30 Great Myths about Shakespeare Read Online Free PDF

Christian; in Othello the exotic other woman is white, not black, and disaster is caused by her chastity, not her sexuality. As Jean Howard observes, the novelty in Othello is seeing the experience of otherness from the African's, not the European's, point of view. 4
    Something similar happens in Sir Thomas More (written and revised about the same time as Othello according to the play's latest editor, John Jowett, who places More 's composition c .1600 and its revisions in 1604). Sir Thomas More is about two things: immigrants to London (the word for foreigners is “strangers,” a much stronger word than now) and the downfall of Sir Thomas More. In the first half of the play More calms the rioting Londoners, He does this in a speech, added by Shakespeare in 1604, which invites the Londoners to imagine the situation if the positions were reversed: that is, if they were banished:
    whither would you go?
    What country, by the nature of your error,
    Should give you harbour? Go you to France or Flanders
    To any German province, Spain or Portugal,
    Nay, anywhere that not adheres to England:
    Why you must needs be strangers. Would you be pleased
    To find a nation of such barbarous temper
    That, breaking out in hideous violence,
    Would not afford you an abode on earth,
    Whet their detested knives against your throats,
    Spurn you like dogs? …
    What would you think
    To be thus used? This is the strangers' case,
    And this your mountainish inhumanity.
    (Add. II. 6. 141–56)
    In effect he says: get in touch with your inner Fleming; imagine things from the point of view of the outsider. That unusual adjective “mountainish” enacts this flip perfectly: the word suggests the ignorant or uncivilized people of a mountainous region, in order to turn this evocation of otherness onto the self. It's a technique we see again and again in Shakespeare: an imaginative empathy with the minority or persecuted person's point of view.
    And yet it is also true that minorities can be presented critically: the fickle crowds in Julius Caesar and Coriolanus , for instance, or the enslaved Caliban in The Tempest who sees freedom as simply having a new master:
    No more dams I'll make for fish,
    Nor fetch in firing
    At requiring.
    Nor scrape trenchering, nor wash dish.
    'Ban, 'ban, Cacaliban
    Has a new master.—Get a new man.
    Freedom, high-day!
    (2.2.179–85)
    One of the reasons it is hard to decide whether Shakespeare is politically correct or incorrect is that he has it both ways. Modern productions of Coriolanus or Julius Caesar have attempted to stabilize the plays' political sympathies through topical costuming—the conspirators as freedom fighters against a dictatorship, or the patricians as the self-interested fat cats of an undemocratic state—but in Shakespeare's hands the balance of sympathies is more delicate. Does Caesar have absolutist aspirations to disband the republic and accept the crown? We don't know, because the scene is only reported, not shown.
    It is also possible to recontextualize some of these most sensitive plays and remove them from historically specific problems. A recent production of Merchant of Venice by Edward Hall's all-male theater company Propeller set the play in a modern prison. The inmates were staging a production of Merchant of Venice without the knowledge or approval of the prison warders. Floors were scrubbed when the warders patrolled; as soon as they were out of sight, scenes from the Merchant of Venice began to be acted. But this amateur dramatic group of prisoners was not a cohesive entity. The performers were divided into two uneven groups—as often happens with institutional politics—one of power-wielders, one of victims. The victims played the Jews, the power-wielders the Christians. Shakespeare's play was thus seen to be about minority versus majority groups and the behaviors that accompany them. It mattered little whether the groups were rival football supporters or different races or religions: