Smith, Ian. "Reading the violent Black man myth in Hamlet." Throughlines. www.throughlines.org/suite-content/reading-the-violent-black-man-myth-in-hamlet. [Date accessed].

Reading the violent Black man myth in Hamlet

Further reading for an interrogation of race in Shakespeare's Hamlet.

Download the transcript
Ian Smith
University of Southern California

Coates, Ta-Nehisi. “The Great Fire.” Vanity Fair, August 24, 2020. https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2020/08/ta-nehisi-coates-editor-letter 

Loomba, Ania. Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. 

Muhammad, Khalil Gibran. The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011.  

Parker, Patricia. “Black Hamlet: Battening on the Moor.” Shakespeare Studies 31 (2003): 127-164. 

Smith, Ian. “White Skin, Black Masks: Racial Cross-Dressing on the Early Modern Stage.” Renaissance Drama 32 (2003): 33-67.  

Download the reading list

Further learning

Essay

Hamlet and the color of criminality

Bringing Hamlet into a recognizable universe of modern concerns and asking students to think about the demands reading Shakespeare and race places on them as 21st-century thinkers.

Ian Smith
Video

Race in Hamlet: The violent Black man myth

Rather than try to tell a sociological story about the "violent Black man" myth, we can examine one instance of this racial mythmaking in a widely studied, influential literary forebear: Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Ian Smith

Recommended

RaceB4Race Highlight

Figurative speech and racecraft

Debapriya Sarkar explores the connections between English-language figurative speech and racecraft through an examination of George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie (c. 1589) and Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra.

Debapriya Sarkar
RaceB4Race Highlight

Shakespeare and the War on Terror

Ambereen Dadabhoy investigates the long history of the logics of the War on Terror and how these structure narratives about Muslims across the centuries.

Ambereen Dadabhoy
Essay

The resources of sovereignty on Caliban’s island

Close reading opportunities to engage students in discussions of sovereignty and self-determination in Shakespeare's The Tempest.

Scott Manning Stevens

Selected annotated bibliography