#i have a collection of elizabethan non-shakespeare plays and it's just. it's not there. that spark. that life. that deep understanding

[noshitshakespeare]

I would be interested in knowing more of how to understand/approach early modern dramas, Shakespeare especially, but other writers from his time too if you know more about them, fron the angle of race/other. Do you have resources/references on how to approach early modern drama this way? I do realise this might be a broad topic, I'm looking to expand my readings and the way I approach/read Shakespeare as a non-black POC who is very fond of his works.

As you’ve said yourself, this is a really huge topic. And as you may imagine, it’s one that’s been getting more focus now than ever (though it has existed as a topic of interest since at least the 1980s). I don’t think I could do justice to the topic in just Shakespeare, let alone in all early modern drama. But let’s see if I can make a reasonable start. 

Because the term ‘race’ didn’t signify what it does now, and because Shakespeare was living in a time before England established itself as a major centre for slave trade, the first thing to be aware of is the difference of understanding. We can’t unproblematically apply modern standards and notions of race and other any more than we can talk about Shakespeare in terms of our modern understandings of sexuality and sexual identity. This isn’t to say that people didn’t notice colour, as can be seen from the terms like ‘blackamoor’ that were being used, but the question of otherness was, then as now, caught up in the more complex issue of religion, and colonisation. Because the Ottoman empire was one of the greatest powers in the world at the time, and Islam was perceived as a major threat to the European countries, difference in skin colour could also denote a difference in ideology (I talked about this a little in relation to Othello once). But sometimes an equal threat was perceived in those who didn’t look different, but who didn’t hold similar beliefs. 

Given that your question is about otherness in general, this is very relevant, and broadly speaking, we can categorise otherness in terms of 

Those who come from abroad

Those who look different (black, brown, even a slightly different shade of white)

Those who have different belief systems (Jewish people, Islamic people, Catholic people)

Those who look different and have a different belief system. 

What to make of early modern treatments of this difference is very difficult, because there isn’t a homogenous viewpoint. There’s never been a time when everybody thought the same thing, and so one can find all sorts of perspectives on race and otherness in early modern writings. Some are missionary perspectives, seeing difference as a mark of heathenism, and wishing to ‘help’ them by converting them, which went hand in hand with those who considered them subjects to be colonised and ‘civilised’ (see for instance Richard Hakluyt, Reasons for Colonisation, 1585). But there were people even at the time who saw the colonial project for what it was, and denounced the cruelty of the conquistadores (Bartolomé de las Casas’ The Spanish Colonie, translated into English in 1583 is a very interesting read), and even people like Michel de Montaigne, who admired what seemed to be a state of prelapsarian paradise in the people of the new world (see ‘Of Cannibals’). In the other direction, looking from Europe towards the East, the great and far superior power of the Ottoman empire manifests itself in a kind of awe, fear, and Islamophobia, but less in a desire to civilise or convert. Often you’ll even find in military and conduct guides a favourable description of the Ottoman nations to the detriment of European cultures. Part of this might have something to do with the fact that Elizabethan England had treaties with the Ottoman empire, but it might be a tactic to shame to west into better practices too. 

Many scholars now attribute the notion of ‘otherness’ in the early modern period as part of the creation of ideas of ‘nationhood’ in a time when nationalism was really beginning to take shape. It’s an age-old notion and one that Shakespeare points out in Henry V that patriotism and national unity is made stronger by demonisation of others. By contrasting themselves with the Catholics, the Protestants could define their own faithfulness, by contrasting themselves with Jewish and Islam religions, the Christian nations could achieve a more unified identity, and by comparing themselves to the less ‘civilised’. In that sense, sometimes more fears are expressed in relation to those one can’t differentiate easily by physical characteristics, like Jewish people, or, for that matter, Irish people.  In fact, there are some very interesting depictions, for instance in The Merchant of Venice or Marlowe’s Jew of Malta in which the so-called Christians condemn the ‘other’ (Barabas, Shylock) for things they do themselves. Barabas, while playing the stereotypical bogeyman of a Jew, will criticise the Christians for their hypocrisy in the way they quote the bible to steal his money: ‘Will you steal my goods? / Is theft the ground of your religion?’ (I.ii.95-96). Shylock is accused of cruelty for essentially buying Antonio’s flesh, even though the Christians have ‘many a purchased slave / Which, like your asses and your dogs and mules, / You use in abject and in slavish parts’ (4.1.89-91). The same applies to more physically different characters. Aaron from Titus Andronicus is a problematic character, almost a cardboard cutout of an evil villain, but though he’s undeniably cruel, so are so many other characters in Titus, and strangely, while internalising the idea that black = moral blackness, he nevertheless shows more love for his child than Titus (who kills his own son), and questions ‘is black so base a hue?’ (4.2.73)

This is all to say that there’s no single approach to studying race and otherness in Shakespeare and other early modern writers. The treatment of the other will differ depending on the writer, the play, and even between characters in the plays, because it wasn’t a straightforward topic then any more than it is now. So the best thing you could do would be to familiarise yourself with the discourse that surrounds the subject without committing yourself too much to one view as being more correct than another (it’s a good scholarly approach to avoid bias as much as possible). Unfortunately, the books on the subject tend to be quite hardcore academic. But here’s a short list if you want to get started on something. 

Miranda Kaufmann,  Black Tudors: The Untold Story 

This is great for a more general readership and helps to break preconceptions about what the early modern period in England was like, but it’s not strictly about Shakespeare or drama

Catherine Alexander and Stanley Wells, Shakespeare and Race 

An essay collection, which is academic, but gives a broader scope than a monograph

Jonathan Gill Harris, Foreign Bodies

Quite hard, but very good for a wider approach to ‘otherness’ rather than being limited to skin colour. Does focus on drama alongside history. 

Ania Loomba,  Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism

A classic. Again quite hard, and somewhat inflected by modern notions, but very useful. 

Miranda Virginia Mason Vaughan, Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500-1800

Good if you’re interested in performance history and the actual presentation of blackness on stage, including blacking up. 

Kim Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England

Hardcore academic stuff, and more history-based about the beginnings of the colonial project and slavery. 

Patricia Akhimie, Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference: Race Conduct and the Early Modern World  

Covers that question of building national identity and deliberate emphasis of race or difference.

Mary Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama

Like the one above, this is broadly about the way English ethnicity is created by othering. 

Sujata Iyengar, Shades of Difference: Mythologies of Skin Color in Early Modern England

Deals with the ways early modern people understood colour in comparison to our own notions. 

Nabil Matar,  Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery

Looking eastward and southward at the relationship between Europe and the Ottoman empire as well as Africa

Daniel Vitkus,  Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean

Another work on the relation between England and Islam, and deals very well with the British sense of inadequacy in comparison to the Ottoman Empire, as well as their fears about others who don’t have distinctly racial characteristics.

Jerry Brotton,  This Orient Isle: Elizabethan England and the Islamic World

A history book that charts the incredible trade and political relationship the court of Elizabeth had with the Ottoman Empire. 

Ayanna Thompson,  Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America

Jumping to the present, this is more about how Shakespeare is used in America now, especially focusing on pop culture and the representation of racial issues.

For a more casual approach, and one that’s about as up-to-date as can be, you could check out the #ShakesRace hashtag on Twitter. All the scholars and theatres are using it for discussion, or for advertising new books, new conferences, talks and podcasts on this subject, though the focus is, as you may imagine, more on colour than otherness more generally. 

[99liners]

Hello Jamie! I hope you're doing good?

Fellow indian here👋.I wanted to ask you how is your eng so good?I really want to know.If you read by any chance , plz drop some recommendations.I really want to be a better eng speaker.Have a good day;)

henlo! i am okay bub, and you?

omg, you think my English is good? i constantly feel like i am lacking in diction and that it can be better 😅 but thank you so much! it's a great compliment and i humbly accept it.

i do read, yes.

i used to read extensively, especially when i was in middle school but life has gotten busier ever since.

this is going to sound racist, but if you want to better your English, stop reading from Indian authors; Chetan Bhagat and the like (i am not basing this off blind hatred but i have actually read, at least, four books of Chetan Bhagat before coming to the conclusion. so, i am speaking from experience). if it's someone like Salman Rushdie, then go for it.

most importantly, don't make it a task.

first, choose the genre that interests you the most. it can be anything from romance, horror, detective stories, non-fiction, auto/biographies, and so on. then start with the most popular one in the genre. search about related works in the same genre and find the books that appeal to you. don't feel like you have to be all aesthetic and read underrated books, go for the overrated ones first. the over hyped, best selling ones. again, do not treat it as a task, like paying too much attention on the words or the flow but just read it as you would any book. read it naturally and you will realize that you have started to notice the linguistic style of the author, the diction, the flow of the words, automatically. that is very necessary. that is how you grow as a reader when you start noticing the small things.

i come from a family full of doctors, and my father has these huge ass encyclopaedias and as a kid, i just used to flip through those pages just to see the images and touch the shiny pages 😂 but with time, i started reading what was written underneath but still it would not make sense to me (cause it's a science encyclopaedia and i was 8-9 years old) but i would read it to know more. i remember i did not understand the concept of space being limitless, it absolutely baffled me. and as i learned more, now i am obsessed with space.

then in middle school, abba got me the full collection of sherlock holmes and i kid you not, i ate that book up. i was so engrossed in detective stories that i ended up reading all those short stories and novels more than twice. and then i found similar books and expanded my genre further.

i think another advantage i had was my English tutor. although, i am from a very small town but i had an amazing tutor who had passion about his subject. i think i still have a lot of dialogues from Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice (in the original Elizabethan text) jotted down to memory.

read: language wise, as far as i have read, Salman Rushdie is so good, his depictions are pure art. i have never been to kashmir, but through his writings, i could visualise it. same goes for Haruki Murakami. his depictions of Japan from the 80's is breath taking. it is like visualising a black and white art movie. read classics like: art of war, pride and prejudice, the great gatsby, 1984, metamorphosis, frankenstein, all the plays of Shakespeare, especially, Julius Caesar, Paulo Coelho’s works, and my absolute favourite, to kill a mockingbird.

write: to master any language, you must develop a habit of writing in that language, as well. if you are already in school, then you would be writing a lot of essays for your coursework but if you have graduated school, that’s alright too. start small: next when you text your friends on WhatsApp / FaceBook Messenger / Instagram Direct, etc, type in English instead of your mother tongue. most importantly, absolutely avoid using text message shortcuts like “u” “ur” "plz", they will be the bane of your improvement.

grammar: additionally, if you want to improve your grammar, consider buying Word Power Made Easy by Norman Lewis. it barely costs like 150 bucks and is a must if you want to improve your skills.

hope this long ass answer holds even an ounce of useful advice that you can utilise. let me know if you have any further questions!

[britneyshakespeare]

🔥🔥🔥 !!

hmmm. i’ll see what i can think of. i’ll do 3 but i’ll try to keep em short. these are just off the top of my head.

idk who noah smith is, apparently some journalist from bloomberg, but i always see him on my twitter tl, either people agreeing w him or dunking on him, i don’t care, i DON’T care, but he’s had several different icons on twitter and none of them are of him. they’re ALL of william butler yeats. he’s had several different photographs of w. b. yeats as his online representation of himself and just god y’know... i wish i had thought of it. i wish *i* could be moderately talked about on twitter, and always represented by a little picture of william butler yeats. no one ever brings it up that they’re dunking on/agreeing w yeats and i feel it’s a wasted opportunity.

i like picking up used books not just bc they’re cheaper than new books, but also bc they feel like they have some kind of past life to it. i love big fancy new editions, OH, those barnes & noble collections of classics, the leatherbound ones w the gilded pages, I’LL ADMIT, i picked up a few of those (the treasury of irish literature, the treasury of irish fairy and folk tales, and 3 bronte sisters novels, if i’m coming clean), BUT, if they’re just regular degular classics reprints, i’d rather get em used. plus, you find a more interesting selection when you’re looking at people’s old books... i found a paperback copy of 5 compiled thomas middleton plays, in kinda-shoddy-but-still-holding-together condition, printed sometime in the 80s, and it’s the kinda thing that i KNOW i wouldn’t have gotten if i hadn’t just happened to step into savers on THAT day. because where do you find a new copy of thomas middleton nowadays wo having to stoop to ordering online???

speaking of middleton, on the topic of elizabethan playwrights, the idea that shakespeare was anything other than the man, william shakespeare, writing his plays, is really silly, and i don’t blame people who don’t know much about the man or his time period for thinking it has some credence to it, but i just wish it were known more widely how RIDICULOUS it is—it’s not something anyone believed until about the nineteenth century when some people wanted to revise history. it’s the Victorian “Paul Is Dead.” for a non-noble man of the sixteenth century, his life was SURPRISINGLY well documented. there’s no legitimate paper trail or anything that suggests it was anyone’s pen name or a conspiracy. the idea that he was too “uneducated” to have written his plays is ridiculous because the elizabethan middle class had a pretty impressive standard of education, ESPECIALLY in literature and boys regularly put on and wrote plays in their school years. no historian worth a dime has ever thought francis bacon, or whoever else, wrote a single line. he did collaborate w a few other writers on some of his early plays, but that was standard practice a lot of the time. jonson, kyd, marlowe, middleton, et cetera, all did that (in fact, middleton may have written some of all’s well that ends well). also by that same token, shakespeare probably wrote unofficially credited parts of other people’s plays too. but generally, shakespeare wrote shakespeare, and it’s really annoying that the false hot take “what if he DIDN’T????” gets so much airtime around the popular discourse of his work in the year of our lord 2019. what if the moon landing was faked? well, who cares, ‘cause it wasn’t.

that ended up being too long but ya know once i get goin... i keep on goin!

Send me a 🔥 for an unpopular opinion.

[heritagehorrorshow]

Session 10

For our next session we have two participants sharing their impressions of the second day of filming! Here is what the first participant says about it: On the second day of filming we had two more scenes to complete. We started by getting into costume, and then splitting into two groups.

One group was based inside the Transmitter Hall, whilst the other group was tasked with going outside to film the scene after the crowd have watched the ‘Doctor Faustus’ play. We had two different types of audience members: believers and non-believers. The believers were shocked by what they had seen, as the ‘Doctor Faustus’ scene begins with the characters hoping to reach safety after thinking that they have seen real devils on stage! The non-believers were over-joyed and excited by what they had just witnessed, as they knew that the devils that were summoned live on stage were just actors playing roles for the scene. We used the area underneath the bridge to film this scene, as it had quite a creepy atmosphere at night, and collectively we thought the space could be used effectively in terms of lighting and sound.

The other group that were based inside the Transmitter Hall focused on filming our Elizabethan re-enactment of the renowned British television show ‘Dragons Den.’

The scene features two opposing playwrights: William Shakespeare versus Christopher Marlowe as they battle for an investment from the dragons in order to open up a new theatre.

The other participant also has some memories of that evening: 

On the night it was way too cold for my liking, but was full of experience. It wasn’t a thing I would normally do, especially being in the cold on a Wednesday afternoon instead of drinking hot chocolate. But let me get to the main concept of what this Blog is about. I used the boom mike, it wasn’t complex in any way and it was different to what I do normally do (I don’t usually go out in the middle of a path and set up a scene to record). It was hard to keep the mike up without it going too far down and being seen in the shot and as it was so cold, it was hard for me not to feel the pain of keeping it in the air for too long which was quite annoying and it did strain my ‘MUSCLES’.

What I found quite fun is how I felt like this was my real job and I was doing a movie that was going to be in the cinema and how I saw people mess up their lines over and over again. Which made it feel a lot more realistic then what you see in the cinema or on TV.