“Come and learn of us / To melt in showers” (5.3.162-3).
In the final scene of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, the Roman general Lucius invites his young son—and by extension, his English audience—to weep for his recently deceased father. Signaling the play's broader interest in emotions, this scene highlights the importance of “learning” to feel, to regulate, and thereby, to avoid the (often dangerous) effects of such emotions within and without the early modern stage. Indeed, as this play demonstrates, sympathy offers the threat of emotional and physical deformity as well as redemption, even as it itself remains elusive and inconsistent. It is this fluidity, however, that allows us to examine Shakespeare's "racecraft," a term borrowed from Barbara and Karen Fields's phenomenal work, "Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American life" (2012). Using racecraft as its starting point, therefore, this talk focuses on some of the intersections of race and sympathy in Shakespeare's England, and in doing so, offers a glimpse into how race is consciously constructed and performed in this particular moment in time.
- Tags
-