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Shakespearean Adaptation, Race and Memory in the New World

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  • © 2020

Overview

Authors:
  1. Joyce Green MacDonald

    1. University of Kentucky, Lexington, USA

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  • Conducts theoretically-informed readings of five 20th/21st Century Shakespearean adaptations that focus on black womanhood
  • Views the texts studied as attempting their own voicing of a suppressed past, and using that recovered past in order to mount a present and possibly even a future informed by black women’s social, political, and emotional agency
  • Valuable both to contemporary students who want to know more about treatments of Shakespeare in the 20th and 21st centuries, and to those working on race in early modern drama

Part of the book series: Palgrave Shakespeare Studies (PASHST)

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Table of contents (7 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-ix
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  2. Introduction: “A Cemetery Inhabited by Highly Vocal Ghosts”

    • Joyce Green MacDonald
    Pages 1-16

  3. Claiming Wisdom: Re-reading Othello in Gayl Jones’ Mosquito

    • Joyce Green MacDonald
    Pages 17-45

  4. Uncrossed Lovers: Remembering Race in Romeo and Juliet and Mississippi Masala

    • Joyce Green MacDonald
    Pages 47-75

  5. Bodies, Race, and Performance in Antony and Cleopatra and Derek Walcott’s A Branch of the Blue Nile: Memory’s Signatures

    • Joyce Green MacDonald
    Pages 77-107

  6. Echoes of Harlem: Women’s Memories in Othello and Harlem Duet

    • Joyce Green MacDonald
    Pages 109-133

  7. ‘The Right Foundation’: Re-racing Romance from The Taming of the Shrew to Deliver Us from Eva

    • Joyce Green MacDonald
    Pages 135-165

  8. Afterword: Adapting Shakespeare, Forgetting Race in King Charles III—Future History?

    • Joyce Green MacDonald
    Pages 167-173

  9. Back Matter

    Pages 175-179
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Keywords

About this book

As readers head into the second fifty years of the modern critical study of blackness and black characters in Renaissance drama, it has become a critical commonplace to note black female characters’ almost complete absence from Shakespeare’s plays. Despite this physical absence, however, they still play central symbolic roles in articulating definitions of love, beauty, chastity, femininity, and civic and social standing, invoked as the opposite and foil of women who are “fair”. Beginning from this recognition of black women’s simultaneous physical absence and imaginative presence, this book argues that modern Shakespearean adaptation is a primary means for materializing black women’s often elusive presence in the plays, serving as a vital staging place for historical and political inquiry into racial formation in Shakespeare’s world, and our own. Ranging geographically across North America and the Caribbean, and including film and fiction as well as drama as it discusses remade versions of Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespearean Adaptation, Race, and Memory in the New World will attract scholars of early modern race studies, gender and performance, and women in Renaissance drama. 

Reviews

“MacDonald … offers up a monograph that aptly demonstrates how adaptations fill in the representational gap of Shakespeare’s missing black women even as she undertakes the same gap-filling work herself by spotlighting the endeavors of creators of color all-too-often overlooked in Shakespearean adaptation studies, as well as in contemporary culture.” (Vanessa I. Corredera, Early Modern Women Journal, Vol. 16 (2), 2022)

Authors and Affiliations

  • University of Kentucky, Lexington, USA

    Joyce Green MacDonald

About the author

Joyce Green MacDonald is Associate Professor of English at the University of Kentucky, USA, where she teaches courses on Shakespeare and Renaissance drama. She is the author of Women and Race in Early Modern Texts (2002) and has published widely on Renaissance racial formations, Shakespearean adaptation, and performance.

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