‘Is Shakespeare Racist?’ Asks New Oxford University Anthology of the Bard’s Plays



Whether Shakespeare was racist or not is a time-honored question, almost as old as the bard himself.

But Oxford University Press, the largest university press in the world, which has been publishing the complete works of Shakespeare since 1891,  has revived the hotly debated question its latest anthology, The New Oxford Shakespeare. The book is being published to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the greatest English playwright.

In a blog post headlined “Is Shakespeare Racist?” on the Oxford University Press website, Gary Taylor, the lead General Editor of The New Oxford Shakespeare, delves into over the content of plays such as Othello—in which the eponymous soldier is called a “lascivious moor” and a “wheeling stranger”—and The Merchant of Venice, which consistently faces accusations of anti-semitism .

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In the post, which is an extract from the General Introduction to The New Oxford Shakespeare, Taylor quotes the political activist H. Rap Brown, who claimed, “After I read Othello, it was obvious that Shakespeare was a racist,” and Jon Stewart, who said about Shylock, the Jewish money lender in The Merchant of Venice, on The Daily Show in 2014: ‘Fuck you, Shakespeare! Fuck you!’

Taylor also cites the example of the undergraduate English majors at Yale University who earlier this year petitioned to eliminate the monopoly of “white male poets” (including Shakespeare) in a compulsory introductory course.

But he adds: “Yet against every one of these indictments, Shakespeare’s attorneys can summon a long list of witnesses for the defense” and he highlights the importance of the bard to Nelson Mandela and 19th-century African-American slave Frederick Douglass.

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Taylor concludes: “Shakespeare’s most politically incorrect plays—Taming [of the Shrew], Othello, Merchant of Venice—have become some of his most popular, in theaters and classrooms, precisely because of the controversies surrounding them. Controversy just generates more interest, more dialogue, more connections.”

And Oxford University Press will help that controversy sell more copies of its new work.

Quite apart from the obvious fact that societal attitudes in the centuries following the Middle Ages were completely different to how they are now, aren’t there classier ways to showcase Shakespeare to a new audience?

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