Description

SHAKESPEARE: increasingly irrelevant or lone literary genius of the Western canon?

‘Powerful and illuminating’ James Shapiro, author of 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, winner of the Baillie Gifford ‘Winner of Winners’ 2023

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 twenty-first century. We might expand and enrich his extraordinary legacy. We might even fall in love with him all over again.

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A TIME MAGAZINE BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023

‘Insightful, passionate, piled with facts and has a warm, infectious love for theatre and Shakespeare running through every chapter.’ ADRIAN LESTER, CBE

‘Dive in and your whole cultural landscape will be refreshed and reframed… A challenging, riveting read, The Great White Bard reminds us how powerful the stories we tell can be on our lives.’ ADJOA ANDOH

‘Vivid… a thorough analysis but also a kind of love letter… Karim-Cooper sees Shakespeare as holding a mirror to this society, with his plays interrogating live issues around race, identity and the colonial enterprise… Her arguments come to feel essential and should be absorbed by every theatre director, writer, critic, interested in finding new ways into the work.’ GUARDIAN

‘There are plenty of books on Shakespeare: but this one is different. This is Shakespeare as we’ve (most of us) never been willing to see him – and the works emerge from the analysis as newly complicit, powerful and yet recuperative.’ EMMA SMITH, AUTHOR OF PORTABLE MAGIC

Publisher Review

'This glorious book... is insightful, passionate, piled with facts and has a warm, infectious love for theatre and Shakespeare running through every chapter. Thank you to Farah Karim-Cooper for underlining the fact that we all have a right to claim Shakespeare's work.' -- Adrian Lester CBE 'There are plenty of books on Shakespeare: but this one is different. This is Shakespeare as we've (most of us) never been willing to see him - and the works emerge from the analysis as newly complicit, powerful and yet recuperative.' -- Emma Smith 'Farah Karim-Cooper's analysis comes from a wide and fascinating perspective. This is an accessible yet scholarly book guiding the reader through essential questions about race, gender and so much more in Shakespeare's plays. It is personal, refreshing and necessary. She has helped me reframe and understand Shakespeare in a different way. Read it and learn!' -- Lolita Chakrabarti OBE 'The Great White Bard is essential reading for teachers, students, practitioners and artists. It makes clear why the exploration of Shakespeare's plays must expose the 400-year-old cultural attitudes contained in them if we are to discover their real relevance and resonance. Farah Karim-Cooper has written an important, illuminating and accessible work that invites our active participation in debate about the plays; to interpret and interrogate them, not to venerate. It belongs in every Shakespeare classroom.' -- Jacqui O'Hanlon, Director of Learning, Royal Shakespeare Company 'The Great White Bard is conscientiously constructed and vitally important. The book is pitched perfectly for the general reader, and it provides clear and compelling models for how to read Shakespeare with race in mind.' -- Ayanna Thompson, author of Blackface 'Anyone reading the contents page alone of Dr Farah Karim-Cooper's The Great White Bard will have their minds blown. Dive in and your whole cultural landscape will be refreshed and reframed. A book of great scholastic yet accessible detail, demanding that we pay attention with new understanding to the work of our greatest playwright, to the staging of that work and its unacknowledged impact on the 21st-century lives of all of us who unwittingly absorb its cultural norms - for good and ill. A challenging, riveting read, The Great White Bard reminds us how powerful the stories we tell can be on our lives.' -- Adjoa Andoh