The Great White Bard begins on an admittedly unusual note. Writing about her appreciation of Romeo and Juliet at school, Karim-Cooper evokes her Pakistani roots to set the ‘patriarchal society’ of South Asia and its ‘oppressed’ women against her ‘modern, westernised sensibilities’. This cultural juxtaposition is not easy to overlook, particularly in a work on race, but Karim-Cooper’s personal experience in her journey to Shakespeare can be appreciated. Karim-Cooper traces the insulation of Shakespeare studies to the 18th and 19th centuries, a period in which Shakespeare came to be defined as ‘for only a certain class of white English, American or European’. The impact of this elitism and racism, she argues, is enduring. For many, it is cause to finally pull down the playwright from an ill-gained pedestal. Karim-Cooper, however, offers an alternative: to bring the playwright down from his pedestal and look him directly in the eye.

This approach releases Shakespeare from the falsehoods of longstanding nostalgia and Tudor mythology. Karim-Cooper sets the record straight on the diversity of Tudor England enabled by the rise of international travel and trade. She traces the canonisation of the playwright to the Enlightenment, when aspirations for high culture coupled with the expansion of the brutal trade in enslaved peoples. The Great White Bard reads some of Shakespeare’s best known works alongside recent race scholarship, notably that of bell hooks. Plays examined include Titus Andronicus, where Karim-Cooper re-examines the villainy of Aaron the Moor. In a work that skillfully establishes the need – and sheer logic – of reading Shakespeare through race, Karim-Cooper affirms, ‘We all have the right to claim the Bard’.

Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.

Lubaaba Al-Azami is postdoctoral fellow at the University of Liverpool and Founding Editor of www.memorients.com. First Encounters: How England and Mughal India Shaped the World is forthcoming from John Murray.