Shakespeare’s Outsiders

Ray Briggs
How does Shakespeare deal with race, gender, and disability?

Adrian Daub
Do his plays reveal deep truths about identity and status?

Ray Briggs
Or are they just old-timey soap operas?

Adrian Daub
This is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs.

Adrian Daub
And I’m Adrian Daub, sitting in for Josh Landy. We’re coming to you from the Stanford Humanities Center.

Ray Briggs
Continuing conversations that begin at philosophers corner where I teach philosophy, and Adrian teaches Comparative Literature. Adrian has been a guest on the show many times and I’m very grateful that today he’s stepping in as co-host.

Adrian Daub
My pleasure—and many thanks to the Humanities Center for sponsoring today’s event.

Ray Briggs
Welcome everyone, to Philosophy Talk.

Today, we’re thinking about Shakespeare’s outsiders.

Adrian Daub
You know, Ray, I find Shakespeare’s outsiders more interesting than his heroes, right? If you think of Othello, Shylock, Caliban…

Ray Briggs
I don’t know, I think that Shakespeare is really unfair to those characters. Look, Othello is violent and jealous. Shylock is vengeful, and greedy. Caliban is primitive and mean. These guys are basically racist stereotypes.

Adrian Daub
Okay, now, I think you’re being a little unfair to Shakespeare. Audiences have a ton of empathy for these characters. There’s a reason they’re iconic, right? How many people remember King Henry VI? He’s pretty boring in comparison.

Ray Briggs
Oh, yeah. They’re memorable. All right, but I wouldn’t say they’re exactly sympathetic. I mean, I wouldn’t want to be remembered as the most bloodthirsty and evil person in my department.

Adrian Daub
Ok so full disclosure. I’ve been described that way and I take offense but look more seriously. An interesting play requires drama. We do like our anti heroes and who would want to see a play where good people do good things and then get praised for it.

Ray Briggs
Look, I’m not complaining that they’re insufficiently nice. I am complaining that they’re stereotypes. Like Macbeth is a horrible homicidal maniac. But it’s not because he’s Scottish. Yeah, he’s very flawed, but he still gets to be a whole person.

Adrian Daub
Well, perhaps Shylock isn’t as stereotypical as you think: has he not eyes, hands? If you prick him does he not bleed? Shakespeare isn’t just recycling the prejudices of his time, he’s reflecting on them when he makes you empathize with someone like Shylock—which you know, last time I checked is not the most bigoted thing to do.

Ray Briggs
Okay, so Shakespeare makes you empathize with Shylock, but he’s still basically a stereotype of a greedy Jew. Giving your antisemitic stereotype feelings doesn’t really absolve you of the antisemitism.

Adrian Daub
Okay, I’ll agree with Shylock, but he’s just one character out of, what, 1223, give or take a herald?

Ray Briggs
So what—Shakespeare has great Jewish representation in his other plays? What do we have Rosenberg and Gildentein? Do we have Two Gentlemen of Brooklyn?

Adrian Daub
But he’s maybe not thinking about difference in exactly the same terms we are today. It’s maybe not just black and white, Jewish versus Christian, male versus female. It’s about all kinds of diversity.

Ray Briggs
Oh, yeah, I forgot his really sensitive disability representation and Richard III—the guy who’s so deformed, that dogs bark at me as I hope by them, who decides to be a villain because of that. It’s just another terrible stereotype. How is it any different from the comic book trope of the guy who has missing a hand and is therefore the evil one?

Adrian Daub
Okay, but counterexample Shakespeare is pretty sensitive and assists treatment of mental illness. Hamlet and King Lear are tragic heroes, right? They’re at the center of their own story. Shakespeare takes tons of time exploring their psychology in real depth, and he never really asked the audience to judge them.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, but the audience does judge them. Hamlet’s tortured inner life results in this huge body count. And Lear’s madness destroys his whole family. These guys are not role models.

Adrian Daub
Okay, but why do they have to be role models? People weren’t going to the globe to learn how to behave. They were going to have a good time to be entertained.

Ray Briggs
Oh, come on. It’s just not just entertainment. It’s serious art. It is literally Shakespearean tragedy.

Adrian Daub
That just proves my point. tragedy is about that. It’s about flawed individuals making a gigantic mess of things. It’s not about nice people doing reasonable things for three hours.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, but audiences still learn things from the entertainment they’re consuming. And Shakespeare was teaching his audiences to have bigoted attitude.

Adrian Daub
Okay, so I wager that they will already be that they probably came in with a bunch of simplistic stereotypes. And at best, Shakespeare was able to give them nuanced characters and complex storylines that complicated those.

Ray Briggs
I feel like nuanced and complex bigotry is still problematic.

Adrian Daub
Well, maybe our guests will change your mind. It’s David Sterling Brown, author of “Shakespeare’s White Others,” and he’ll be joining us shortly.

Ray Briggs
But first: since we’ve only been talking about Shakespeare’s male characters so far, how did he think about female characters? We sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Holly J. McDed, to find out. She files this report.

Elizabeth Sylvia
All that is great in me might be made little by a word, but I will spin you a tale that brings you in again.

Holly McDede
That’s “Nell’s Ode” by poet Elizabeth Slyvia from her collection “None But Witches: Poems on Shakespeare’s Women”   It’s inspired by the character Nell from Shakespeare’s “The Comedy of Errors.”

Elizabeth Sylvia
I am swart as the Earth’s crust, soot as the banked embers.

Holly McDede
Nell, a kitchen maid,  is married to one of a pair of twins separated at birth. She mistakes the twin she’s not married to for her husband.

Elizabeth Sylvia
He thinks he’s been like trapped by witchcraft. And he and his boss, who is also a secret twin, by the way, do a three page takedown of Nell.

Holly McDede
Nell is never even on stage.

Elizabeth Sylvia
She’s fat, she’s sweaty, she’s smelly, she’s dark. They compare her to a globe and her body parts to various countries.

Holly McDede
Sylvia’s poem is a response on Nell’s behalf.

Elizabeth Sylvia
As if you ever could stop burying in me desires that I raise in you.

Holly McDede
In Sylvia’s collection, published by 3 Mile Harbor Press, the women of Shakespeare unleash their pain, sorrow, and might. The project emerged after Sylvia made a New Year’s resolution to read all of Shakespeare’s plays in a year. For the record it took to just a few plays in she was pretty disturbed.

Elizabeth Sylvia
I was just so angry at what was happening to the female characters, especially in these early plays, which a lot of people don’t read are reall—they’re just super violent anyway, but they’re particularly violent towards women I think.

Titus Andronicus
Die die, Lavinia, and my shame with you. Unnatural and unkind!

Holly McDede
Silvia thinks mothers in Shakespeare have it especially bad.

Elizabeth Sylvia
I’m seeing play after play after play. In which, if you have a kid, that kid is killed, and you spend the rest of the play like basically walking back and forth in the back of the stage hoping someone will pay attention to you, as you trust try to express how completely destroyed you’ve been by this stuff.

Holly McDede
But you can scrutinize how Shakespeare portrays people and still appreciate his work. To love Shakespeare is to know him, argues Farah Karim-Cooper, a professor of Shakespeare studies at King’s College London and co director of education at Shakespeare’s Globe.

Farah Karim-Cooper
In order for us to keep Shakespeare around, he’s got to be more accessible. Otherwise, he’s going to become obsolete.

Holly McDede
Karim-Cooper says if we shy away from the flaws in Shakespeare, his work becomes hard to relate to. That’s part of why she started the Globe’s Shakespeare and Race Festival in 2018. The festival brings together actors and academics to talk about race and Shakespeare.

Farah Karim-Cooper
There was a lot of be wilderness on the part of the public because nobody had really had a public conversation about Shakespeare and race.

Holly McDede
She faced a lot of backlash.

Farah Karim-Cooper
You have people constantly accusing you of just doing it for tokenism, or that is driven by your own identity or that it doesn’t have any real validity or we’re trying to cancel Shakespeare. So that makes it difficult and that is backlash to the Black Lives Matter movement.

Holly McDede
Karim-Cooper wants to keep Shakespeare in schools and in the imagination, but she says we should do so without blind worship. Like the poet Elizabeth Sylvia, who saw value in reading all of Shakespeare’s plays.

Elizabeth Sylvia
Run into the marketplace with me, mothers of this world. For I have seen you weeping at the dry edged river. And wading from the boats.

Holly McDede
Her poem “Unbind” is inspired by Constance from Shakespeare’s play King John. Constance’s son has been abducted, but the male characters keep asking her to fix her hair. Shakespeare may be on to the idea of tone policing.

Elizabeth Sylvia
Because our hair makes fire of the wind. And all around us knots are come undone. And birth instead of death is thundering.

Holly McDede
As a person in the contemporary world, Sylvia says, it can seem like the world is crashing down around you. But the women of Shakespeare never seem to give up in any circumstance. They’re powerful.

The Taming of the Shew
If I’d be waspish, best beware my sting!

Holly McDede
The Shakespearean world like ours is just a mess. For Philosophy Talk, I’m Holly J. McDede.

Ray Briggs
Thank you for that revealing report Holly. I’m Ray Briggs, along with my Stanford colleague, Adrian Daube, who’s sitting in for Josh Landy. And we’re at the Stanford Humanities Center, who has generously sponsored today’s event.

Adrian Daub
Our guest today is professor of English at Trinity College in Hartford. He’s also the author of the recent book, “Shakespeare’s White Others.” please welcome to the Philosophy Talk stage, David Sterling Brown.

David, you’ve written about how Shakespeare treats characters who are outsiders in some way, what in your own experience drew you to these outsider figures?

David Sterling Brown
I’d have to say it started with adolescence really, looking back to that as of writing this book and thinking about how there were times when I sometimes the lone black student in my middle school high school scenarios was the outsider. But then also seeing how even some of my peers who didn’t look like me, were also outsiders, I just became fascinated by that.

Ray Briggs
So David, Shakespeare is a lot of things to a lot of people. He’s our he’s entertainment. What do we gain by looking at him through a racial lens?

David Sterling Brown
wW gain a lot. I mean, we gain an understanding of our modern world. First and foremost, we can also see the continuity between then and now and thinking about how even modern stereotypes that we have were for it at play in Shakespeare’s world, or at least anticipating where we are today. And so there’s a lot that can be looked at through Shakespeare’s plays, that allows us to again, map on to the now solutions, or even problems that we have in our modern world.

Ray Briggs
So how is race different for Shakespeare than it is for us?

David Sterling Brown
Well, one thing to note, race and Shakespeare’s period actually did not mean what it means today, it actually meant family Kenton, for instance. And so as time evolved, and as definitions evolve, right, we start to see, there is resonance between this idea of connectivity between people of a certain group or subset that allows us to think about how race in Shakespeare’s time will is, in some ways, similar to how we think about it today. Of course, it race is not a biological factor. It is a social construct, but we use it to organize and our social settings and groups in our modern world.

Ray Briggs
And what continuities Do you see between sort of our contemporary concept of race and what was going on in Shakespeare?

David Sterling Brown
Sure, well, certainly, the valuation of whiteness, for instance, racial whiteness, but also the devaluation of blackness. So within Shakespeare’s plays, you know, a fellow has mentioned, that’s a play where we can see clearly how anti blackness was something that was prevalent in the early modern culture, we can also see how the value of whiteness gets praised in certain places. So that’s, that’s one example to think about in response to your question.

Ray Briggs
So one thing you say in your book is that this is a time of like race formation, when the concepts of black and white were sort of coalescing into what they are now is I got that right?

David Sterling Brown
Yes, I mean, I do mention medieval literature because thinking about Geraldine hang who’s a scholar, her work, she also talks about it in medieval period. And so it moves forward, though.

Adrian Daub
And is there did Shakespeare reflect this? Or did the theater have a real hand in shaping people’s attitudes?

David Sterling Brown
Thanks a bit of both, right? When we think about how in Shakespeare’s day there were no as far as we know, black actors on the stage. So the fact that you have people blacking up and using blackface on the stage, that’s one way to think about it, but also, even just considering how whiteness is important in Shakespeare’s plays, thinking about plays like Hamlet or Much Ado About Nothing, we start to see the usages of terms like fare for instance, that have a lot of capital in those plays and shape Shakespeare’s world, but also shape our so it’s an interesting look back and read and see that.

Ray Briggs
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. We’re thinking about Shakespeare’s outsiders with David Sterling Brown from Trinity College Hartford.

Adrian Daub
What’s your favorite Shakespeare play? Do you ever worry about his politics? Or do you like the way he makes you root for the underdog?

Ray Briggs
Much gevalt about nothing? Along with questions from our live audience, when Philosophy Talk continues.

The Ramones
Everybody trying to put me down.

Ray Briggs
Do Shakespeare’s characters get put down and pushed around because of their race, gender or disability. I’m Ray brakes. And this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Adrian Daub
…except your intelligence. I’m Adrian Daub, sitting in for Josh Landy. Our guest is David Sterling Brown from Trinity College, and we’re thinking about Shakespeare’s outsiders. Special thanks to the Stanford Humanities Center for sponsoring today’s episode,

Ray Briggs
Got a comment or question about identity and Shakespeare’s plays? join the discussion by raising your hand, and Laura will put you on the list and bring the mic to you when it’s your turn to talk.

Adrian Daub
So David, a lot of people think about race is black versus white. But your work on Shakespeare specifically explores the tensions between white people. Can you tell us more about that?

David Sterling Brown
Yeah. So in the book, I’m first of all, identifying this figure of the white other Who is this less than ideal white character that appears in the play? And I’m doing that along sides of the, what I call the intro racial color line. So thinking about white on white dynamics, ideal white characters versus less than ideal, and how there’s sort of these in group and out group dynamics that form in Shakespeare’s plays.

Ray Briggs
So if you’re like a good white character for Shakespeare, what does that consist in? What do you do?

David Sterling Brown
I love that question. So you are, you know, you’re morally good, you’re ethically good. You are also somebody who adheres to the standards of the dominant culture, whatever they might be, and they do shift at times. And so I would say, that’s the sort of basic criteria for being a good white character in Shakespeare’s plays.

Ray Briggs
That’s like, not a lot of his characters, I’m noticing.

David Sterling Brown
Yes, you know, there are ways in which these characters shift in and out of that space of being an ideal figure versus a less than ideal figure, for instance, like Macbeth is actually a really good example of that.

Ray Briggs
Yeah. Tell me more about Macbeth. Like, when is he good, when is he bad?

David Sterling Brown
Macbeth is good at the beginning of the play before he decides to have his king over and host him and kill him? So there’s that that, you know, turns him into a sinner. He violates hospitality code, right, which was super important in the early modern period. And his wife is also implicated in that, but he kills other people in the play, too. And so when we think about sin, when we think about the moral nature of his character, as well as ethically, he is sort of blackened in that play, and even referred to as black Macbeth, in the lines of the play by Malcolm.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, I’m kind of curious about the color imagery that you kind of, you find all of this image imagery, and Shakespeare equating sort of fair or which sort of means pale, and also beautiful, and also good. And then sort of, on the other hand, black with like, bad and evil and not beautiful. So So, yeah, how do I think about these terms getting like stuck together, getting all these meanings stuck together? Like is it happening before Shakespeare is happening, when Shakespeare is writing?

David Sterling Brown
I mean, so we can think about this as even going back to the Bible, right? Where you have color symbolism being managed in that text. But of course, as I mentioned, medieval literature, but so it predates Shakespeare in terms of the color symbolism. I’m less invested in that so much as I am in thinking about even what we can’t see in these characters, right. So moral, like I said, moral qualities, ethics, but even clothing can be a determining factor in how we can perceive a character as a white other or not.

Adrian Daub
So one of the things that you can draw on is this idea that this is really much about a process and about dying is a dynamic thing, people are not sort of statically slotted into, you know, white other or not white other red Macbeth moves kind of in the wrong direction, quote, unquote, as the play goes on. And which of course, is kind of different from the way that it comes sort of risk comes to be conceptualized in, let’s say, the 18th century or something like that. Um, I’m wondering, like, one of the things that’s really noticeable about about the book is that it’s not sort of a question of like, where these characters fall ethnically. So for instance, someone like Cleopatra, who like we might historically think like, oh, yeah, well, that’s a person who obviously wouldn’t have looked like a British person. Most likely. I mean, we can’t we can’t find that out. But it seems likely. That’s not how you position or it’s not, it’s not the fact that you ethnically might have registered differently. No It’s about how she falls into the moral economy of the play. Right? Can you say a little bit more about that?

David Sterling Brown
Well, in that play, just make sure I understand you correctly. So within Shakespeare’s play like, like some scholars like QMF Hall, for instance, who wrote things of darkness, I’m thinking about Cleopatra and the way that Shakespeare positions are as black. But in the middle of that play, there’s a moment where her hand is referred to as the white hand of a lady. And so there we have this turn. And it begs the question of what is the value being placed on her body in terms of whitening her hand when we’re seeing her as referred to as tawny, for instance, or blackened, etc.

Adrian Daub
Right,so it’s something that people can also get back, it seems like it’s like, you know, the tragedy can can move characters in and out of the space that you’re describing.

David Sterling Brown
They can move in and out of it depends now because in the tragedies, for instance, like Titus Andronicus is a character who begins on the right side of the interracial color line. But by the end of that, he is just as barbaric as the Goths. And Aaron, the more I think a more fitting character is like hero from Much Ado About Nothing, right?

Ray Briggs
Yes, hero, if I’m remembering right, is engaged to Claudia. And then Claudio, sort of gets told some kind of rumor that she’s not sexually pure. Yes. And this like, in purifies her. And he’s like, super upset about it. And then there’s kind of an interesting subplot, right, where there’s a maid who gets tell me about this offline.

David Sterling Brown
So there’s an interesting moment. So the reason I bring up hero, right is that when that moment we’re talking about happens when she’s accused of being a whore, her father says that she has fallen into a pit of ink. And so if we just slow down and think about that moment, as this white woman figure emerging from a bit of it, because she doesn’t actually die in a play, it’s a comedy. So these characters don’t die. She’s essentially an invisible black and woman, right. And so there’s the stereotype of hypersexuality that’s being played upon there in that moment. And she does go away in the play, but she comes back once it’s realized that she’s not actually impure, and she gets to marry Claudia.

Ray Briggs
So I’m gonna ask more about Hero because there’s this thing that happens in the middle, right? So if I’m remembering, like, some powerful guy wants to have sex with hero, and the way that she gets out of it is by substituting her maid who wants to have sex with the powerful guy.

David Sterling Brown
Okay, so yeah, in the play, there’s the sort of ruse, yes, and the sex doesn’t actually happen, but it’s perceived to be hero, and that’s why it’s thought that she is a whore. And so that’s how she ends up being blackened and falling into this pit of ink.

Ray Briggs
I’m curious about the maid, like, what should we think about her and her status?

David Sterling Brown
Well, she’s a lower class character in the play, right? So there’s that and I guess, in terms of thinking about morals and ethics, being in on this ruse, obviously, disturbs things into play in terms of thinking about white otherness, but class is not necessarily something that makes one a white other, which is interesting, like Hamlet is a figure that I think about as a white other as well. And he’s a royal figure. Right?

Ray Briggs
So it’s more about sort of doing the moral thing that is your station correctly.

David Sterling Brown
Could be, but it could also be so in The Hamlet, for instance, it’s not really Hamlet’s morality that makes him or immorality that makes him white. Other it’s the way that he’s perceived as not being manly, for instance. Um, so he’s referred to as having unmanly grief by Claudio. And also there’s his moments in the play where he’s referring to himself even as being like effeminate and not man enough. And so the ideal standards of early modern culture would go against that in terms of thinking about ideal masculinity.

Ray Briggs
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk, and we’re at the Stanford Humanities Center, thinking about Shakespeare’s outsiders with David Sterling Brown, author of Shakespeare’s white others. And we have a question from our live audience.

David
Hi, I’m David from Menlo Park. So my question is, is it clear that this imagery about whiteness and darkness, fairness, and dirtiness and so forth? Is it clear that there’s a connection, a nexus between that and our modern notions of race?

David Sterling Brown
Yes, you know, we can see in Shakespeare’s plays, right, how I’m thinking about a figure like Aaron the more from Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus for instance, he’s Shakespeare’s first black character and Titus is my favorite tragedy. But even in that play, you have this division between the Goths, the Romans and the Moors. There’s a baby that appears later in the place I put the plural there, but we can see how these groupings function in that society in very similar ways to our own and as these outsiders the Goths come in And you know, they are very much treated like enemies because they are prisoners of war. But then we also see slippage there with the character Tamar, who’s a gosh, she becomes Empress of Rome, right? So she gets this elevation in that moment in the play. And then slowly the play works itself to eradicate these less than ideal white characters once it’s realized that they can never really be as good as the sort of pure characters in the play that are typically the Roman figures. But there are other gods that are not that into play. So it gets complicated. But yes, we do see that continuity. And I think Titus has a really great play Othello’s another play, we can kind of see this mapped out too easily.

Ray Briggs
So you’ve got another question from our live audience. Hi, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Guy
Thank you. Guy from Woodside. I’m getting lost a little bit in in your term other. And I was wondering if I missed the definition. Can you please repeat it? It seems elastic to me right now.

David Sterling Brown
Sure. So I’m thinking about when with respect to the white other. And thinking about how within whiteness, there are divisions. So one of the things that’s important to sort of understand the concepts of my book, and Titus, again, is another play that makes it really easy to see it. When you look at my chapter in the book, I’m taking Aaron out of it for a moment, because even in the first 600 lines of that plays the character who doesn’t say anything, so we’re just watching dynamics between the white characters and that moment. And it’s pretty clear how Shakespeare shows us that with white otherness, these characters who are less than ideal, they do not meet the standards of the dominant culture, for whatever reason, because the dominant culture is what defines what the standards are. And so as we see, these characters sort of assimilate, right, Tamar was able to become emperor of Rome, because she is adopted, you know, happily into Rome in that play. And that allows us, again, to see with these divisions, that it’s porous, just like I think about the concept of racial passing, for instance, back in, you know, times postbellum period, for instance, there were people who were considered black, right, that could pass as white. And so they weren’t necessarily deemed or seen as other, even though they may have known that they were. And I think that’s a more sort of modern connection to understanding this concept of white otherness that I’m thinking about.

Adrian Daub
I’m also wondering, so you, you mostly talking about the tragedies in the book, but we’ve sort of veered into the comedy a little bit. And one thing that I’m noticing as you’re describing these characters, is that they sort of come by negotiating this internal color line pretty honestly, that is to say, they don’t tend to perform their way across it. A lot of people in Shakespeare dress up as other things. But that seems that’s something else. That seems to be not what you’re talking about. Right?

David Sterling Brown
Yeah, it’s not a performance. And but I love that you said negotiating because that’s the title of my introduction is negotiating whiteness. And I use a quotation from a play that Claudia Rankin has called Help, where she says, This is why to stay alive, forget thriving, I need to negotiate whiteness. And what we see in these plays is that it’s not just a figure, like a fellow, or Aaron, that has to negotiate whiteness, it’s all of these characters, because they live in a white dominated world. And what I want people to understand with the concept of the white other, and the interracial color line is how whiteness is not invisible. I mean, we live in a world where people often think, if blackness isn’t present than race doesn’t exist. And so I want to, again, sort of other whiteness to get people to see that we should always be thinking about race, and that we can even in the absence of blackness,

Ray Briggs
so I’m kind of curious about this idea of like a precarious status, which it seems like white otherness is so there’s the you are safely inside whatever power exists, and you can stop worrying about it, which is I think, one way of being powerful. And then there is the you are sort of inside whatever power exists until you do the wrong thing. And then you’re not there anymore. And what other seems very much about sort of the precarious, sort of inside power.

David Sterling Brown
I mean, I think, to go back to my sort of adolescent image, right, to be in the in group, you’ve kind of got to conform on some level, because you can be in today and out tomorrow. And I think it really depends on your behavior, right? And how you are adhering to the standards of what the end group, you know, thinking back to middle school that the what are the popular kids think is cool, right? Or what do they think, is defining the circle? And as long as you commit to that, then you’re safe. But if you violate those norms, and I think that’s what these characters do, like, again, Macbeth, he violates Social Code. He violates norms. that gets him put on the wrong side of the interracial color line.

Ray Briggs
How do I know when the norms are about race? And when they’re about something else? Or is that a sensible question to ask? Because it seems like in your Hamlet example, both race and masculinity are very important. Do you think that like, there’s any sense in trying to separate that those out? Or is it just one like mess of power?

David Sterling Brown
I mean, I’ve a short answer is, it’s messy. I think race is always messy, when we have conversations about it, but you can’t take race out of the equation, right? Just like you can’t take gender out of the equation. Everyone has a racial makeup. Everyone has a gender identity. And so I’m really interested in tracking how that operates in these plays, and thinking about intersectionality in particular, how race, gender and class, all those things are working together in our modern world, always. And they’re also working together in these plays. Like I can’t look at Hiro and not see that she’s a woman and say that her gender matters in terms of how she’s being treated in that moment.

Adrian Daub
Is there an element though—I mean, like, Are there moments when we I mean, I take your point that these two are always intertwined. But with something like right part of Macbeth’s problem is clearly that in his household, gender, the gendered roles are maybe a little miss distributed. And that seems to that seems to be what does poor Duncan is that? Is it the fact that like, he’s not wearing the pants in the relationship. Does that does? Is that the kind of dynamic you’re describing? Or does it with that sort of very safely, just fall into, you know, gender bucket, basically?

David Sterling Brown
No, so I love that you asked that question, because I think about the Macbeth in the book. And Lady Macbeth is a character who embodies masculine qualities, right? She’s actually more masculine, I’d say, than her husband. Yeah. And she even critiques his, you know, inept masculinity. And it’s that inversion, actually, that leads to the contribution of their white otherness, and how we can see that because Lady Macbeth does not meet the standards of the ideal white woman in that play. And Macbeth certainly does not meet the standards of the ideal white man. And then once we sort of track their trajectories, and again, I just love that black Macbeth line, black Macbeth will seem as pure as snow, right? He will seem that, as Malcolm says, but he’s not. He’s not as purist. No. And so there’s a call to attention there about how Macbeth, inside he is impure. It’s about his soul. It’s about his spirit. It’s about his moral character.

Ray Briggs
So I want to ask a little bit more about precarity. And about conduct. So it seems like things have kind of significantly changed between when Shakespeare was writing and now in the sense that, like, if you’re, if you’re white, now, you might get kicked out of whiteness, if the racial lines shift, due to like factors that are beyond your control, but I’m not sure that you can, like misconduct yourself out of whiteness in the same way, or do you think that’s right?

David Sterling Brown
Well, so the white other, if I’m understanding you correctly, is still white, but there are others, right, so one example that I call attention to in the book in chapter four, I believe, I’m thinking about, you know, Jerry Sandusky, this beloved, football, you know, figure, but then there’s a situation a scandal that leads to a sort of backlash in terms of how he was, you know, idealized and thought about, and a lot of that has to do with again, the undeniable ality of this violation, right. And so he’s still a white man, but in terms of his status as a white man that has changed, and he’s no longer seems to be revered in the same way that a figure like Macbeth, for instance, is certainly not revered in that play, or Iago is not a revered figure in that play for the things that he does to Othello and the other characters.

Ray Briggs
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about Shakespeare’s outsiders with David Sterling Brown from Trinity College Hartford, author of “Shakespeare’s White Others.”

Adrian Daub
Is Shakespeare education or just entertainment? Why are his plots so over the top? Could soap operas be the modern day Shakespeare?

Ray Briggs
We’re coming to you from the Stanford Humanities Center, who have generously sponsored today’s event. We’ll take more questions from our live audience when Philosophy Talk continues

Brandy Clark
Yeah, we’re all big stars in our own soap opera.

Ray Briggs
If all the world’s a stage, does that mean we’re in a soap opera? I’m Ray Briggs. This is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Adrian Daub
…except your intelligence. I’m Adrian Daub sitting in for Josh Landy. Our guest is David Sterling Brown from Trinity College. And we’re at the Stanford Humanities Center thinking about Shakespeare’s outsiders.

Ray Briggs
So David, I hear you’re a big fan of daytime soap operas. And do you think they have something in common with Shakespeare? Could you elaborate?

David Sterling Brown
I can’t. And I feel so embarrassed right now. But yeah, so I’m a big fan of like shows like the young, the restless and the Bold and the Beautiful. And actually a great example of not just because it’s entertainment, but I see this concept of, you know, the white other and interracial Color Line playing out even in that show. So last week, actually, I watched the bone, the beautiful and a character who might refer to as the white mother. Her house gets broken into by a character who would pitch as like the ideal white woman in the play, or in the show, and she gets accosted. So we’ve got trespassing, we’ve got her being accosted. There are no consequences for the ideal white woman. It’s actually the white other figure, Sheila, who gets pitched as the wrongdoer. And I’m like, Where have I seen that before? I mean, we see that play out in our modern world when it comes to even you know, anti black state police violence, for instance, how someone can be a victim of that violence, even though they’re innocent. And I just was fascinated by I was laughing hysterically, because I’m like, her house got broken into like, she’s the victim, but she doesn’t get to be the victim because she’s the outsider in that show.

Ray Briggs
Yeah. So we have like very similar psycho dramas playing out in like the soap opera. And in Shakespeare, yeah. Do you think that Shakespeare was was like the soap opera of his day? Does that make sense as a comparison?

David Sterling Brown
I kind of like that. Because, you know, it’s entertainment. Right? Shakespeare was writing these plays for them to be performed. So we can see the language put into action. And I think also though, the plays are mechanisms for transmitting ideals about the culture. I think we see that in soap operas as well.

Adrian Daub
I was a little surprised to hear that you made that comparison. But it now makes a lot of sense to me. Because I initially thought like one place where it seems to me that the internal color line gets policed a lot today, as in reality shows. But of course, what soap operas really share with Shakespeare is the kind of insistence on artifice. And reflecting on artifice, what’s the role of that it’d be like All the world’s a stage that isn’t real. What you’re seeing is an heightened, idealized, hyper real version of what’s going on outside, what role does that play in it that this shows that the auto shows and Shakespeare’s plays are so insistent like, Hey, guys, remember, this is a play.

David Sterling Brown
I think one of the interesting things for me is just you know, how aspects of identity are performative. That’s one way that I like to think about a connection. But again, just going back to the way that these shows or any form of entertainment can be a commercial, they transmit messages to us. And I think that’s what I find so valuable about Shakespeare’s work. I know a lot of people are sort of resist Shakespeare’s work, or they’re afraid of it. But I think it’s so rich. And I think there’s so much in it for us to learn from. And similarly, I used to think that, you know, the bold and the beautiful young, the restless, were just mindless entertainment, guilty pleasures. But I actually learned things and I see things being reflected back to me, even as I think about the critical literature that I studied.

Ray Briggs
So I was definitely brought up to think that Shakespeare and soap operas were supposed to be completely different because Shakespeare is important and educational, whereas soap operas are, like mindless entertainment. Where does that idea come from? And should I be getting over it?

David Sterling Brown
I think, you know, well, first of all, Shakespeare is, you know, referred to as the greatest dramatist that ever lived. So there’s a lot of capital that his name carries. But as you were just talking, I was reminded that even sometimes on the boat in the beautiful, there are two characters. Rich Forester is one of them. He has recited Shakespeare’s poetry at times on the show. So like this merger of Shakespeare with soap operas is not something that I’m just creating, like, even the writers do that. And I think that shows both the value of Shakespeare’s literature today, but also, again, they’re capitalizing on Shakespeare as sort of brand recognition, if you will, right. Because even if somebody hasn’t studied Shakespeare, they’ve likely at least heard that name. You can’t really go many places like New York for example, you can see subway ads with quotations from Shakespeare or and stuff. So it’s kind of everywhere in a way.

Ray Briggs
I also want to come back to the thing you said about moral lessons. I’m trying to figure out the the sense in which Shakespeare is teaching moral lessons like, I don’t think of him as somebody who’s intending to teach moral lessons. But I guess you could teach a moral lesson without intending it, like, how much of this is on purpose and how much of it is unconscious? And how do I pull that apart?

David Sterling Brown
I think it’s, again, two things can be true. And I think that’s probably the answer to the question. So Othello and Desdemona are a good example. And I’m not saying that I agree with how the play plays out for them. But in terms of thinking about the issues that it raises, right, Desdemona marries a fellow without her father’s consent. So there’s a message there being sent about what mattered in the early modern period about how fathers were supposed to be involved and invested and consulted as sort of marriage intermediaries. There’s also an age difference between Othello and Desdemona. And so we’re learning something they’re there, they’re sort of unequally yoked, if you will, we can take that further and think about our modern world where people will consider you know, class dynamics and suggest that somebody maybe shouldn’t marry down, so to speak in terms of class. So all of that is at play in these works. I do think Shakespeare was trying to, of course, reinforce certain ideals from his society, but also teach and undermine them even at times.

Ray Briggs
Yeah. So your Macbeth example, in your Othello example, or both? person does bad thing person gets bad consequence. Are there examples that you think don’t fall into that mold as well.

David Sterling Brown
In terms of somebody doing something bad and something the consequences for it or?

Ray Briggs
Right, so I’m thinking like, morality plays is a structure where like, you do a bad thing. And it’s invariably followed by a bad consequence. And this shows that like, you never should have done the bad thing, you will only suffer? Do you think that that is what the tragedies are about? I don’t think it’s what the comedies are about. Do you think that that’s too simplistic?

David Sterling Brown
I don’t think that’s too simplistic. I mean, I think any sort of moment of violation has consequences. And I think that’s true for us in our today as well.

Adrian Daub
So in terms of what these plays teach us, right, you’ve mentioned a couple of things where it’s pretty obvious that there is a straightforward moral lesson to be learned here, we shouldn’t do XY and Z, right. Like, maybe he’s mourning for too long, it’s not the greatest idea if you’re also have kingdom to kind of be in charge of or whatever. But on the other hand, like you also describe these things that are like hidden in metaphors that are almost sort of mythologies of racialization. We can say, right? Like, that someone can easily read the play, view the play a couple of times and not catch on to, like, are those on the same level for you? Like, you see what I mean? Like, at what level? Do these plays teach? Is it like, they’re overt things that they might aim at? But like, surely, you know, if someone really wants to teach me a lesson, they wouldn’t hide it in a metaphor, I would think, what else? You know, they’ll have to hope that I’ll watch it 50 times before, but oh, wait, I think I think this is bad.

David Sterling Brown
It depends, right? Because if I want to impact your unconscious, or send subliminal messages to you, right, because I’m trying to reinforce and constantly reinscribe a certain hierarchy, for instance, I wouldn’t necessarily want to make that obvious. And so one of the things that I talked about in the book is how these things are hidden in plain sight. And there’s a reason they’re hidden in plain sight, because that allows us to maintain the system, if you will.

Adrian Daub
So that’d be something like this, the Mona fellow where the play never comes out and says, like, even probably a bad idea for these and those reasons, but like, you enter the play thinking, ooh, this seems shaky. I’m a little worried about these two people.

David Sterling Brown
Yeah. And I mean, and we’re supposed to feel that way about them. Because Iago, who I analyze in my books chapter on the play, he’s driving that with his racist discourse, right? And that does a lot of damage in the play, both on a conscious level, but also unconsciously.

Ray Briggs
So David, I’m wondering if reflecting on how race works in Shakespeare, and how otherness works in Shakespeare should affect how we perform or read Shakespeare today.

David Sterling Brown
Significantly, you know, so I’m hoping people will read the book because it matters, right? People go as my colleague, Keith Hamilton, Cobb likes to say, they go to Broadway, they get this Shakespeare, they go home, and they’re happy that they’ve had their Shakespeare. But if we slow down with these plays, and these moments or one thing that producers will do sometimes is have talkback, so they’ll talk about the play with the audience. because not everybody’s processing all this, you know, so rapidly in the moment. I think that that can go a long way for making the productions not just entertainment, but learning opportunities.

Ray Briggs
So David, this has been a wonderful conversation. Thank you so much for joining us.

David Sterling Brown
Thank you.

Ray Briggs
Our guest has been David Sterling Brown professor of English at Trinity College in Hartford, and author of “Shakespeare’s White Others.”

Adrian Daub
We’ll put links to everything we’ve mentioned today on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you can also become a subscriber and find your muse in our library of nearly 600 episodes.

Ray Briggs
And if you have a question that wasn’t addressed in today’s show, we’d love to hear from you. Email us at comments@philosophytalk.org, and we may feature your question on the blog.

Adrian Daub
Now, someone who could teach Hamlet a thing or two about getting on with it: it’s Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales… Along with the Beatles, color television, and SUVs, Shakespeare is part of the cultural pantheon, a large unwieldy edifice of all kinds of things, some encrusted, some which drop off like spent mosquitoes from a bloodless dog.  Plays in blank verse are no longer made. Yet high schools still perform them, if they’re Shakespeare.  Other verse plays, like Tis Pity She’s a Whore, or The Jew of Malta, gather dust in the stacks, sadly awaiting the Moms for Liberty Proud Boy jackboots to take any teachers and librarians who might even know these works exist off to Steve Miller’s reeducation camp.  Once MAGA teams up with politically correct cancel culture, they’ll whittle that pantheon down to the size of an Airstream trailer.  Which is also part of the pantheon, but just barely.   But even Shakespeare has work that is problematic as the kids say.  OTHELLO was about a Moor.  Moors were Muslims that ran Spain for a while, giving us architecture, orientalism, and subject matter for half the French painters of the late 19th Century.  In Shakespeare’s time, Moor mainly meant a black person from Africa.  In this play he is also a soldier, just back from conquering Turkey or whatever, he’s a hip black warrior who’s so cool the white Homecoming Queen marries him.  Iago, his bitter assistant, is a racist psycho, who messes with Othello’s head, so he winds up killing his wife. It’s like a True Crime Story on Investigation Discovery only olden times!  I saw this play on the screen in 1964, with Sir Lawrence Olivier.  In blackface.  I knew that blackface had existed, of course, but I had not seen the Jazz Singer, I mean, where would I and why?  Sure, it wasn’t that long ago that blackface was part of the resume if you were a singer or dancer.  20th Century brought shame, I guess.  And by 1964 people cared a lot about racism, even white people.  I was certainly thrown for a loop.  And Olivier was hamming it up.  Rolling his eyes.  Pitching his voice low.  Like a parody of a racist’s idea of a black person, in blank verse.  And the play itself had every racist tropes of the time presented as the CAUSE of the tragedy.  It wouldn’t have happened if Othello hadn’t been so gullible and jealous, you know how those Moors are.  But it struck me as bizarre.  And why not have, you know, a black person play this black person?  Anyway, I read up on blackface.  Minstrel shows were the number one American live entertainment for over a hundred years.  It’s the weirdest damn thing, cause it sent a mixed message.  We wished to represent black people in our entertainment, but we didn’t want black people to play them.  Black people could play nurturing maids or scaredy cat limo drivers, and that’s it.  And it was music and dancing that minstrel shows paid tribute to, areas where black people often excel- perhaps because black people were allowed to sing and dance, well, for each other.  Then we’d eavesdrop and steal what they were doing, and then whiten it up a bit, so the blue notes go away, and melisma, and sexy subject matter.  Don’t let them do it, they’ll get everybody worked up with sexy talent moves.  To be on the safe side, you get Stephen Foster to write songs full of doo da doo da, and next thing you know, tap dancing white people in blackface were picking up banjos and ruining show business for a hundred years.  A sizeable number of blackface performers were themselves black, so black people had to pretend to be white people pretending to be black people in order to work.  Today of course, many black people have hacked out a place in the pantheon.  Martin Luther King.  Sammy Davis Junior.  Leadbelly.  Ripped off, murdered, yet made famous in compensation.   Back to Shakespeare.  In Henry V the French king, Charles the VI, does not make an appearance. Cheated out of his place in the pantheon you might say.  Well, the real Charles VI was delusional.  He believed he was made of glass. Which made one on one encounters problematic.  Probably why he wasn’t in Shakespeare’s play.  He could shatter.  You can see right through him.  He might cut you.  Shakespeare was good with fools, but not glass kings.  Well, that’s more of a 20th Century spin on history isn’t it?  Maybe Brecht, or Pirandello, or Ionesco.  Or Alfred Jarry. Oh wait.  Who are they again? Somebody check the pantheon.  Glass is in the pantheon, if it’s stained.  History if there’s propaganda value.  But it’s leaking playwrights like a sieve. I gotta go.

Ray Briggs
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW San Francisco Bay Area, and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2024.

Adrian Daub
Our Executive Producer is Ben Trefny. The Senior Producer is Devon Strolovitch. Laura MaGgire is our Director of Research. Dan Brandon is the TechnicalDdirector.

Ray Briggs
Special thanks to Merle Kessler, Becky Baron, Petro Jimenez, Karen Adjluni, and Linda Fagan.

Adrian Daub
Thanks also to Roland Greene, Eric Ortiz, Bob Cable, Patricia Terrazas, and the staff here at the Stanford Humanities Center, which has generously sponsored tonight’s event.

Ray Briggs
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University, and from our subscribers to our online community of thinkers

Adrian Daub
And from the members of KALW local public radio San Francisco, where our program originates.

Ray Briggs
The views expressed—

Adrian Daub
…or mis-expressed!

Ray Briggs
…on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford or of our other funders

Adrian Daub
Not even when they’re totally true and reasonable.

Ray Briggs
The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk, where you too can become a subscriber and question everything in our library of nearly 600 episodes. I’m Ray Briggs.

Adrian Daub
And I’m Adrian Daub. Thank you for listening.

Ray Briggs
And thank you for thinking.