Now they claim that Macbeth promotes white supremacy!
Play’s language ‘racialised’ and Bard himself was a racist, say US experts
EVEN after countless repeat viewings, theatregoers have been known to spot something new in Macbeth.
But it seems unlikely that anyone ever expected to see Shakespeare’s masterpiece at the centre of a race row.
Now, however, an American expert has sparked uproar by claiming the play’s atmospheric references to darkness and black are an attempt to reinforce ideas of white supremacy.
Kathryn Vomero Santos, an assistant professor of English at Trinity University in Texas, insists the Bard’s use of words such as bat, beetle, black and night are examples of what she calls ‘racialised’ language.
The academic, who made her comments in a webinar lecture organised by Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London, highlighted a scene where a character uses the phrase ‘black Macbeth’ to describe the drama’s antihero.
She said: ‘It’s important to help our students see the ways in which a play we might not recognise immediately as a quote-unquote race play is relying on racialised language and playing on the dichotomy of whiteness and blackness and dark and light.’
Ms Vomero Santos added that ‘it’s really important to ask our students how this is not just constructing blackness but also constructing whiteness’.
Meanwhile, US playwright Migdalia Cruz branded Shakespeare a ‘racist’ who used offensive language in the dialogue spoken by the play’s three witches.
Ms Cruz pointed to the use of ‘moor’, ‘Turk’ and ‘Jew’ in the context of the witches’ incantations. She said: ‘A lot of people cut all those things and I thought I am not going to make him not a racist, he is a racist – but he was a racist of his time. Everyone in his time were racists.’ Her comments were made in the same webinar as part of the Globe’s ‘Antiracist Shakespeare’ lectures. But the claims have been dismissed by other academics who say matters of race could not have been further from Shakespeare’s mind when he wrote Macbeth.
Frank Furedi, emeritus professor of sociology at Kent University, said: ‘Within Shakespeare’s text the terms ‘black’, ‘dark’ etc did not have racial connotations and had a very different meaning to what these two women attach to it.’
Historian Jeremy Black, whose books include England in the Age of Shakespeare, said: ‘These criticisms are confused. The idea of blackness as evil and the cover for crime draws on longstanding fears of the dark and should not be confused with racism.’
Shakespeare’s source material for Macbeth, which was first performed in 1606, included coverage of a series of witch trials in East Lothian in the early 1590s.
Bosses at the Globe last night distanced themselves from the idea that Shakespeare was a racist, although they said his plays did contain what they called ‘racist rhetoric’ and ‘anti-black language’.
The Globe’s director of education, Farah Karim-Cooper, said: ‘While we may not agree with everything our participants say, we trust our audiences the way Shakespeare did – to judge for themselves.’
Professor Karim-Cooper added: ‘While we may not agree with the view that Shakespeare was a racist – though we simply will never be able to determine this – it is no secret that at times Shakespeare’s plays contain racist rhetoric, racist humour and anti-black language.’
A spokesman for Shakespeare’s Globe said: ‘Anti-Racist Shakespeare brings together scholars and artists of colour from a wide variety of backgrounds to examine Shakespeare’s plays through the lens of race and social justice.’
‘Shakespeare was racist – everyone was then’