Shakespeare’s creativity and imagination flourished in the age of exploration, when ships sailed from English ports and returned with prodigious goods, disruptive ideas, wondrous tales and black servants or slaves. Travellers, ambassadors, oligarchs and traders were coming into London. He named his first theatre the Globe, read Plutarch, Ovid, Pliny, plus Italian and French writers. Though he never left these isles, he was mesmerised by distant places, strangers, borderless desire and forbidden love.
Othello, The Merchant of Venice, Titus Andronicus, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Antony and Cleopatra, between them, explore assimilation, black pride, miscegenation, cultural and religious loss, mad love, sexual obsessions, imperial disdain and weakness. The plays reflect contemporary dilemmas and the unending struggle between the self and society.
Othello, high-octane and contested, speaks acutely to our times, this age of high-migration anxiety. Unlike pesky modern European Muslims, the Moor turn’d Christian Venetian is the perfectly assimilated migrant. As Spanish scholar Ana Maria Manzanas Calvo observes: “He appears in the play as a colonial subject who has absorbed European culture and morality and therefore domesticated the wildness implicit in his origins. He has expelled from his nature, the menacing aspects of the stereotype of the African.” Othello’s tragedy is that cultural surrender is not enough for most Venetians. They cannot ever truly embrace him. Desdemona represents the impossibility of colour-blind love and its utter fragility. My children, born here, think their colour doesn’t matter. I hope they are strong enough to bear the pain when they realise it does, always will.
Aaron the black villain in Titus Andronicus, unlike Othello, is a bad boy who refuses to trade in his blackness for acceptance. There is heroism in this refusal. He has an affair with the white Goth queen Tamora, who gives birth to their baby, a boy who looks African. She wants the child killed, Aaron claims him and his blackness in a stirring speech that could have been made by Malcolm X, Martin Luther King or the late Bernie Grant. (Interestingly, in 1596, two years after Titus was first staged, Elizabeth I passed an edict banishing “blackamoors brought into this realme, of which kinde of people there are allready to manie”.)
Shakespeare understood the dangers of the personal to the political. Inter-religious love is one of the many dramatic conflicts in The Merchant of Venice, another perpetually disputed play. Jessica and Shylock are part of a beleaguered, despised, marginal community. They have two choices: to cling on desperately, perhaps destructively, to their heritage, or break the ties of religious identity and meld into the majority faith. The old man clings on and young Jessica flees. I was once like Jessica, a Muslim who fell in love with and married a lapsed Christian. It has been a happy marriage, but now I’m older, I do understand Shylock better. A question hangs in the end: did Jessica live happily in that antisemitic city state, or did she feel guilt for hurting her father and scorning the memory of her mother? We can only speculate.
I interviewed the theatre director Tim Supple and his wife, actor Archana Ramaswamy for my series on the subject. He is Jewish, she is Indian. She played Titania in his all-Indian, multilingual Midsummer Night’s Dream. They fell in love and married. She speaks movingly about life in London, the cultural loss and gain. In this disorientating play, couples cross between realities. Titania briefly experiences earthly fun and sex with Bottom. The spell is broken and she returns to controlling Oberon; Bottom goes back to his lowly place. He might have lived and died a dull man, but for a brief moment he lived the dream. This is a study of mad crossovers, infatuation.
Finally to Antony and Cleopatra, a complex play about civilisational divides, foreign occupation, subversive retaliation and the irresistibility of the east. You won’t find an eastern woman like Cleopatra in the whole of western literature. Antony, an imperial Roman, Enobarbus his faithful follower, are felled by her female mystique and otherness. No other playwright has been as bold, truthful and nuanced on mixed relationships.
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s five-part series Shakespeare: Love Across the Racial Divide is on Radio 4 this week from Monday to Friday at 1.45pm.
