Hall, Kim F. "Blackness and Shakespeare's sonnets." Throughlines. www.throughlines.org/suite-content/blackness-and-shakespeares-sonnets. [Date accessed].

Blackness and Shakespeare's sonnets

Using Shakespeare's sonnets to discuss race-making through the language of 'fairness' and 'darkness.'

Download the transcript
Kim F. Hall
Barnard College

Shakespeare’s sonnets allow for generative conversations about the way perceptions of fairness and darkness inform understandings of race in the early modern world. Shakespeare’s procreation sonnets, in particular, tether whiteness not only to physical beauty but to national identity for the English. By attending to the way the sonnets deploy whiteness to consider social and gendered hierarchies, we are able to see how uses of fairness reveal emergent ideologies of white supremacy. As a result, Kim F. Hall explains, we find that the dark lady sonnets threaten the entitlement of whiteness, rendering a real danger for those with dark bodies.

Further learning

Activity

One word essay

This assignment in Kim F. Hall's Shakespeare courses asks students to analyze a single word in early modern texts using a variety of primary sources.

Kim F. Hall
Activity

The unessay

Kim F. Hall assigns the unessay to have students tackle an intellectual knot outside the constraints of the usual college essay.

Kim F. Hall
Activity

BIPOC lives in the English archives

This assignment asks students to investigate online databases in search of BIPOC who lived in England between 1500-1700.

Kim F. Hall

Recommended

Video

Witnessing whiteness in the early modern world

It is crucial to scrutinize whiteness when exploring early modern constructions of social difference with students. Students are not often taught to see issues of white privilege and power.

Kim F. Hall
Essay

Racialized skin in Shakespeare

The necessity of excavating and exposing the forms of whiteness that both drive the cliché of race and offer students opportunities for more sharply defined social critique and self-interrogation.

Ian Smith
Syllabus

Othello and Othello and Othello

Beginning with the play’s earliest performance, we study Othello from various critical perspectives through close analysis of the play-text and adaptations on film and stage. For several weeks students read the text of the play slowly and closely, paying particular attention to Shakespeare’s use of language, metaphor, genre, and dramatic form.

‍

Abdulhamit Arvas

Selected annotated bibliography