on the early modern stage, often characterized by contempt for their alleged lustfulness, treachery, and unfaithfulness to (often) white mistresses.5 Othello’s depiction of Barbary also subverts contemporary visual and theatrical portrayals of Moorish maidservants that reduce them to figures of Otherness whose Black skin serves as a racial background against which the whiteness of their mistresses’ skin – and so those mistresses’ privilege, status and virtue – shine.

This chapter explains how and why The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race would have been nearly impossible to create thirty years ago. It traces how the volume requires scholars who know not only Shakespeare’s works, the historical and cultural milieu of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries in England and Europe, and the archives that hold the historical documents from these time periods, but also the history of imperialism, alternative archives that reveal more about the various lives of people of color in the early modern world, and the history of Shakespeare’s employment in various theatrical, educational, and political moments in history – from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first century. Post-colonial studies, African American studies, critical race studies, and queer studies allow scholars to apply new methodologies to Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

Surveying Shakespeare adaptations in Classical Hollywood from the failure of Sam Taylors Taming of the Shrew in 1929 to the final triumph of Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar in 1953, this chapter looks at how Hollywood film endeavoured to become the ‘new Shakespeare’ while Shakespeare film adaptation gained the reputation for being, as Louis B. Mayer famously declared, ‘box office poison’. Focusing on the marketing of Hollywood Shakespeare adaptations, the chapter reveals how in their eagerness to please everyone, promoters of these films reveal some of the underpinning strategies for adapting Shakespeare in Classical Hollywood. ‘Exploitation’ and ‘showmanship’ (terms used in film marketing in Classical Hollywood) offer an approach to film adaptation that focuses on the consumer rather than the author, the adaptation not as interpretation but as product, not as something to be revered, but as something to be sold.

The stranger was everywhere in early modern England. Part of a larger project about sixteenth and seventeenth century English perceptions of identity, human mobility, and belonging, this article shows how the Comedy of Errors unfolds against the backdrop of the city of London’s own troubled relationship with ‘strangers’

In the debate around Shakespeare and 9/11, the question of Shakespeare’s political uses tends to be addressed only in the most oblique of ways. As Matthew Biberman, the editor of Shakespeare Yearbook’s special issue on the theme, notes, criticism typically retreats into a looser discussion of ‘the role that canonical texts can play in the development of ethical, philosophical and civic frameworks’.