As we witness monuments of white Western history fall, students are asking, ‘why should we study Shakespeare? How is he still relevant? Wasn’t he racist?’ Professor Farah Karim-Cooper has dedicated her career to the Bard, which is why she wants to take the playwright down from his plinth and unveil a Shakespeare for the twenty-first century. 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. Combining piercing analysis of race, gender and otherness in famous plays from Anthony and Cleopatra to The Tempest with a radical reappraisal of Elizabethan London, The Great White Bard entreats us neither to idealise nor bury Shakespeare but instead to look him in the eye and reckon with the discomforts of his plays, playhouses and society. In inviting new perspectives and interpretations, we may yet prolong and enrich his extraordinary legacy.
