The Great White Bard - Shakespeare, Race and the Future
By Farah Karim-Cooper

SHAKESPEARE: increasingly irrelevant or lone literary genius of the Western canon?'Powerful and illuminating'and James Shapiro, author ofand 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, winner of the Baillie Gifford 'Winner of Winners' 2023Professor Farah Karim-Cooper grew up loving the Bard, perhaps becauseand Romeo and Julietand 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 fromand Othelloand toand The Tempestand with a radical reappraisal of Elizabethan London,and The Great White Bardand 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.***Aand TIME MAGAZINEand BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023'Insightful, passionate, piled with factsand and has a warm, infectious love for theatre and Shakespeare running through every chapter.'and ADRIAN LESTER, CBE'Dive in andand your whole cultural landscape will be refreshed and reframed... A challenging, riveting read,and The Great White Bardand reminds us how powerful the stories we tell can beand on our lives.'and ADJOA ANDOH'Vivid… a thorough analysis but alsoand 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…and Her arguments come to feel essential and should be absorbed by every theatre director, writer, critic, interested in finding new ways into the work.'and GUARDIAN'There are plenty of books on Shakespeare: but this one is different. This isand Shakespeare as we've (most of us) never been willing to see himand - and the works emerge from the analysis as newly complicit, powerful and yet recuperative.'and EMMA SMITH, AUTHOR OFand PORTABLE MAGIC