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.

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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.  

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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

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Activity

The unessay

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

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Reading list

Reading race in Shakespeare

Suggested readings from Ian Smith for an in-depth understanding of the "cliché of race."

Ian Smith

Selected annotated bibliography