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The Great White Bard

Shakespeare, Race and the Future

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About this listen

Professor Farah Karim-Cooper grew up loving the Bard, perhaps because Romeo and Juliet felt Pakistani to her. But why was being white as a ‘snowy dove’ essential to Juliet’s beauty?

Combining piercing analysis of race, gender and otherness in beloved plays from Othello to The Tempest with a radical reappraisal of Elizabethan London, The Great White Bard entreats us neither to idealise nor to fossilise Shakespeare but instead to look him in the eye and reckon with the discomforts of his plays, playhouses and society.

If we persist in reading Shakespeare as representative of only one group, as the very pinnacle of the white Western canon, then he will truly be in peril. But if we dare to bring Shakespeare down from his plinth, we might unveil a playwright for the 21st century. We might expand and enrich his extraordinary legacy. We might even fall in love with him all over again.

©2023 Farah Karim-Cooper (P)2023 Penguin Random House LLC Education Europe Literary History & Criticism Renaissance Shakespeare

Critic reviews

'It is personal, refreshing and necessary.' (Lolita Chakrabarti OBE, award winning playwright of Life of Pi)
'The Great White Bard is conscientiously constructed and vitally important.' (Ayanna Thompson, author of Blackface)
All stars
Most relevant
This will make you want to revisit familiar plays, characters and passages with opened eyes. Wonderfully crafted, paced and narrated. Wish I’d had this book at university!

Eye-opening and highly necessary!

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