In the old age black was not counted fair,
Or if it were it bore not beauty’s name;
But now is black beauty’s successive heir,
And beauty slandered with a bastard shame,
For since each hand hath put on nature’s power,
Fairing the foul with art’s false borrowed face,
Sweet beauty hath no name, no holy bower,
But is profaned, if not lives in disgrace.
Therefore my mistress’ eyes are raven black,
Her eyes so suited, and they mourners seem
At such who, not born fair, no beauty lack,
Slandering creation with a false esteem:
Yet so they mourn, becoming of their woe,
That every tongue says beauty should look so.
-Sonnet 127 by William Shakespeare
There have been more than a few folks that think Shakespeare was a brother. They point to his pre-occupation with the condition of Blacks in 17th Century Europe and the fact that he carried on a passionate love-affair with a Black courteson in the neighborhood near the globe theater. Whether this is true or not, it does not change the fact that as a writer and social scientist, Shakespeare's treatment of blacks and their condition is a theme that he circles back to in his plays. His sensitivity in dealing with the subject of his black characters and the challenges of their race, as a factor in the complexity of their lives is one of the most enduring positive characterizations of blacks in the history of theater.
“Until now people have assumed that the Elizabethans did not know people of color,” says Shakespeare and English Renaissance scholar Imtiaz Habib, a fellow who penned a book titled, " Shakespeare and Race", that takes a look at the social, political and cultural impact of Shakespeare's treatment of racial issues (as exemplified in his plays). Habib states, “We now have documented proof of the residences of black people, which must be reckoned into the colors of Shakespeare’s world, in a very literal sense. Shakespeare knew people of color. He walked through their neighborhoods every day.”
Habib’s research is valuable for the way in which his thorough examination of race and colonialism played out in Elizabethan society. As in the Black experience of the time, the first Blacks who were brought to new worlds (Porugal, England, Spain) as well as the new world (Brazil, the Indies, Cuba and America) these involuntary exiles were the forerunners of much larger numbers to come, yet, in the early years, the collision of race and culture had yet to take on the air of racism, oppression and exploitation (per se as systemetized and politically expedited) and more or less were an exoticism and fetish of style and inquiry.
Mr. Habib's book documents the fact that as blacks were gradually absorbed into society, they were given Christian names, acquired skills, and dispersed into roles as, usually, laborers, menial workers, servants, maids and, for the aristocracy, entertainers. This cultural integration as well as intrusion lead to a pre-duboisian "double-consciousness" as the firm identiy of Blackness was shaken through transport and assimilation, and yet, there was no yearning or disconnection to the extent that a separate or second consciousness had experience or necessity to form. A visible minority in Shakespeare’s London, blacks attempted to carve out lives for themselves in what must have seemed an often bizarre majority culture in which they found themselves ensconced.
However superficial a role race might play likely didn’t occur to Shakespeare. With a keen eye for human behavior and attentive to detail, Shakespeare must have spent time pondering the differences between cultures as he passed or interacted with blacks in regular sojourns to see friends, visit pubs and attend rehearsals or performances at the theaters showing his plays. Yet, it was his intense sexual relationship with the un-named black woman that scholar Habib believes was an experience that so affected Shakespeare that he went on to incorporate aspects of it in such plays as “Titus Andronicus,” “Othello,” “The Tempest,” “Antony and Cleopatra,” “Henry VIII,” “Pericles,” peripherally in “The Merchant of Venice” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and explicitly and extensively in his sonnets.
Shakespeare’s black characters struggle between the twin dangers of cultural catalepsy and historical petrifaction; that is, between colonial subjugation and assimilation and anti-/post-colonial resistance. His tormented black characters are, of necessity, at once object and subject, feminized and patriarchal, demonized female and demonic male, victim and oppressor. This split position, Habib asserts, defines an unstable line between the sexualization of race and the racialization of sexuality in the dominant early modern English colonial discourse that both “writes” Shakespeare and is written by him.
Nevertheless, the black subject manages to mitigate that domination. Blacks resist and, paradoxically, whites come to depend on aspects of that resistance. “In exercising power, the colonizer ironically loses power,” Habib says. “He arrives; his technology is superior. He cannot be stopped. But he can be undermined over time.
By employing race in his plays, Shakespeare may ultimately have performed a great service. On one level, the fates of his black characters affirm cultural imperialism and the unfortunate pattern of one culture dominating and subsuming the other, yet, Shakespeare’s very depiction of cultural intersection offers hope that apparently intractable difficulties may eventually be resolved and by his placement of blacks so prominently within his plays, Shakespeare put persons of color into European culture, there to remain as a constant in racial discourse.
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