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The Great White Bard: How to Love Shakespeare While Talking About Race
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About This Book
As we witness monuments of white Western history fall, many are asking how is Shakespeare still relevant ? Professor Farah Karim-Cooper has dedicated her career to the Bard, which is why she wants to take the playwright down from his pedestal to unveil a Shakespeare for the twenty-first century. 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. Combining piercing analysis of race, gender and otherness in famous plays from Antony and Cleopatra to The Tempest with a radical reappraisal of Elizabethan London, The Great White Bard asks us neither to idealize nor bury Shakespeare but instead to look him in the eye and reckon with the discomforts of his plays, playhouses and society. In inviting new perspectives and interpretations, we may yet prolong and enrich his extraordinary legacy.
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Reviews
"The rigorous and nuanced analysis stimulates, and Karim-Cooper's evenhanded approach refuses to excuse Shakespeare's racism while insisting that his plays still have much to offer modern audiences."
"Shakespeare's canon is robust enough to take it."
"The author is most convincing when she insists that readers consider "how students… or actors of colour… can get to grips with the excessively valued and quite sublime poetry that just happens to, at times, diminish their own bodies."
"Contributes to an essential discussion on Shakespeare and race, one that must include literary scholars, historians, etymologists, audiences and, yes, even actors."
"Karim-Cooper's candid discussion of more nuanced and informed approaches to interpreting Shakespeare can only help his work endure."
"There are moments, all the same, when Karim-Cooper's prose is suffused with a genuine passion for the subject at hand ..."
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