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

PCRS and appropriation studies

Vanessa I. Corredera explores ways of productively understanding racial representations in premodern critical race studies and in adaptations.

Vanessa I. Corredera
Reading list

Indigenous Shakespeares

Selected readings to contextualize Shakespeare and indigeneity in your classroom.

Madeline Sayet
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

Selected annotated bibliography