Shakespeare’s Narrative Poems

How did early modern England understand race and how has that influenced our thinking?

Race is often considered a recent construct, but Shakespeare’s works—both his plays and poetry—reveal a diverse world already aware of race, identity, and difference. In this episode, Patricia Akhimie, director of the Folger Institute and editor of The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race, discusses this growing field of study and what we can learn from it.

She is joined by two of the scholars contributing essays to the guide, Dennis Britton and Kirsten Mendoza, who are exploring the ways race, gender, and power intersect in Shakespeare’s long narrative poems. Britton examines Venus and Adonis, investigating how Shakespeare’s portrayal of beauty, fairness and darkness, and desire reveals thinking about sexuality and gender. Mendoza focuses on The Rape of Lucrece, looking at the ways that Shakespeare is thinking about sexual violence, race, and human rights. Both scholars illuminate how Shakespeare’s works have encoded ideas about race, which continue to resonate today.

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race is an essential resource for scholars, teachers, students, and readers interested in this important area of Shakespeare research. 

Listen to Shakespeare Unlimited on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Spotify, Soundcloud, or your favorite podcast platform.

From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published February 11, 2025. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had help with web production from Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services are provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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FARAH KARIM-COOPER: From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited. I’m Farah Karim-Cooper, the Folger director.

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KARIM-COOPER: One of the most important areas of Shakespeare research has focused on questions about race. What can Shakespeare’s plays and poems tell us about the ways race was understood in early modern England? And how have his works helped shape our beliefs about race in the centuries since?

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race is a major new contribution to this growing field of study. Edited by Patricia Akhimie, the director of the Folger Institute, the Oxford Handbook gives teachers and students an ideal starting place for learning about how race and Shakespeare intersect.

On today’s episode, we’ll hear from Patricia, as well as two of the scholars whose essays are included in the Handbook. Dennis Britton, who writes on Shakespeare’s narrative poem Venus and Adonis, and Kirsten Mendoza, whose essay examines Shakespeare’s work including his narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece through the lens of human rights.

Here’s Patricia, Dennis, and Kirsten, in conversation with Barbara Bogaev.

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BARBARA BOGAEV: You know, I wanted to start on a personal note, because handbooks just seem very textbook-y and formal to me. Patricia, I noticed that your introduction to the handbook also begins with this personal note. It begins with a childhood memory of being a National History Day contestant. So, why did this Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race call up that experience for you?

PATRICIA AKHIMIE: The whole thing was very personal. I think partly because the initial invitation to put the volume together, it happened one full pandemic, and one human baby, and one completely different job ago. It’s been kind of a journey putting this volume together. And so, as I sat down to write the introduction, I realized it might be really important to tell the story of how I came to be interested in the topic that the volume covers rather than just talking about the topic. And so, I told the story of how, as a kid, one of my secondary classroom teachers thought it might be a good idea if I was a contestant in National History Day, which I didn’t know what that was—

BOGAEV: Me neither.

AKHIMIE: And it was such a blast. If you are a secondary classroom kid or you have a secondary classroom kid in your life, this is great opportunity and it’s in almost every state in the US. So, you can put together, kind of like, a science fair exhibit, except it’s a humanities exhibit, a history focused exhibit. Mine was about… well, what I didn’t understand at the time was, it was about race in the early modern period and I tried my best to find a way to learn about that and then find a way to share it with other people.

That’s what I think is truly amazing about all of the pieces in this volume. We have scholars in very different fields with very different interests, who are all looking for novel ways to talk about race, which is not an easy thing to talk about, and Shakespeare, which makes it even harder, and they do it in such illuminating ways. The two contributors who we’re talking to today have some fabulous ways into Shakespeare’s material that also give us ways to talk about race. I just think that’s cool.

BOGAEV: That’s wonderful—and that’s a lot. So, that made me think that you didn’t assign the topics—or did you assign topics? And how do you choose?

AKHIMIE: A lot of these scholars, I know their work. I’ve known them for a long time. I’ve watched their careers and their research grow and change. So, it wasn’t so much assigning as knowing where the strengths in their scholarship already lie and then asking them, “Hey, would you like to do something fun? And would you like to do it on a timetable? I will now tell you what it is.”

BOGAEV: So, you were nudging. Okay, now this makes sense.

AKHIMIE: Oh, yes.

BOGAEV: So, I think I’m going to ask Dennis. How did you end up writing about the topic you did, which was focused on Venus and Adonis, the long narrative poem? And could you remind us all what Venus and Adonis is all about?

DENNIS BRITTON: Oh, yes. Venus and Adonis is one of two of Shakespeare’s long poems. The other one, The Rape of Lucrece, which Kirsten—

KIRSTEN MENDOZA: Kirsten, yeah, me!

BRITTON: Yeah. The story is Venus sees the beautiful, young—probably too young—hunter boy. And the whole poem is about Venus attempting to woo and seduce Adonis, but Adonis has no interest in her whatsoever. All he really wants to do is go hunting.

BOGAEV: Okay. So, you take that poem and where did you go with it? What did you end up focusing on?

BRITTON: Well, I ended up focusing on a line at the very beginning of the poem where Venus says that Adonis is thrice fairer than she is and that really became the question. Like, why is Venus, who herself is supposed to, you know, be the epitome of beauty, she’s the goddess of love, if in Shakespeare’s day whiteness is associated with beauty—and mostly we associate women being praised for their whiteness, not men, what does it mean for Venus to try to praise Adonis for his whiteness and to suggest that his whiteness is superior or exceeds her own?

So, that one line became my question and then I spent, you know, the next several months trying to figure that out. What I eventually came to was thinking about, is Venus really white? If Adonis is really, really white, what color is Venus? And then I just started tracing the uses of the language of “fair” and “light” and “dark” and “white” and “black” and “white.” Of course, Kim Hall is behind so much of, you know, our attention, our ability to even notice that these patterns of “fair” and “dark” and “black” and “white” are actually worth paying attention to and that they are coding racial knowledges.

So, I, in just tracing that, I began to see that Venus is so much associated with darkness. Adonis and his resistance to having sex with Venus is associated with whiteness, and fairness, and lightness. So, we really do see in the poem a patterning of sexual desire being associated with darkness and virginity, chastity, and even asexuality, I suggest, being associated with whiteness and purity.

So, sexuality and gender are actually doing something somewhat different than I think in some other poems from the period in which there really is a praise, I think surprisingly, in Venus and Adonis of a fair, white man who doesn’t want to have sex. And that just seems to be, “What?” That seems to be quite counterintuitive. But that’s what I saw in the poem and that’s what I talked about.

BOGAEV: Yeah, it’s interesting. You write that, as you’re saying, “Both Venus and Adonis’ skin colors are unstable in the poem,” and then you dig into that. But then you turn to the history of how the poem was read. So, why do that? And what’s the takeaway for you there?

BRITTON: I was interested in the fact that this poem was one of the most popular poems of the 16th and 17th century. It went through many, many editions.

It was well known to be of interest to university boys and university male students. Arguably, I think scholars have said, because it’s just so sexy, right? Venus is, you know, on one hand like, oh, who doesn’t want the goddess of love just pining after you? So, maybe this was part of the appeal for the university—

BOGAEV: And this was kind of the porn of the day, really.

BRITTON: Yeah, this was the titillating pornography, right? You had to read Shakespeare, I guess, back then.

But I was interested in like, well, why is this poem so interesting? Why was this poem so popular? And one of the ways we can see its popularity is in it being quoted and cited by later writers.

I turn to one particular example, which is one of the Parnassus plays. These plays were produced by students from St. John’s College in Cambridge between 1598 and 1602 and in one of the plays, we have characters quoting these exact lines from Venus and Adonis, the “Thrice fairer than myself.”

So, we can look at the ways in which writers are quoting Shakespeare to see what stood out to them. In this one example, we can say, “Wow, these readers, these university students were very much interested in this language of fairness, lightness, darkness. But also, in particular that the praise of fairness is supposed to be a good tool for seduction.”

BOGAEV: That really gets to something that jumps out at you, I think, immediately as you’re reading this handbook, any of the essays in it, which is, where does history fit into this project? How did people in Shakespeare’s England understand race, first of all? And how does historical context fit into just the overarching consideration of Shakespeare and race?

AKHIMIE: I think this is an interesting question because when we talk about race, often we have a desire to situate race as a modern problem, as a kind of contemporary issue. When we know that race is not a new conception. It’s not a new social issue. It’s part of how people described themselves and others and has been for as long as we have writings that tell us about what people from the past thought and said about one another and about themselves.

I think what we’ve come to understand is that Shakespeare’s world was every bit as diverse as the one that we inhabit now. Race is a word that we use, and that Shakespeare might have used differently in his period. But it’s a good word for naming that thing. That experience of looking around you and seeing that there are differences between you and others, between your family and another family, between the citizens of your city or your nation and another city or nation.

And so as literary critics working on Shakespeare, one of the things that we are able to do is just move the sort of, like, laser focus on race, place it right over the text that we’re working with, and say, “Well, so then what does this text tell us about race in Shakespeare’s period?”

And there are a lot of good reasons to do that. One is that Shakespeare is often presented as an author who has universal appeal. An author who is particularly deft at describing humanity. And if we take that on its face, it means that Shakespeare probably has a lot to tell us about race.

Alternatively, we might say that if we’re not looking at race in Shakespeare, we’re not really fully understanding in what ways the plays do reflect a dynamic sense of humanity in the early modern period, one that speaks to us today.

So, when we look at race—the other thing I want to make clear is—when we look at race, there’s not one way of doing it. Race is a multiple concept. It’s—I want to say kaleidoscopic.

So, there are a lot of ways into it we might talk about. When we’re talking about race, we might be talking about color, which Dennis has been looking at in Venus and Adonis and telling us about. We might be talking about nation or region of origin. We might be talking about religious identity. We might be talking about language. And so, when we talk about race, it’s a really broad concept.

BOGAEV: And all of that,  it makes sense why the handbook is so broad. I mean, you write in the introduction, again, that you had, you divided this huge topic into three categories, and you had kind of three aims. Just lay those out so that people know what they’re getting into.

AKHIMIE: Yes. So, there are three sections in the book. The first section is, it’s devoted to kind of, well, I suppose we could call it “overview,” although that feels really dry. I think what it really is, is an introduction to some of the major ways that scholars have entered into discussions about race in Shakespeare. So, a big one would be performance, talking about staging and casting. Another big one would be in whiteness studies or colorism, which is something that Dennis’ essay gets at and appears in that section of the book. Another would be feminist scholarship, post-colonial scholarship.

And then the second part of the book is, I think, a really exuberant section that says, “Let’s throw open the gates and see what are all the different ways that people are engaging with Shakespeare and race. And how does that work collide with work that’s being done in other fields, subfields?”

So, there are essays on indigenous studies, there are essays on trans identities, there are essays on disability, and Kirsten’s essay, which takes us into human rights, gives us a different angle on how we talk about race. Because sometimes race, when we talk about race, we are venturing into the world of legal definitions. For what it means to be human, and what are the ways that we can trespass on that identity.

And then in the final section of the book, we get to talk about, sort of, like, what’s happening right now in our world in thinking about Shakespeare and race. So, it’s about contemporary art, contemporary performance, political activism. It’s about teaching and what people are doing in their classrooms, both college level classrooms and secondary school classrooms, right now in addressing Shakespeare and race.

And as a whole, my hope is that the volume gives you a place to start, whether you are a teacher building a syllabus, or a graduate student starting to think about this material, or a professor with many years experience but who doesn’t work on race and wants to know what the field looks like and what are the ways that people are talking about it.

That this volume is—I won’t say comprehensive, because nothing could possibly be—but expansive. Let’s say that.

BOGAEV: It comes as close as you can. Thank you for that. Kirsten, your chapter, as Patricia said, falls into a larger category that also features innovative methodologies and new approaches to archives. So first, what central question were you investigating? You really do take a line right through a number of plays: The Tempest, Titus Andronicus, Comedy of Errors, and also the long poem, The Rape of Lucrece.

MENDOZA: Yeah, so, I would say, actually, if I may, the long poem, The Rape of Lucrece, it was really the the focal point and the work that really has, in terms of my thinking about this project, was really the cornerstone for the project.

For those who might not be familiar with The Rape of Lucrece, it is a narrative poem that was written around the same time as Titus Andronicus, and so there are actually a lot of similarities in terms of the ways that Shakespeare is thinking about sexual violence, about race, about what does it mean to understand unlawful sexuality alongside different identities.

It is having us think about, number one, thinking about who deserves protection. Because something that for us today might seem a bit weird or perhaps even abhorrent at times might be the fact that rape moves in and out of atrocity status, right? It’s not viewed automatically as something that is horrific. Sometimes it could be viewed as something that was politically necessary to the early moderns. And when I introduce that to students, they are usually aghast by that.

BOGAEV: I bet.

MENDOZA: I mean, but the truth—

BOGAEV: And you also explain that in medieval law, they defined rape differently than we do. That it conflated rape with abduction, and effectively it made it a matter of stealing another man’s property. So, women’s agency and self-determination, that wasn’t at issue in this at all.

MENDOZA: Well, so yes. So, in terms of the medieval law, the focus was… I usually like to give an example when I teach of Romeo and Juliet. Juliet has sex with Romeo, and based on medieval law, Lord Capulet could charge Romeo with the rape of his property, right? Based on medieval law.

But of course, by the time Shakespeare was writing The Rape of Lucrece, that legal definition had already changed… at least legally, right? It has now become the carnal knowledge of a woman against her will.

But even though the law has changed, that doesn’t mean the society, right, immediately jumps on board. In fact, in Titus Andronicus, you actually have both versions of rape operating in which it is either the unlawful seizure of one man’s property or it’s sexual violence against a woman without her consent, right?

And so, I think that’s also one of the virtues of what the early modern period reveals to us is that people tend to assume, “Okay, well, the laws have changed and therefore everything is fine.” The reality is that even if laws are codified, that doesn’t mean the society operates in conjunction with the movement of those laws, if that makes sense.

BOGAEV: Yeah, there’s a lag time. And how does then Shakespeare grapple or express or get into this issue of women’s self-possession or agency in this poem, in Rape of Lucrece?

MENDOZA: Yeah. And so, for The Rape of Lucrece, what’s really fascinating about that poem is the way that this rape has been viewed. It’s through Lucrece’s rape and later suicide that it brings forth the birth of the first Roman Republic. And so there’s something very heroic about it that Shakespeare, in my opinion—you know, and many scholars have pointed this out as well—is kind of pointing out that there’s this horrific tragedy that happens, and yet historically people tend to romanticize it.

And so for my questions regarding this piece, I was really looking at number one, how is it that the rape of a woman who should have been protected, right? A Roman matron. As her rape happens, technically Rome is besieging another city, Ardea, and what happens when Ardea falls? Well, there’s going to be rape of other women there. But the reality is that it is through Lucrece’s privileged position that her rape matters and others don’t.

BOGAEV: And this is where race comes in.

MENDOZA: And this is where race comes in. This is where what we see in terms of the language of fairness being deployed, in terms of the ways that it affects you as a reader, how you are being conditioned to feel a particular way.

Especially since the ways in which—and this is something that a wonderful scholar, Arthur L. Little, Jr. has pointed out extensively—is that the ways that the early moderns described rape was through tropes of miscegenation, right? It is, “A fair body who is stained with a black deed” for example, right? So, the mixing of colors here.

And what this narrative poem does is that it continues with this trope. But what fascinated me in particular were the people’s responses to the violence that she sustained and how in Shakespeare’s narrative poem that feeling of disgust, of abhorrence, of disdain toward rape is actually being what I describe as racialized in here.

That’s one of the titles of the piece, is, ‘Let fair humanity abhor the deed.’ And of course, the term “fair” could mean lighter skin complexions or lighter complexions. You could also indicate, right, goodness or virtue, right? Which is probably what it’s—you know, in terms of the immediate—what it’s looking for. That’s probably what we’re probably considering.

But what’s important is that as you’re reading, what sticks, therefore, is the association of fairness or to be fair, with the capacity to recognize that this is an evil deed, that this is wrong. And it sticks, therefore. Not only the idea of virtue, but also that certain people who can understand themselves as belonging to one another, not only in terms of virtue, but also in terms of a particular way of looking. A certain type of phenotype. Those start to stick. These associations, when they are repeated ad nauseum in so many different plays, so many different poems, these things start to stick.

BOGAEV: This is really clarifying something that you wrote, which is that, “Shakespeare uses color symbolism to make it clear that not all women deserve to assert their will and that Lucrece is a big exception.”

MENDOZA: Yes, and I will also point out that this is at a point in which what we also realize is that women of the lower classes, for example, their bodies, their ability to express control over their bodies and their right for, to have the rape—their experience of rape, to receive justice for that, some sort of recompense for it, for that violence, that it really depended on your status and who’s your legal guardian, who can also claim to have been wronged alongside the victim.

What I am looking at in this piece, but also in my other work, is that what we see is, there is now a way that who has access to these rights and privileges are expanding. They’re expanding but only through the exclusion of particular groups. As it’s expanding in terms of the ability for white women to protect themselves, right, or as England’s also beginning to see itself as white, we know that the transatlantic slave trade, right, literally requires that a whole group of individuals are denied self-possession, denied the efficacy of being able to state what they will for their bodies.

BOGAEV: Kirsten and Dennis, you both talk about color symbolism. But do you get a lot of pushback? I mean, are there still scholars out there insisting Shakespeare’s use of words like “fair” don’t have anything to do with race?

MENDOZA: I would say that one of my first experience as a grad student, I gave a paper, in which I was looking at Desdemona, and one of the responses had been just to point out, you know, race is anachronistic and misreading the terms, in terms of implying that this is about race when in fact it’s more about virtue versus villainy or something of that sort.

But I would say that since then I have been very privileged and fortunate to be writing among amazing Shakespeare scholars who are critical of my work, but not in a way that tries to have me no longer wrestle with these problems. If anything, they’re critical of my work so I can wrestle with it even more, right? So, I can think more deeply. And so, I’ve been very fortunate, and I know that hasn’t been the experience of everyone in the academy—and in fact, it’s because of people like Patricia, like Dennis, right?

And so, in terms of the responses, perhaps sometimes students might—who point out that, you know, “I thought that this word could mean more. That fair means more than just complexion,” which is true, and it did, and it does. And there are words that mean multiple things in our contemporary moment as well.

I guess my response to that is in terms of our associations of fair, there’s always a sense of it’s being tied to something that is distinctive and opposite to darkness, right? And those already provide you with some sort of a visual. It’s a mark. It’s something that can be—that can separate them.

So even though, yes, as I had mentioned with ‘Let fair humanity abhor the deed,’ the term “fair” certainly is operating on multiple registers. But the idea of color difference, of color distinction, is nonetheless something that is being repeated, and it will stick, right, in terms of the associations that people have.

BOGAEV: How about you, Dennis? What’s your experience?

BRITTON: I would very much agree with a lot of what Kirsten just said. I think that there has been a—I would say, scholarly, in the scholarly world, there is a less vocal opposition to the discussion of race in Shakespeare. There might be conversations behind closed doors that we’re not privy to.

But I feel like at the scholarly conferences that I attend, the conversations I have with my colleagues who are, you know, not working, or race is not part of their expertise sort of thing that they really focus on in their work, I don’t feel a resistance or a rejection of thinking about how Shakespeare’s works are engaged with, imagining trying to make sense of the differences, the bodily and the cultural, the national, the religious. All the things that Patricia mentioned earlier. All the types of difference that they were encountering and seeing in their world.

Where I do think there is still a backlash or some hesitancy is in the public discourse. Someone says you should never read the comments on anything. But if you sort of look at a something that appears in public media or something on YouTube and, you know, there’s often the accusation that, “Oh, these are woke scholars who are just trying to desecrate one of Western culture’s greatest minds and greatest poets.” And that’s not what scholars are doing.

MENDOZA: No.

BRITTON: We’re not… I mean I always say, in spite of it all, at the end of the day, I kind of still like Shakespeare, mostly.

MENDOZA: Yes.

BRITTON: Some days I don’t like about him. But I still find—I still go see Shakespeare plays for fun, and I still teach him. And I go, “Ugh,” and I cringe sometimes with some things. And I say, “This is very useful to think through, and think alongside, and think with.”

So, there is a sense, I think, that scholars who work on issues of race and difference are somehow, like, our primary aim is to get rid of Shakespeare so that we can replace him with, I don’t know, whoever we want to replace him with—ourselves or something.

But I think, you know, these are also people who are not reading the work, right? These are—a lot of these cases are—a lot of these people who are, you know, in the public discourse who are resistant to thinking about Shakespeare differently, may not have even read the plays since they were in high school. But are not actually engaging with the conversations that scholars are having on an intellectual level. They are reactionary. They’re not actually interested in learning and not actually raising questions.

And if we know that there are Black people, you know, living in London at the time in which Shakespeare is writing these plays. Yeah, I’m sorry, I just can’t believe—I refuse to believe, maybe that’s my own closed mindedness—that there isn’t some relationship to the way in which Shakespeare is representing characters of darker skin. The language, the traditional color symbolism associated with light and dark. And the interactions between people in early modern London and that they might have had or seen or questions they might have had about them. Everything is there. I think it’s for us to continue to unpack it and try to understand it.

MENDOZA: Critique does not mean that we do not love Shakespeare’s plays or wrestling with the words, right? In fact, if anything, especially since so many of my students are going to be future educators. One of the reasons why they oftentimes are shying away from Shakespeare is because they find his works, potentially, to not really be the most empowering. And the ways that they have been exposed to Shakespeare have historically not allowed them to wrestle with these issues, such as, for example, the ways that race is being performed.

And so, I think that one of the things that we offer is a way to have Shakespeare mean something, continue to have meaning, continue to have people want to wrestle with his works, think with him, think through his works with him.

And so yeah, critique doesn’t mean that we’re not creating a place for Shakespeare. In fact, if anything, I think we’re helping to solidify his place in the future.

BOGAEV: Thank you all so much for this. I really appreciate it.

AKHIMIE: Thank you.

BRITTON: Thank you, Barbara.

MENDOZA: Thank you. Thank you for having us.

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KARIM-COOPER: That was Kirsten Mendoza, Dennis Britton, and Patricia Akhimie, interviewed by Barbara Bogaev.

This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Garland Scott is the executive producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. We had technical help from James Morrison in Washington DC;  George Drake in Dayton Ohio; Squarewave Sound in Vancouver British Columbia; and Voice Trax West in Studio City, California. Our web producer is Paola García Acuña. Leonor Fernandez edits our transcripts. Final mixing services provided by Clean Cuts at Three Seas, Inc.

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